Fabrizia Faustinella is a board-certified internist who has worked in the Texas Medical Center for over thirty years, as a trainee and as a faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center, now John P. McGovern Medical School, in Houston, Texas. In both institutions, a constant element of her work and career has been extensive and direct patient care, patient advocacy, and an unwavering dedication to the education of future generations of physicians.
Fabrizia’s Baylor career started in Dr. Lawrence Chan’s lab, in the Department of Cell Biology. Later, her interest in the molecular basis of genetic diseases and in gene therapy brought her to Dr. Tom Caskey’s lab in the Department of Molecular Genetics. After completing a residency program in internal medicine at Baylor, Fabrizia readdressed her career choices to reflect her commitment to patient care and medical education, bringing science and humanism together to benefit patients and improve the health of our community.
While working in the TMC, she has made an effort to seek, develop, and foster inter-institutional collaborations in education and research between Baylor and UT. Examples are the work done as Chair of the Comprehensive Clinical Competency Exam Committee, the participation in the combined BCM-UT Master Teacher Fellowship Program and, prior to that, a collaborative study on neural injuries and liposome-mediated gene transfer of nerve growth factors in primary septo-hippocampal cell cultures.
As a Co-chair of the TXACP-HPPC (Texas Chapter of the American College of Physicians-Health and Public Policy Committee) her current refined focus is health care access, health care cost and disparities, and patient-physician relationship.