Dr Leonardo Aliaga

Dr Leonardo Aliaga
Clin Asst Professor
Emergency Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine

Dr Leonardo Aliaga is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University and a medical education researcher who studies how clinicians learn from error and failure. His research explores how learning and adaptive expertise improve when difficulty is calibrated to induce errors and growth, but not to overwhelm. This includes teaching strategies such as Productive Failure and Error Management Training. 

Dr Aliaga led a multicenter randomised clinical trial, published in JAMA Network Open, showing that residents who made more errors when learning head CT interpretation had fewer errors when doing new cases. He is developing an AI-powered virtual patient simulator calibrated at the limits of difficulty to reliably trigger errors and strengthen clinical reasoning. 

He has delivered invited talks and led international symposia on using errors and failure to improve learning. Having trained in neurosurgery before transitioning to emergency medicine, he brings a unique perspective on how struggle and pressure shape expertise. Clinically, he practices and teaches emergency medicine in a high acuity academic center, bringing the realities of risk, uncertainty, and patient safety into his educational work.