Dr. Clara Alvarez Villalba is the founding Program Director of the Psychiatry Residency Program at Aventura Hospital and Medical Center. She is board-certified in adult psychiatry, addiction medicine and psychosomatic medicine. Dr. Alvarez earned her medical degree from the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Senora del Rosario in Bogota, Colombia in 1994, after which she completed her medical internship at the Fundacion Santa Fe de Bogota. She then went on to complete her psychiatry residency training at the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Hospital, an affiliate of the Weill Cornell Medical College, in 2007. Dr. Alvarez served as Chief Resident in her final year of residency before moving on to pursue a psychosomatic medicine fellowship at the North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in 2008.Dr. Alvarez has served as Medical Director of the Outpatient Behavioral Health Center at the Memorial Regional Hospital and at the Adult Outpatient Psychiatric Clinic at the Jackson Memorial Hospital, in collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami. She was also an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Dr. Alvarez served as Attending Psychiatrist at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York City and Adjunct Lecturer at the City College of New York.Dr. Alvarez has given a variety of presentations on topics such as depression, deep brain stimulation for obsessive compulsive disorder, and psychiatry in transgender health. Her areas of interest include mood disorders, women?s health, psychopharmacology and geriatrics.