Our Fellows
Class of 2024–2026
Suzanne Bradshaw, M.D., IBCLC
Suzanne Bradshaw earned her BS in Biochemistry at the University of California San Diego. She attended Vanderbilt Medical School and completed her Pediatric Residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2002. She worked as an inpatient and outpatient pediatrician as well as a lactation consultant in Upstate New York from 2002-2016. She relocated to the Boston area in 2016 where she has worked in community health, largely serving a Spanish speaking immigrant population. She was certified as a CLC in 2010 and earned her IBCLC certification in 2014. She currently works as a primary care pediatrician and lactation consultant at East Boston Neighborhood Health Center. She is also the Chapter Breastfeeding Coordinator for the Massachusetts AAP chapter. She is a member of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine and a FAAP. Suzanne is the proud mother of 3 adult children. She enjoys swimming, traveling, reading novels, and hiking with her family and dogs.
Carla Brown, M.D., FAAP
Carla is a Newborn and NICU Hospitalist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Arkansas Children’s Hospital. This is also where she completed medical school and her pediatric residency training. She is a native Arkansan and have a passion for improving healthcare outcomes for the children of Arkansas with interests in healthcare disparities, breastfeeding medicine, and educating and training the next generation of physicians who will care for them! Currently, she serves as the Director of Medical Student Education in Pediatrics and the Director of Pediatric Residency DEI. Outside of work, She absolutely loves traveling the world with her 15 year old daughter and spending time with her family and friends. Carla is very excited to begin this journey of training in Breastfeeding and Lactation Medicine.
Maria R. Fisher, CNM, MSN, MPH, IBCLC
Maria has been employed at Stony Brook Medicine in Stony Brook, NY since 2009 as a certified nurse-midwife. In 2014, she started an outpatient breastfeeding service which has grown from 4 hours per week to 16 hours per week of dedicated clinical time for lactation/breastfeeding medicine services. Maria has trained 2 other midwives to work along side her and is now training a third with students and residents that rotate through their service. Prior to her employment at Stony Brook, she had a private practice conducting home visits for lactation while she was on maternity leave (and breastfeeding). She also practiced midwifery for 10 years in Brooklyn before retreating to the suburbs. In Brooklyn, she cared for a large orthodox Jewish community with high breastfeeding rates. Breastfeeding was definitely the cultural norm. Maria's research experience with regard to lactation began in graduate school at University of Pennsylvania, where she conducted a study of breastfeeding initiation and duration of 100 postpartum women that she followed for a 6-month period. Her work was published as a poster presentation with the support of her professor and mentor Dr. Diane Spatz. Most recently she has worked on a project for the National Perinatal Association developing "best practices" for infant feeding. This three-part series is awaiting publication in the Journal of Perinatology.
Emily Trambert Kylstra – MD Candidate
Emily is a soon-to-be graduate of the UNC Chapel Hill Family Medicine Residency with a love of helping patients in their reproductive health and parenting journeys. During residency, she served predominantly Spanish-speaking patients in a rural federally qualified health center. Her passion for breastfeeding medicine and lactation was born of her own rewarding (and sometimes challenging) experiences navigating breastfeeding her daughter. Ultimately, she aims to provide Breastfeeding & Lactation Medicine services to uninsured patients at local federally qualified health centers, who may not otherwise have access. In addition to more holistically supporting her patients, she is also committed to sharing the knowledge she gains with other providers given her love for teaching. After finishing the LILAC fellowship, she hopes to attain a position as an academic faculty member at a local family medicine residency so she can empower trainees in their breastfeeding counseling.
Ana Lucia Ruiz Cabrera, M.D., IBCLC
Ana is a Colombian mother of 3, OBGYN and IBCLC. She became interested in breastfeeding during her pregnancies, and before her third pregnancy she found out breastfeeding medicine was a blooming specialty. She studied and became an IBCLC while breastfeeding her youngest child. She is the only OBGYN certified lactation consultant in her country and hopes to expand to make other doctors notice breastfeeding medicine as a new and necessary specialty. She is very happy to join the LILAC group!
Dr. Kavita Thanakrishnan, MBBS, BCHAO, FRACP, DCH, BArts
Dr. Kavita has been a doctor for more than 16 years. She loves all facets of medicine but has a specialized interest in children and women's health. She loves helping parents navigate the labyrinth of Perinatal medicine in those first 2 years. Before becoming a GP, she worked for 6 years in Paediatrics at the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network including Neonatal Intensive Care (NICU) at the RHW and attained a Diploma of Paediatrics from UNSW/SCH. She developed a special interest and focus in Breastfeeding Medicine after finding that many of the problems and distress faced by patients was preventable. She is also a Lactation Consultant and member of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine. She is experienced in the model of Neuroprotective Developmental Care and a Possums NDC Practitioner. She is also certified in the Thompson Breastfeeding method. She is passionate about improving breastfeeding support and education. Outside of medicine, she has a strong interest in nature, martial arts and social justice. Before Medicine she did a Bachelor of Arts—majoring in Classics—Greek and Roman Literature and Political science.
Janet Wasylyshen-Velasco, M.D., M.P.H., IBCLC
Dr. Wasylyshen-Velasco is an Internal Medicine-Pediatric trained physician at Dayton Children's Hospital in Dayton Ohio. She completed medical school and public health training at Loma Linda University in California and her Med-Peds residency through Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine in Dayton Ohio. She has provided care in hospital medicine for patients from birth -106 years of age since completing residency in 2003. Her perspective on the impact of breastfeeding on health outcomes has been a progression, formed by her personal experiences and those of her patients, particularly through the onset and progression of disease over time. Opportunities for building systemic fundamentals to support breastfeeding within hospital systems are unique; care tends to separate dyads as the norm and provision of care for illness exacerbated by lack of breastfeeding as a root cause contributor is often unrecognized. She is excited about teaching the next generations of providers, and advocacy and support for women through their pregnancy and postpartum journey. Outside of work, she loves spending time with her husband and two daughters, their canine, feline and equine interests, anything outdoors and travel whenever possible.
