Alejandra Casillas, MD, MSHS
Associate Professor in Residence, Associate Vice Chair for Community Impact
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Alejandra Casillas MD, MSHS is an associate professor of medicine in residence, in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research and the at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She practices primary care at UCLA and teaches medical students and internal medicine residents while caring for patients at the Venice Family Free Clinic. The first in her family to attend college, Dr. Casillas completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard College and medical training at Harvard Medical School, where she received the Dean’s Community Service Award and was a Paul and Daisy Soros Scholar for New Americans. She finished her internal medicine and primary care residency at UCSF, also serving as Chief Medical Resident. She returned to Los Angeles as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar-- where she completed a health services research and leadership fellowship and received a masters’ degree at the UCLA School of Public Health. After completing her training, Dr. Casillas worked at the academic medical centers in Geneva and Lausanne, with funding from the Swiss Office of Public Health, to address immigrant health disparities in the French-speaking region of Switzerland.
Dr. Casillas’ community-engaged health services research focuses on the low-income communities served by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, the second largest municipal safety net in the US, developing digital health interventions tailored to socially complex, Limited English Proficient patients. Her published scholarship also includes research and initiatives addressing equity and diversity inclusion in academia and health, connecting to her PI roles on several NIH-funded implementation science and health technology studies (AIM AHEAD, BP REACH, DECiPHER), co-lead faculty in the Community Engagement Research Program in the UCLA Clinical Translation Science Institute, and Associate Vice Chair for Community Impact in the UCLA Department of Medicine.
