Welcome to the Montenegro Lab!

The Montenegro Lab focuses on assessing for and addressing bias in medicine and medical curriculum, with the primary goal of developing and implementing sustainable training methods and strategies for healthcare professionals and systems to continuously address bias in medicine.

Investigator Biography

Roberto Emilio Montenegro, MD, PhD

Roberto Montenegro is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at The UW department of psychiatry and adjunct clinical assistant professor in Pediatrics in the Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics and Palliative Care at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Dr. Montenegro specializes in cross cultural psychiatry, mental health for the deaf and hard of hearing, and mental health for incarcerated youth.

He completed a PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he specialized on health inequities, doctor-patient communication, and race relations research. He then attended the University of Utah School of Medicine, completed his adult psychiatry training at Yale University, and his child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Seattle Children's Hospital. His research focuses on machine learning detection strategies for bias in medical text, evidence-based strategies for personal and interpersonal bias reduction within pediatrics, and doctor-patient communication. 

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Current Research/Scholarship Projects

Bias Reduction in Medicine- Pediatrics+ (BRIM-Peds+)

The overall goal of Bias Reduction in Medicine- Pediatrics+ (BRIM-Pediatrics+) is to develop, implement, and study an effective bias literacy curriculum intervention for the Department of Pediatrics at The University of Washington School of Medicine. This intervention aims to address bias in the form of racism, in the field of pediatrics, at the personal, interpersonal, and institutional level.

Bias Reduction in Curricula Content (BRICC)

The BRICC program takes a multi-disciplinary approach to systematically evaluate and identify potential bias in medical education curricula content. BRICC aims to 1) preemptively identify social and structural determinants of health (SSDOH) that should be included in medical curricula content and 2) use computer science technology (text extraction and natural language processing methods) to more efficiently and accurately examine large corpuses of data to reduce bias in medical education materials via machine learning methods.

Highlighted Publications

1. Montenegro RE, Dori-Hacohen G. Morality in sugar talk: Presenting blood glucose levels in routine diabetes medical visits. Soc Sci Med. 2020; 253:112925.
2. Montenegro RE. My Name Is Not “Interpreter.” JAMA. 2020;323(17):1700-1701.
3. Overland MK, Zumsteg JM, Lindo EG, et al. Microaggressions in Clinical Training and Practice. PM R. 2019;11(9):1004-1012.
4. Cavallo J, Montenegro RE. Addressing Discrimination and Bias in Medical Education. The ASCO Post. Published online 2017.
5. Montenegro R. Microaggressions During Medical Training—Reply. JAMA. 2016;316(10):1114-1114.

View a full list of Dr. Montenegro’s publications on PubMed.