Thank you, SAEMF Donors, from Marina Gaeta Gazzola, MD

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 examines areas for intervention to address the worsening overdose crisis in the United States and improving experience and engagement in medication for opioid use disorder treatment for people with opioid use disorder. She has broad experience in conducting patient-centered, mixed methods research ranging from individual qualitative interviews to prospective survey studies to large quantitative studies using national datasets and electronic medical record data. She is particularly interested in emergency-department interventions that reduce the harms associated with substance use and improve treatment engagement and outcomes for people with addiction with high levels of social vulnerability, such as those experiencing homelessness or with criminal-legal system involvement.

Since 2019, Dr. Gazzola has held a first author/project management role for over a dozen addiction-focused research projects spanning medical school and residency (resulting in 16 published peer review articles, 2 book chapters, over 30 abstracts, and several workshop/didactic level speaking engagements and invited talks at national conferences); led a number of clinical initiatives to improve access to harm reduction tools at the institution level across NYU Langone Health sites; mentored other trainees in addiction research; and led educational initiatives surrounding addiction and vulnerable populations for her residency program. She has given poster and oral presentations at many addiction-focused conferences, including the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and the Association for Multidisciplinary Education and Research in Substance Use and Addiction, and presented her research on emergency department-based harm reduction interventions at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine annual meeting last year. In September 2023, she gave an hour-long invited talk at the annual meeting of the International Society of Addiction Journal Editors to disseminate the results of multiple first-authored research projects studying patient preferences for substance use terminology. She has also been recognized locally and nationally, including being awarded the “Best Abstract: Resident” award at the 2023 American Society of Addiction Medicine annual meeting, the 2024 Ruth Fox Scholarship by the American Society of Addiction Medicine to attend the 2024 annual meeting and pre-conference didactics sponsored by the society, and winning “best abstract” at her residency program’s 2023 research day as an intern. In medical school, she spent a dedicated research year examining the intersection of social determinants of health and methadone treatment, culminating in her MD thesis, “Housing as Healthcare: The role of homelessness in patient characteristics and retention in outpatient medication for opioid use disorder treatment,” for which she was awarded the Peter F. Curran graduation prize for an outstanding thesis at the Yale School of Medicine. Since starting residency in July 2022, Dr. Gazzola has conducted research examining emergency department harm reduction interventions and emergency clinician knowledge of overdose prevention tools. She has also joined several pre-existing projects surrounding overdose prevention and addiction treatment run by faculty at her institution.