2024-2025 Family Medicine-Psychiatry Program Residents
PGY1
Joel Burt-Miller, MD, MPH
Medical School: University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville
Joel is originally from the Bronx, New York, and raised in a culturally rich Caribbean immigrant community. Joel completed his undergraduate studies at Brandeis University, majoring in Biology and Health: Science, Society, and Policy as a Posse Scholar. Following college, he was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach English to first- and second-generation learners in New Delhi, India. Upon his return to the U.S., he obtained a Master of Science in Biomedical Sciences from Duke University. As a medical student, Joel founded the Ubuntu Healing Project and became the principal investigator for its research study, assessing burnout, social isolation, and belonging within his learning community. Embracing Ubuntu, a philosophy learned during an undergraduate semester abroad in South Africa, he successfully created an avenue for wellness among medical professionals and learners. Subsequently, he was inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. He also obtained his Master of Public Health in Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as a Zuckerman Fellow. Joel hopes to utilize his training to reimagine existing healthcare structures and envision innovative avenues for promoting holistic individual and collective healing. He is excited to join the BMC family! Outside of medicine, Joel enjoys writing and performing hip-hop songs, exploring new restaurants, traveling, and spending time with family and friends.
Jennifer Tucker, MD
Medical School: Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina
Raised in Merrillville, IN, Jennifer had an early passion for community service, the Black community, and the Spanish language. She attended Washington University in St. Louis. She majored in Biology, minoring in Spanish and Public Health. She also led the Minority Association of Premedical Students and was a Goldman Fellow. After graduation, she studied biotechnology, Spanish, and Communications while working as a graduate assistant at Purdue University Northwest. During this time, she served various youth and community organizations in Northwest Indiana as an AmeriCorps member and worked as an ED Scribe, where she really felt the need for improvement in access to primary and psychiatric care. She then studied medicine in Cuba at la Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM). She graduated with a Titulo de Oro (summa cum laude). Jennifer wants to use combined Family Medicine and Psychiatry training to establish safe, person-centered medical homes for minoritized communities in the global South, at home and abroad. She also seeks to cultivate increased safety and opportunities for underrepresented in medicine (URiM) healthcare professionals. Her extra-professional joys include faith, family, singing, volleyball, and tennis. Jennifer is excited to explore Boston and experience east coast living.
PGY2
Janani (Jan) Arangan, MD
Medical School: Frank H Netter MD School of Medicine
Janani was born and raised in Orange County, CA, surrounded by her family’s rich Indian culture and traditions, as well as by immigrant communities from all over the world. She developed an early interest in languages after studying abroad in Spain while in high school, then went on to double major in Portuguese and Environmental Science, with a focus on public health, at Duke University. After graduation, she taught English as a Second Language (ESL) courses to immigrant janitorial workers in Oakland, CA, and participated in the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) program in the Brazilian Amazon for nine months. Janani then connected her classroom teaching experience to the clinic through volunteering as a health educator at a reproductive community clinic in San Francisco. During medical school, she ignited her passions for primary care and quality improvement work by engaging low-income, Spanish-speaking patients with diabetes at a community health center in New Haven, CT. She hopes to utilize her combined Family Medicine/Psychiatry training to lead integrated care teams and improve patient outcomes in the primary care setting. Janani’s desire to work with under resourced communities led to her commitment as a scholar in the National Health Service Corps. She was also inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. Janani is looking forward to exploring Boston and continuing to work with patients in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as learn Haitian Creole!
Kardeem Joseph, MD
Medical School: Meharry Medical College
Kardeem was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York to Haitian parents, and moved to the metro-Atlanta area before attending undergrad at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Georgia. There, he received his BS in both Psychology and Biology, and worked as an Emergency Department scribe prior to matriculating into Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. During medical school, Kardeem worked with marginalized groups, working with the Unhoused Neighbors population at Restoration Pointe, a shelter for men experiencing homelessness, and the Salt Wagon Clinic, a free student-run health clinic. He co-founded the Salt Wagon Mental Health Clinic to provide free mental health care to the community in addition to free primary care. He also established Products of Our Environment with 3 of his peers, a non-profit focused on connecting youth with mentorship and opportunities, while participating in various community service projects, and was ultimately inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. He looks forward to joining BMC and working in both Psychiatry and Family Medicine, as it is an opportunity to serve and provide primary and psychiatric care to a community who may traditionally be ambivalent towards receiving care. Outside of medicine, Kardeem loves producing music, playing sports, travelling, comedy, spending time with family and friends, and most importantly, sleeping.
PGY3
Kathryn Cushing, MD
Medical School: University of Illinois College of Medicine
Kathryn was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs. She then ventured out to Villanova University for undergrad and majored in Neuroscience and Biochemistry with a minor in Spanish. Following her college graduation, she returned to Chicago for medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she received the College of Medicine merit scholarship. Her research continued with UIC's CoNECt lab where she used fMRI to study the effective connectivity of reward networks in treatment-resistant depression. For three years of medical school, she was President of the UIC chapter of Chicago Street Medicine, a non-profit organization that provides healthcare and harm reduction resources to folks living unhoused in Chicago. This ignited her passion for providing holistic healthcare to underserved urban populations, particularly compassionate addiction care informed by both Primary Care and Psychiatric perspectives. Outside of medicine, she enjoys taking leisurely walks with her elderly dog, practicing yoga, and enjoying time with family and friends.
