Attending Physician
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Maria Christina Herrera, MD, MSHP is an attending physician in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), who was selected as a scholar for Yale’s K12-funded Drug Use, Addiction and HIV Prevention Research Scholars program. Her present focus addresses the intersection of the HIV and opioid use disorder (OUD) epidemics for teens and young adults. She is a board-certified pediatrician who is particularly interested in broadening access to substance use and HIV treatment and prevention initiatives for historically marginalized and disenfranchised groups, namely Black and Latino youth.
Dr. Herrera contributed to health care and public health efforts during her domestic training in New York City, San Francisco, Philadelphia and with the Indian Health Service on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona. She has also worked both clinically and in a research capacity globally in the Dominican Republic, Peru, and Mexico, all of which served to deepen her commitment to health equity and poverty alleviation.
Originally from a small, rural town in upstate New York, Dr. Herrera completed her undergraduate education with a BA from the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University. She received her MD from Columbia University prior to completing her residency in the pediatrics PLUS program at the University of California, San Francisco which trains pediatricians to advance health equity through community engagement and legislative advocacy. She graduated from CHOP’s Adolescent Medicine Fellowship training program in June 2022. During her clinical training at CHOP, she completed the Master’s of Science in Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania through the T32-funded Pediatric Hospital Epidemiology and Outcomes Training program.
