Portrait by ChiChi Ubiña
YWCA Greenwich will be holding its 6th Annual Women Who Inspire Awards to recognize exceptional women in our community. YWCA Greenwich’s Women Who Inspire Awards was established to recognize and celebrate outstanding women who have excelled in philanthropic, professional, and volunteer pursuits. Importantly, these honorees have enriched the lives of many in our community. This event acknowledges the changes in society that have led to the fluidity of work/life pursuits for women of today.
For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.
Dr. Maria Cecilia C. Asnis was born in Manila, Philippines and immigrated to the United States at the age of five. She is a proud graduate of Alexandria City, VA public schools and graduated magna cum laude with BA in Biological Anthropology from Harvard College. She earned her MD at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and completed her internal medicine residency at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. It was here that she saw the importance of equitable access to medical care for all communities. She then completed her endocrinology fellowship at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. She is board certified in Obesity Medicine, Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, and Internal Medicine.
Dr. Asnis joined Stamford Health in 2013 and in 2019, she solidified her particular interest in weight medicine. Recognizing the enormous need in the community and the advancements in the science and tools for metabolic health, she founded the Stamford Health Medical Weight Loss Program. Along with Stamford Health’s cardiologists, particularly Dr. Ed Schuster, she created the Stamford Health Cardiometabolic Program, a collaborative program to aid patients with cardiac disease to improve their metabolic health. She was named Director of the Center for Weight Management at Stamford Health in 2022.
Throughout this time, Dr. Asnis has made it her mission to educate patients, physicians, and the greater community that obesity is a medical condition – not a failure of personal willpower. She places particular importance on the goal of overall improved health, rather than weight loss per se. Dr. Asnis conducts several seminars a year to medical providers and the community at large to update them on the advances in obesity medicine as well as challenge weight-based bias and continuing concerns regarding patient access to care and treatments. On the local and state levels, she has fought for access to metabolic/weight loss medications for those that need it.
Dr. Asnis is grateful for her family – especially her husband, Jeremy, a busy anesthesiologist (whom she met when they were first year medical students) and her two daughters, Olivia and Mia, of whom she is immensely proud. Her inspiration are her parents– who left promising careers to give her and her siblings more opportunity in the United States.