After graduating from Lacey Township High School in 2009, Brian continued his education at the University of Connecticut, studying biomedical engineering. He graduated magna cum laude from UConn in 2013 as an Honors Scholar and New England Scholar. While completing his engineering senior design capstone, he also successfully received grant funding to support his project from the CT Space Grant Program, part of NASA’s National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program.

After completing his engineering degree, Brian attended the University of Bridgeport to complete a Doctor of Chiropractic degree. He graduated in 2017 summa cum laude and as valedictorian of his class. While at the University of Bridgeport, he began diverging from the traditional path of a chiropractor of clinical practice towards academia and research. He began working with one of his mentors, Dr. Anthony Lisi – the national program director for the Department of Veterans Affairs National Chiropractic Program office – at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System in West Haven.

To combine his interest in medical research and back ground as an engineer, Brian began a postdoctoral fellowship in 2018 studying medical informatics at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System and the Center for Medical Informatics at the Yale School of Medicine. He identified an opportunity to build a research career on the rapidly growing evidence supporting the primary use of nonpharmacological approaches to pain management, especially in the context of the public health crisis that has been the opioid epidemic. During this period of mentored research, Brian continued to work with Dr. Lisi as well as other national leaders in pain research and medical informatics. He also began providing chiropractic care to our nation’s Veterans at VA Connecticut during his fellowship training. His first study was published in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, where he and his team identified factors associated with post-traumatic stress disorder among a population of Veterans who received VA chiropractic care. More recently, he also published the first study that applied machine learning and artificial intelligence to data from the chiropractic clinical setting, developing a model to predict healthcare utilization for Veterans using VA chiropractic care.

After completing his fellowship, Brian continued working at VA Connecticut and Yale University. He is currently an advisor on data science to the National Chiropractic Program Office for the US Department of Veterans Affairs and remains a chiropractic physician at VA Connecticut. He is also the Director of Information Technology and Scientific Communications for the Yale-based, National Institutes of Health-Department of Defense-Department of Veterans Affairs Pain Management Collaboratory, a multi-organization sponsored collaboratory of clinical trials focused on the implementation and evaluation of nonpharmacological approaches for the management of pain and common co-occurring conditions in Military and Veterans healthcare systems.

Related to this position, he published a paper in Translational Behavioral Medicine describing the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on clinical trials studying pain management and the response of the Pain Management Collaboratory. Brian currently holds academic appointments and instructs courses in informatics, population health, and epidemiology at Yale University, VA Connecticut, and Sacred Heart University. His career goal is to apply and evaluate pain care models offering nonpharmacological approaches, such as chiropractic care, in integrated health care settings. He is currently preparing a career development award training grant proposal to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health of the National Institutes of Health, where he plans to apply informatics methods, specifically natural language processing and machine learning, to clinical data relevant to chiropractors to improve healthcare delivery and improve human health.