Dr. Cristina Gonzalez’s research interests focus on health disparities and advocacy education. Specifically, she focuses on undergraduate medical education both in the clinical realm and in the preclinical years, including teaching about health disparities and giving learners the tools to overcome health and health care disparities in their own clinical encounters and expose them to avenues of advocacy to help patient populations at large.
In 2011 Dr. Gonzalez's leadership was recognized nationally through the Unified Leadership Training in Diversity Award from the Association of Chiefs and Leaders in General Internal Medicine. An active member of the Society of General Internal Medicine, she has contributed to the efforts of the Disparities Task Force and has served as Chair of Minorities in Medicine Interest Group since 2010. In 2011 she was named the Associate Director of the Institute of Community and Collaborative Health at Einstein, in recognition of her dedication to minority health and diversity enhancement in academic medicine. Most recently, she was selected as a Scholar in the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This four-year award will enable her to continue to pursue her research in instruction of recognition and management of implicit bias in clinical encounters.
Dr. Gonzalez completed her medical education at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and her internal medicine residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital- Weill Cornell Medical Center. Upon completing residency, she returned to Einstein as faculty in 2007 as a Teaching Hospitalist and a Clinical Instructor. She became active on the internal medicine teaching service, and became the Medicine Clerkship Site Leader at Weiler in 2009. In addition, she developed a health disparities elective for first year medical students in 2009, which has now been successfully run for four years. In 2010 she became an Assistant Professor of Medicine. These initial forays into medical education led her to seek formal training in curriculum development and medical education research methods. In 2010 Dr. Gonzalez was awarded a Faculty Development Fellowship through Einstein’s Hispanic Center of Excellence, through which she earned a Master’s Degree in Medical Education in August of 2012. In 2011 she was selected for the Stanford Faculty Development Program and is now trained as a facilitator for Clinical Teaching seminars.