Leadership Team

Naomi Botkin, MD, has been the program director of the Cardiovascular Medicine Fellowship since 2009. After earning her medical degree from Yale University School of Medicine, she completed medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and cardiology fellowship at UMass Chan Medical School. She is an associate professor of medicine at UMass Chan Medical School and practices noninvasive cardiology at UMass Memorial Medical Center. As a member of the Program Directors and Graduate Medical Education Council of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), she works with fellowship leaders from around the country to optimize the education of cardiology fellows. She has an interest in knowledge assessment and recently served as chair of the committee that creates the ACC’s in-training exam for fellows. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, hiking, theater-going, cooking, and spending time with her husband, teenage daughter and dog.

Kai Chen, MD, PhD, returned from UConn and became an associate program director of the Cardiovascular Medicine Fellowship in 2022. After graduating from Wenzhou Medical University in China, he became a pediatric surgeon. He was then enticed by basic research and decided to pursue Ph.D in molecular and cell biology at Osaka University, Japan.  His cardiology career started with joining the lab of John Keaney Jr. at Boston University, followed by internal medicine residency and cardiology fellowship training at UMass. He is an associate professor of medicine at UMass Chan Medical School and practices noninvasive cardiology at UMass Memorial Medical Center. He is honored to care for his patients and enjoys mentoring trainees in clinical research. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, travelling, and binge-watching Netflix.

Bryon Gentile, MD became associate program director of the Cardiovascular Medicine Fellowship in 2022. After earning his medical degree at Penn State, he moved to Worcester where he completed internship, residency, and fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at UMass Chan Medical School.  Bryon is an Associate Professor of Medicine and serves as the Director of Interventional Echocardiography focusing on a multimodality approach to cardiovascular imaging as well as the use of imaging in guiding transcatheter structural heart interventions. In addition to his clinical work, Bryon enjoys teaching, mentoring, and collaborating with fellows and residents. Having been selected as Teacher of the Year by the cardiology fellows was a highlight of his early career. Bryon enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters, escaping to Maine, and complaining about Massachusetts pizza.