Class of 2023–2025
Lindsey Daggle
Lindsey Daggle, M.D., FAAP, is a board-certified pediatric hospitalist at Inova L.J. Murphy Children’s Hospital. She earned her Medical Degree at Georgetown University and completed her Pediatric Residency at Lurie Children’s and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
After residency, Dr. Daggle practiced outpatient pediatrics in Northern Virginia for several years before joining INOVA’s pediatric hospitalist team and finding her niche in the newborn nursery. She is excited to complement her newborn hospitalist role with outpatient medicine again when she joins INOVA’s newly opened Breastfeeding Medicine Clinic in the summer of 2023.
Dr. Daggle is passionate about medical education and is the Associate Pediatric Clerkship Director for University of Virginia’s School of Medicine at Inova’s Regional Campus. She is eager to develop breastfeeding medicine curriculum for undergraduate and graduate medical education.
Dr. Daggle currently resides in Falls Church, Virginia with her husband, four children (11 ,9, 6 and 4) and their COVID dog.
Amelia Henning
Amelia Henning, MSN, CNM, IBCLC, is a staff midwife and the Director of the Lactation program at Massachusetts General Hospital. She completed her midwifery education at the University of Pennsylvania, and holds a BA in interdisciplinary studies from Wheaton College. She has always had an interest in breastfeeding and was fortunate to have that spark nurtured by Dr. Diane Spatz while at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Breastfeeding her own four children for a cumulative ten years certainly influences her understanding of the field. Amelia has served on the hospital’s Breastfeeding Task Force since its inception in 2005, as well as the Baby Friendly Task Force, and is a member of the Boston Breastfeeding Coalition, and the Massachusetts WIC Medical Advisory Board. In addition to seeing patients in the lactation clinic, she is responsible for all OB provider and outpatient staff breastfeeding education, and is a clinical teaching associate at Harvard Medical School. She provides didactic BFLM education for medical students and residents, as well as clinical preceptorship for residents and midwifery students both in the outpatient clinic and on labor and delivery. She is very excited to grow the program at MGH and improve care for families in the fourth trimester.
Outside of work, Amelia enjoys gardening, cooking, and spending time outdoors. She resides in RI with her husband and four children.
Hayley Hoffman
Hayley Hoffman, CNM, IBCLC, is a Midwife on faculty at the University of Maryland, department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She has been an IBCLC since 2017 and has dedicated herself to helping patients overcome feeding challenges. As a CNM, IBCLC, she has a unique scope that allows her to diagnose, treat, and refer both the mother and the baby. She founded and runs the outpatient breastfeeding medicine clinic at the University of Maryland. Her special interests include tongue ties, perinatal mood disorders, diabetes in pregnancy and providing fourth trimester support. Her current research is on tongue ties and their effect on postpartum mood.
Hayley is a mother of three, all of whom she has breastfed, and all of whom have had their own unique breastfeeding journeys. She loves to spend her free time with her children, trying new activities and seeing the world through their eyes. She also loves gardening, exploring the outdoors, and crafting.
Melissa Holmes
Dr. Melissa Holmes is a physician practicing pediatric primary care in an urban, academic setting at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, IL, where she also serves as an Associate Chief Medical Informatics Officer. Her interest in breastfeeding and lactation medicine stems first from her own experience as a breastfeeding mother where her own struggles and lack of knowledge and support sparked a desire to further her education in this area. Through her own self-education and assisting other breastfeeding parents in her daily clinical practice both in the outpatient pediatric primary care office setting and general care nursery, she became increasingly inspired to more formally pursuit education in breastfeeding and lactation medicine to improve the care of her patients, the knowledge of her fellow colleagues, develop much needed education at the medical student, resident and fellowship levels across multiple disciplines, and advocate for breastfeeding support and policies at her own institution and beyond. Dr. Holmes would like to develop a clinical program at RUSH to provide lactation support to the immediate community RUSH serves on the West Side of Chicago and across the greater Chicago area. RUSH has a successful NICU Human Milk Research Program and Dr. Holmes’ long-term goal is to create a clinical program to supplement the outstanding research being done by her fellow colleagues. Lastly and likely more uniquely, Dr. Holmes looks forward to bridging her experience in clinical informatics with that of breastfeeding and lactation medicine, which is an under explored and worthy niche.
Edna Prieto
Edna Prieto is a Family Medicine physician and International Board Certified Lactation Consultant in California's Bay Area. She graduated from University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine and completed her residency at Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency. Dr. Prieto is passionate about teaching and since 2018, she has worked as volunteer clinical faculty at UCSF facilitating a third year small group each year: part of the medical school longitudinal Family and Community Medicine curriculum. Dr. Prieto started her work in lactation as a member of the Alameda County Breastfeeding Coalition, for which she is now one of its co-chairs. She is also an active member of the coalition's Latina Chicana Lactation Taskforce. Since 2021 she has pivoted away from primary care and is focusing on breastfeeding and lactation medicine (BFLM). Dr. Prieto is currently working as the lactation specialist at a local WIC office.
She will continue to work to increase access to lactation support for her community as well as help improve lactation knowledge and education in medical training. Outside of work, she enjoys exploring with her husband and their two boys, and trying out the local ice cream shops.