2024 SAEMF Grantees

Dr. Gazzola is a resident physician in the department of emergency medicine at NYU Langone Health/Bellevue Hospital Center in New York and a post-doctoral research associate at the APT Foundation Inc., a not-for-profit, low-barrier opioid treatment program based in New Haven, Connecticut. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Medicine and Cornell University. Her scholarship investigates the intersection of social determinants of health and opioid use disorder; emergency department-based harm reduction interventions; and patient language preferences and stigma surrounding substance use disorders. 

During a gap year in medical school, Dr. Hayes completed a master's in public health with a focus in health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as a Zuckerman Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership. She is thrilled to be selected as a SAEMF/RAMS Resident Research Grant awardee and hopes her work will contribute to improved resuscitation of trauma patients in the prehospital setting.

Dr. Whittaker is a second year emergency medicine resident at Memorial Healthcare System in Hollywood, Florida. She is excited to be completing residency in her hometown and honored to be treating the population where she was raised. While in medical school at Nova Southeastern University, she completed a master's of public health degree. Dr. Whittaker is passionate about public health and hopes to focus future research in this field. She also enjoys mentoring medical students.

Ms. Abrams is a second-year student at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Her experience and professional interests drive her desire to develop expertise at the intersection of clinical medicine and public health. After undergraduate training, Ms. Abrams completed a master’s degree in public health that focused on health behavior change and community-based participatory research methods, often implemented in collaboration with and support of populations receiving suboptimal care or who are under-engaged by the health care system. She researched care systems for people who use drugs and those living with HIV, including the implementation and evaluation of programs aiming to reduce HIV viral load among youth locally and globally. She then served as project coordinator leading substance misuse intervention programs for the Washington, DC Hospital Association, where involvement with physicians, scientists, community partners, and patients ultimately led her to medical school. Ms. Abrams has co-authored 10 publications, including one as lead author focused on health care provider experiences helping implement an HIV youth peer mentoring program. She is working towards a career as a physician-scientist through which she can specialize in clinical and public health interventions.

Mr. Makutonin is a fourth-year medical student at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He has been involved in dataset and data science research throughout his medical school career, starting multi-institution collaborations by drawing on skills he learned as a software engineer and a data science bootcamp instructor. Mr. Makutonin's nascent research career has earned him recognition in the field, including research awards and plenaries at national conferences. Mr. Makutonin is passionate about the potential of data science research to inform and solve impactful problems and continues to mentor others in the field as a vice chair in the EMRA research committee and a principal investigator at the George Washington University Healing Clinic, among other roles.