Dr. Salles is a keynote speaker and diversity and inclusion researcher with a focus on gender. She is also a bariatric surgeon. During her surgical training she pursued a PhD studying how the stereotype that men are better surgeons than women affects women training to become surgeons. Dr. Salles's work continues to focus on gender equity within medicine with ongoing studies related to the representation of women at surgical conferences and gender bias in evaluations of residents and medical students. She was also a founder of TIME'S UP Healthcare, which aims to fight inequity and harassment in medicine.Dr. Salles is also an expert on physician well-being and helped found one of the earliest resident well-being programs in the country while she was a resident. For this work she was featured in TIME magazine's September 7, 2015 issue ("Doctors on Life Support"​) as well as an online addendum, "See the Grueling Life of an American Surgeon,"​ http://time.com/4005766/surgery-stress-balazs-gardi/.Dr. Salles has given numerous talks on topics related to stereotype threat and well-being at conferences such as the American College of Surgeons, Academic Surgical Congress, Association for Surgical Education, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and American Educational Research Association. She is also a sought after speaker on topics such as gender bias, physician well-being, and obesity bias.