Dr. Amanda Velazquez graduated with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a Bachelor of Science in Public Health in Nutrition and received her MD from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. She did internal medicine residency at Indiana University School of Medicine: Indianapolis and subsequently completed a Nutrition and Obesity Medicine fellowship program at Boston University School of Medicine at Boston Medical Center. She spent the last 5 years at Southern California Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Hospital caring for historically underserved communities, primarily Latinx patients. She was recently recruited to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles to serve as the Director of Obesity Medicine at the Center for Weight Management and Metabolic Health. She is passionate in helping patients with obesity, especially people of color, obtain evidence based treatment for this chronic, relapsing disease. Her research interests focus on reducing weight bias and stigma among healthcare professionals, promoting health equity, improving education of medical trainees for obesity medicine, food and nutrition, and studying pharmacological treatments of obesity.