Dr. Vivian Ortiz joined the Department of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology as an Assistant Professor in September 2023. Dr. Ortiz attended medical school at Meharry Medical College and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She then completed her gastroenterology fellowship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and her transplant hepatology fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota where she also served as a fellow representative. Her research interests are in identifying biomarkers for human cholangiocarcinoma and understanding spatial organization of the immune microenvironment in cholangiocarcinoma. She became inspired in a career in hepatology through scientific research on hepatocellular carcinoma during her college years, and since then, she has gained skills through her training process to grow as a physician scientist and a transplant hepatologist.
She was a recipient of the Yale/Stanford Johson & Johnson Global Health Program that allowed her to do a rotation in her home country Colombia where she also joined a hepatology clinic caring for patients with liver disease, as well of the AGA Investing in the Future Award where she also had the opportunity to do a medical rotation in Honduras. Since her award as an American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases Emerging Liver Scholar in 2017, she has remained an active member of this organization as speaker at the 2020 Academic Debates, and through committees and small interest groups. She also completed the American Gastroenterology Association (AGA) Editorial Fellowship and was selected for the 2022 AGA Fostering Opportunities Resulting in Workforce and Research Diversity (FORWARD) program. Her research interests are cholangiocarcinoma, liver transplantation, hepatocellular carcinoma and cholestatic diseases of the liver.