Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine are the two main areas of my work. From my formal training in Infectious Diseases at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts to studies in Tropical Medicine led to my involvement in research work related to these fields. My earlier work included surveillance and serologic studies in Tetanus, Diphtheria, and Toxoplasmosis. Subsequently I was involved in studies of surveillance skin cultures as related to devices infections as well as vascular devices infections. In more recent years I have been a close collaborator with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Dengue Branch with active participation as Physician Master Trainer in the Dengue Clinical Case Management Course (Certificate of Appreciation) and developing and conducting a dengue clinical management course for physicians to improve outcome during the largest epidemic in Puerto Rican history (Honor Award Certificate). I have been part of some of the dengue vaccine trials at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine. I was awarded a grant as Principal Investigator (2012-2015) by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for a study of Dengue and Acute Febrile Illnesses. The project has allowed us to study our local acute febrile illnesses that includes (besides dengue) chikungunya, leptospirosis, influenza, as well as the respiratory viruses (metapneumovirus, adenovirus, coronavirus, parainfluenza, respiratory syncytial virus). This project allowed us to document the historic moment of the introduction the chikungunya virus to our Caribbean island in 2014.