Belinda Zhou, MS MD
Medical School: The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University
Belinda Zhou grew up in Queens, NY, and moved to Providence, RI, to attend Brown University, where she majored in History. In college, she served as a Health Leads advocate, which introduced her to the importance of considering and addressing social determinants of health. After working in Hong Kong for a year, she returned to Rhode Island to attend the Warren Alpert Medical School, where she completed the Primary Care-Population Medicine master’s program to further examine issues related to health equity and advocacy. She pursued her passion for immigrant and refugee health through volunteering with Clínica Esperanza, a local free clinic that serves a significant Latinx population, and creating a patient navigation system for asylum seekers who had evaluations completed through the local branch of Physicians for Human Rights. She also spent time working with housing unstable patients and people with substance use disorders, addressing both clinical and social needs. Belinda is pursuing combined training in family medicine and psychiatry in hopes of providing comprehensive, holistic health care to marginalized populations. Outside of medicine, she enjoys reading fiction, yoga, hiking, and eating good food.
PGY4
Anna Smith, MD
Anna Smith grew up in Bourbon, Indiana. After college, she served for two years in a volunteer program working with adults living with mental illness and unstable housing. She then worked for over three years at the Downtown Emergency Services Center (DESC) in Seattle as a mental health case manager. These experiences led her to medicine as a way to combine her interests in health equity, advocacy, service, and patient care. In medical school she was a community-focused Urban Scholar and was peer-elected to the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She also trained healthcare providers in Trauma-informed Care and led volunteer clinics at DESC. Anna is eager to be trained in both Psychiatry and Family Medicine in order to best provide holistic care to those most in need. After residency, she will be working with the National Health Service Corps. In her spare time, she enjoys weightlifting and napping with her cat.
Brett Lewis, MD
Brett grew up in Massachusetts before moving to the West Coast for college at UC Berkeley. There, she studied public health and medical anthropology and found her passion at the intersection of the macro and the micro. Upon graduation, she interned at UCSF’s Global Health Core within the Division of Hospital Medicine. Her role quickly transformed into being the first and only full-time employee for a brand-new global health equity fellowship, the HEAL Initiative, in which she helped develop partnerships in Navajo Nation and internationally in eight countries. It was through her time working with passionate physicians all over the world that she learned uncertainty is something to be embraced, leadership is best worked from alongside, and solidarity is a verb. Those lessons led her to medical school and through it, along the way taking her to Botswana, Mexico, and the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon. Her interest in family medicine and psychiatry came through her work in indigenous and other historically marginalized communities that have been disproportionately affected by personal, structural, and historical trauma. She hopes combined training will help in her journey to help dismantle some of the barrier’s communities face to primary and psychiatric care and reimagine what healing can look like for individual patients and communities. Brett is particularly excited to return to her home state, be close to family, and re-discover the beauty of New England (especially in fall!).
PGY5
Aisha Lott, M.D.
Medical School: Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, D.C,
Aisha is originally from Milpitas, a small town in Northern California. She grew up playing soccer and continued her career at the University of California, Davis where she also completed her undergraduate degree in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior. She became interested in the social determinants of health at Imani Clinic, a student-run clinic in the heart of Sacramento’s historically black community of Oak Park. This solidified her interest in medicine and brought her to the Medical Investigations of Neurodevelopmental Diseases (MIND) Institute where she worked as a research assistant. She subsequently traveled to the East Coast to attend Georgetown University School of Medicine. While there she completed a master’s degree in Systems Medicine. She continued to explore her interests in fighting health inequities doing medical evaluations with asylum-seeking populations alongside Physicians for Human Rights as well as giving health talks to incarcerated populations. These experiences taught her to advocate for patients. She was subsequently inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society for her efforts. In her spare time, she enjoys soccer, yoga, running, reading, and cooking.
Bryan Rego, M.D.
Medical School: Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, R.I.
Bryan Rego is from Fall River, MA, and is the son of Azorean immigrants. He attended Brown University for his undergraduate studies and majored in Neuroscience. In a gap year before starting at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, he worked as a medical scribe in the emergency department and later visited Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to study a sports-for-development program for favela youth. In medical school, Bryan followed his passion for immigrant and refugee health by concentrating in Global Health. In this capacity, he started a medical Portuguese elective, lead a refugee health elective, studied addiction stigma in Lisbon, Portugal following drug decriminalization. He also co-founded and continues to lead Connect Soccer Academy, a mental health and soccer program in Providence, RI for newly resettled refugee youth in partnership with youth soccer clubs, psychologists, and local community organizations. He is a proud Portuguese-American and is devoted to mentoring other first-generation high school, college, and medical students. He is excited to join BMC to expand on his interests and advocacy for immigrants, refugees, and drug-dependent patients.