The Warren Alpert Medical School celebrates residency placements at annual Match Day

The Warren Alpert Medical School’s MD Class of 2026 gathered with their families and friends to discover the next stage of their careers at the annual Match Day Celebration on Friday, March 20.

With about 800 people attending this year, the celebration was held for the first time in the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center on Brown’s main campus. The crowd clinked champagne glasses in a toast shortly before noon, when 146 fourth-year medical students opened their red envelopes and learned where their residency training will begin.

Before the big moment, Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences Mukesh K. Jain, MD, acknowledged their hard work and saluted the families, friends, and faculty who supported them through their studies. He also acknowledged the adversity students faced following the senseless Dec. 13 shooting on campus, and how it shook the community deeply.

“In the midst of grief, uncertainty, and loss, you showed up,” Jain said. “You showed up for your patients, you showed up for each other, and you carried yourself with compassion, steadiness, and courage. Resilience matters—it says something important about who you are and it has shaped you into the kind of doctors the world needs.”

Twenty-two students in this year’s class matched to residency programs in Rhode Island, and 56 will train in the primary care specialties of family medicine, pediatrics, or internal medicine.

Those who pursued unorthodox pathways into medicine had much to celebrate. Urvi Tiwari MD’26 was born in India and moved to Jersey City with her family in the late 1990s. At Rutgers University she studied accounting and finance and earned a Master of Science in Business of Fashion. Tiwari worked for Gucci for several years, until she was furloughed during the COVID-19 pandemic. So she volunteered at a local hospital, speaking with patients’ families who were waiting in cars and parking lots for updates on loved ones inside.

“I found myself enjoying that so much more than my job [at Gucci], even though it was emotionally draining,” Tiwari says. “That made me realize that I’m enjoying doing something more people-centered, so I focused on a job in clinical medicine.”

She became a clinical research intern for Eko, a digital stethoscope company, and took premed courses at John Hopkins University, which offers a linkage program with The Warren Alpert Medical School. On Friday, she learned she matched to the University of Cincinnati’s combined family medicine and psychiatry residency program.

She was attracted to both fields not only for the opportunity to build long-term connections with patients, but also because of her  family’s experience as immigrants in Jersey City.

“We only had one general practitioner in the area, and when they closed down we didn’t really have anyone else to go to,” she says. “As I got older, I realized the big gaps that existed in my own health care and my family’s. It’s so important to have someone there who can navigate those things with you. I feel like it’s such a privilege to be that person in somebody’s life.”

Victoria Angenent-Mari MD’26, a Madison, WI, native, will train in family medicine at Kent Hospital, which is affiliated with Brown, and specialize in obstetrics. She says she didn’t realize the scope of family medicine until she shadowed a physician at his clinic during her third year. Angenent-Mari was struck by the level of trust he had with two patients in particular—a pregnant patient who repeatedly asked if the doctor would be the one to deliver their baby, and a palliative patient who shared their worries with taking certain medications prescribed by an oncologist.

“That day really did it for me,” she says. “I just thought it was so beautiful that at every stage of someone's life that the thing he seemed to be specializing in was a trusting relationship with his patients, so I was pretty convinced after that.”

Angenent-Mari looked back on many opportunities for advocacy at Brown, including working with the Brown Human Rights Asylum Clinic, where she wrote pro bono medical affidavits for those seeking asylum, and serving as co-president of the Medical Student Pride Alliance during her second year.

“I didn’t realize how much medical-legal overlap there was in the field of medicine, and getting more involved in that made it clear I want it to be part of my practice in the future,” Angenent-Mari says. “I wish more physicians realized how easy it is to be able to advocate for patients legally and in various other ways.”

Bazif Bala '22 MD'26 came to Brown through the Program in Liberal Medical Education and is earning a master’s degree alongside his MD as part of the Primary Care-Population Medicine Program. Next year he will begin his psychiatry residency at Stanford University Medical Center. He says he chose the field because of his experience as a South Asian and some of the stigmas associated with mental health care.

“Even for people that recognize seeking out treatment is important, they generally want people who speak the same language as them and who look like them,” Bala says. “Beyond that, they want people who, even if they don’t speak the same language, know how to ask about their culture and their background.”

Bala’s research in language-based work culminated in his 30-minute, award-winning documentary, Migration and Medicine: Teaching Trauma-Informed Care for Refugees, about the barriers many undocumented and refugee populations face when seeking health care. He hopes to continue focusing on the intersection of public and community psychiatry, and says that he wants to be a teacher “in every sense of the word.”

“Teaching is what I’ve loved since I was 10 years old, and I can’t wait to intersect that with medicine,” Bala says. “That’s what keeps me going and that’s what I want to do.”

Kalyn Nix MD’26 will train in general surgery at Weill Cornell Medical Center. The Wilmington, DE, native and Princeton University graduate had originally aimed to pursue obstetrics and gynecology—however, a surgery rotation in her third year altered her course.

“In my fourth year, I was trying to figure out if I was going to dual apply to ob/gyn or general surgery,” Nix says. “I was very open about it with all the general surgeons and they were so supportive with helping me and my decision making.”

Over the past four years, Nix took on various leadership and mentoring roles. She served as a head tutor at the Medical School and helped manage more than 100 tutors; was co-president of the Student National Medical Association chapter; and gave lectures at Harvard and Yale on topics like health disparities and the realities of race-based medicine in American health care.

“That’s not something that’s a huge part of our curriculum, so it felt really fulfilling to be able to give a lecture that I wish I would have had,” she says.

Nix also volunteered with Clínica Esperanza, a Providence clinic that provides care to uninsured patients, and traveled to Kenya for a global health rotation. She says she is looking forward to future international surgery experiences, and may even practice in Barbados, where her family is from. Thanks to her experiences at Brown, she also sees herself teaching in an academic setting.

“I’m really grateful for my time here,” Nix says. “If I could do it all again, I 100 percent would.”

The Warren Alpert Medical School is among medical schools across the country that participate in the National Resident Matching Program. Check out where everyone matched here.