Maria Christina Herrera, MD, MSHP

Maria Christina Herrera, MD, MSHP is an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Sections of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and a faculty scholar at PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Prior to her appointment at Yale, she was an attending physician in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at CHOP. She is currently funded by a National Institute on Drug Abuse K12 grant through Yale titled, Drug Use, Addiction and HIV prevention Research Scholars (DAHRS). Her present research focus addresses the intersection of the HIV and substance use epidemics for adolescents and young adults. She is particularly interested in optimizing access to HIV prevention initiatives for historically marginalized and disenfranchised young people with substance use.

Dr. Herrera contributed to health care provision and public health efforts during her domestic training in Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, and with the Indian Health Service on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Whiteriver, Ariz. She has also worked both clinically and in a research capacity globally in the Dominican Republic, Peru and Mexico, all of which served to deepen her commitment to health equity and poverty alleviation.

Originally from a small rural town in upstate New York, Dr. Herrera completed her undergraduate education with a Bachelor of Arts out of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University. She received her medical degree from Columbia University prior to completing her residency in the pediatrics PLUS program at the University of California, San Francisco, which trains pediatricians to advance health equity through community engagement and legislative advocacy. She then went on to complete her adolescent medicine fellowship at CHOP and graduated with a Master of Science in Health Policy from the University of Pennsylvania.