Welcome to the Montenegro Lab!
The Montenegro Lab focuses on assessing for and addressing variability in clinical decision-making and medical education, aiming to develop sustainable strategies that support fairness, accuracy, and accountability in healthcare delivery.
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 reducing variations in health outcomes across communities 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 detecting unfair and problematic language in medical text, evidence-based strategies for personal and interpersonal fairness enhancement within pediatrics, and doctor-patient communication.
Current Research/Scholarship Projects
BRIM-Peds+
The overall goal of 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 unfair or problematic language in the form of racism, in the field of pediatrics, at the personal, interpersonal, and institutional level.
BRICC
The BRICC program takes a multi-disciplinary approach to systematically evaluate and identify potential unfair or problematic language 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 problematic content in medical education materials via machine learning methods.
Highlighted Publications
- Anderson N, Lett E, Asabor EN, Hernandez AL, Nguemeni Tiako MJ, Johnson C, Montenegro RE, Rizzo TM, Latimore D, Nunez-Smith M, Boatright D. The Association of Microaggressions with Depressive Symptoms and Institutional Satisfaction Among a National Cohort of Medical Students. J Gen Intern Med. 2022 Feb;37(2):298-307. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC8811096
- Dori -Hacohen S, Montenegro R, Murai F, Hale SA, Sung K, Blain M, Edwards-Johnson J. Fairness via AI. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2109.02202
- Overland MK, Zumsteg JM, Lindo EG, Sholas MG, Montenegro RE, Campelia GD, Mukherjee D. Microaggressions in Clinical Training and Practice. PM R. 2019 Sep;11(9):1004-1012. PMID: 31368663
- Montenegro RE, Dori-Hacohen G. Morality in sugar talk: Presenting blood glucose levels in routine diabetes medical visits. Soc Sci Med. 2020; 253:112925.
- Montenegro RE. My Name Is Not “Interpreter.” JAMA. 2020;323(17):1700-1701.
- Montenegro R. Microaggressions During Medical Training—Reply. JAMA. 2016;316(10):1114-1114.
View a full list of Dr. Montenegro’s publications on PubMed.
Participate in Research
Help us answer questions about childhood health and illness and help other children in the future. Learn more about Clinical Trials and Research Studies.