Dr Faria is a medical doctor from Brazil and a Research Fellow at BIDMC Transplant Surgery. Her research includes surgery outcomes and disparities, global surgery, and gender equity in surgery. She is a former Research Associate at the Harvard Program in Global Surgery and Social Change and serves as Co-Chair of the Gender Equity Initiative in Global Surgery (GEIGS) and as Vice-Chair for the Associate Committee of the Association of Academic Global Surgery (AAGS). She is deeply passionate about liver transplant and aspires to become an academic transplant surgeon. Dr Faria’s goal is to help increase access to surgical care and surgical capacity for underserved communities.
Dr Faria earned her MD from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). Her first research experience was during her first year of medical school, in 2014. She won a national scholarship for junior researchers funded by CAPES/CNPq, and started working in a pediatric pneumology lab under Dr Laura Facury Lasmar at UFMG. There, she helped perform spirometries in children between 4 and 6 years old and assessed them with a quality of life questionnaire. This project led to Dr Faria’s first research award as best poster presentation in the largest regional academic conference in Minas Gerais, her first publication, and the start of a passion for research.
Dr Faria was always interested in learning more about health systems worldwide. She lived in Paris during medical school to improve her french and did a rotation in the transplant service of the La Pitié-Salpétrière University Hospital – Université Paris VI Pierre et Marie Currie. There, she saw a liver transplant for the first time and immediately knew she wanted to be a transplant surgeon. Back in Brazil, she was awarded a health planning and policy teaching assistant position after a competitive selection process. She further developed her knowledge about healthcare systems abroad and the universal free healthcare of Brazil, SUS.
In the quest to explore these different systems, she came to the US for a transplant surgery observership at Jackson Memorial Hospital and a visiting assistant researcher position at Yale. While there, she learned about how research and surgery could co-exist seamlessly and about providing top-notch evidence-based medical care to patients. At this second turning point in her career, Dr Faria decided she wanted to pursue her training in the world’s best hospitals.
During medical school, Dr Faria created and led several community outreach projects and medical interest groups. Always drawn to medical education, she worked on initiatives about surgery, gastroenterology, medical English, and innovation. She created a platform to reach medical students outside UFMG and give them free tips while promoting collaboration. Dr Faria reaches over 130,000 students monthly on her platforms and has taught more than 2,000 students with workshops and ebooks. She also developed the largest study community in Brazil at Discord, a collaborative workspace where students can study together, share resources, find study buddies and be held accountable for their progress. This community has over 18,000 students, with over 30% of them being active weekly.
Dr Faria’s goals are to work as a surgeon and give her patients the best care possible, do meaningful research with an impact on society, and develop her teaching skills to help students be as passionate about medicine as she is.