About Me
Roberto was born and raised in East Los Angeles, CA. Roberto attended Pitzer College, in Claremont, CA, where he majored in Psychobiology and Sociology and completed an honor’s thesis that examined inequalities in emergency room visits secondary to doctor-patient communication breakdown. Roberto completed a PhD in Sociology at UCLA, with an emphasis in Medical Sociology, Race/Ethnicity, and Multimethod research. As a medical student at the University of Utah School of Medicine, Roberto continued his research on pediatric cancer, pediatric palliative care, pediatric cancer survivorship and doctor-patient communication.
Roberto is currently an APA SAMHSA fellow and is working on a national mixed-methods study (survey, interviews, and epigenetics) looking at how microaggressions impact the professional and personal lives of sexual minority physician residents, with a focus on sexual minorities of color. He is also exploring the use of personalized music in inpatient psychiatric units to assess its potential to mitigate nursing shift-change associated agitation. Roberto is interested in child psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, language and cognition, and multicultural psychiatry.