Tung Nguyen, MD
Co-Director
Dr. Nguyen is the UCSF Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Opportunity and Impact (AVC-ROI) and Stephen J. McPhee, MD, Endowed Chair in General Internal Medicine. A general internist with a panel of diverse patients, Dr. Nguyen teaches medical students and residents about medicine, health equity, and community-based participatory research (CBPR). He has conducted CBPR and patient-centered research with diverse populations including Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Korean, and Vietnamese Americans on cancer control, tobacco control, hepatitis B and C screening, nutrition and physical activity, and end-of-life care.
Elizabeth Ozer, PhD
Co-Director
Elizabeth Ozer is Professor of Pediatrics & Associate Vice Provost at UCSF. She also serves as Director of Fellows Research Training in Adolescent & Young Adult Medicine. Dr. Ozer is a psychologist whose research has focused primarily on the health of adolescents, young adults, and women. She has served as either Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator of multiple U.S. federally funded grants focused on decreasing adolescent risky behavior through improving the care provided by the health care system and the primary care provider. This research has tested models for increasing the screening and counseling of adolescents in primary care as well as evaluated the effect of provider screening and counseling on adolescent behavior across multiple health risk areas. More recent Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), National Science Foundation, and NCI-funded research has explored ways that technology can be incorporated into successful models of prevention for teenagers, with a current transdisciplinary collaboration with computer scientists to design, implement, and investigate a self-adaptive personalized behavior change system for adolescent preventive health (with a focus on reducing adolescent alcohol use); and NIH SEPA-funded work to create AI4Health, the first game-based learning environment to introduce students to AI in the context of biomedical careers.
School of Dentistry
Sunita Mutha, MD
Faculty Lead
Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP directs Healthforce Center at UCSF. In addition, she is a professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and associate dean for academic affairs in the UCSF School of Dentistry. As director of Healthforce Center, Dr. Mutha leads the organization’s efforts to increase workforce knowledge, develop leadership capacity, and nurture networks across silos to advance health equity.
Dr. Mutha’s scholarly work has focused on overcoming language barriers in health, cultural competence training for clinicians, and improvement interventions to reduce disparities in care. She has served on national committees including the Joint Commission’s Expert Advisory Panel guiding the development of hospital standards for culturally competent patient-centered care and the National Quality Forum’s Cultural Competence Steering Committee. Dr. Mutha serves on an expert advisory committee to develop a scorecard to measure the implementation of high-quality primary care and inform national and state policy.
School of Medicine
Katrina Abuabara, MD
Faculty Lead
Dr. Abuabara has a joint appointment with Department of Dermatology, the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, and the new UCSF-UCB Computational Precision Health graduate group. Her research examines how biological, sociocultural, and environmental factors influence chronic inflammatory disease. This includes research on atopic dermatitis disease course and comorbidities, the role of skin barrier function in aging, the impact of environmental microbes and climate on immune medicated disease, and how salt in the diet influences sodium storage in the skin and autoimmune and chronic inflammatory disease.
Steve Mack, PhD
Faculty Lead
Dr. Steve Mack is an Adjunct Professor in Pediatrics who does basic science at Benioff Children’s Hospital, Oakland. His work focuses on histocompatibility and immunogenetics — understanding how variation in immune genes impacts infectious disease, autoimmune disease and cancer, and the developing novel informatic tools and systems aimed at maximizing bone-marrow transplant outcomes. He is also an avid science-fiction fan, does not believe it is possible to consume too much chocolate, and serves as the President of his daughter’s High School PTA.
Christina Mangurian, MD
Faculty Lead
Dr. Mangurian is the Vice Dean for Faculty & Academic Affairs at UCSF School of Medicine. She is also a Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Epidemiology & Biostatistics.
Dr. Mangurian is a community psychiatrist whose research program focuses on improving health care of people with severe mental illness (e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder), particularly among economically disadvantaged populations. Dr. Mangurian has a successful track record in implementation in the public sector, most notably being her work as a Special Coordinator for the Medical Director of the New York State Office of Mental Health to implement health screening of 15,000 outpatients served within the New York State public mental health system. She has a diverse research funding portfolio, with a long track record of federal, foundation, and industry grants as well as state and county contracts and philanthropic support.
In addition to her research experience, Dr. Mangurian is the Executive Sponsor and co-Founder of the UCSF Public Psychiatry Fellowship. This was the first Public Psychiatry Fellowship in California, and the only one nationally to have a formal mental health services research component.
School of Nursing
Mica Estrada, PhD
Faculty Lead
Mica Estrada is the Associate Dean of Opportunity & Engagement and Professor at the University of California at San Francisco’s School of Nursing in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Health and Aging.
Her research program focuses on social influence, including the study of identity, values, kindness, well-being, mentorship, and integrative education. She has been Principal Investigator on several longitudinal studies, which implement and assess interventions aimed to increase student persistence and workforce retention in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics & Medicine (STEMM) careers (funded by NIH, NSF, and HHMI). In her research, facilitation, writing and consulting work, she remains committed to sharing skills and practices that advance opportunity, kindness and dignity for all people.
School of Pharmacy
Ryan Hernandez, PhD
Faculty Lead
Dr. Ryan Hernandez’ research focuses on computational genomics and complements the department’s emerging strengths in quantitative sciences and genomics: First, he seeks to characterize the patterns of genetic variation within and between populations using large-scale genome resequencing data. A second branch of research in his lab focuses on developing novel population genetic simulation techniques. Such simulations are used to lend insight into the plausible evolutionary forces that have shaped patterns of genetic variation, including the implications of complex interactions among selected alleles in non-stationary demographic environments. His third branch of research seeks to exploit population genetic models of demographic history and natural selection to interrogate the genetic basis of disease. By capitalizing on recent theoretical advances, Dr. Hernandez is constructing models of population dynamics that will utilize genomic re-sequencing data to discover novel regions of the genome that underlie genetic susceptibility to disease and drug response.
Jason Sello, PhD
Faculty Lead
Jason Sello is the Vice Dean of Academic Affairs in the UCSF School of Pharmacy and a full professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF. Prior to his appointment at UCSF, Dr. Sello was a professor in the department of chemistry at Brown University. Before his first faculty appointment, he investigated RNA processing in Streptomyces bacteria using genetic tools as a visiting scientist at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England and studied enzymes catalyzing antibiotic biosynthesis as a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School in the laboratories of Prof. Christopher T. Walsh. He earned a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University in 2002 for work in diversity-oriented chemical synthesis under the supervision of Prof. Stuart L. Schreiber and a B.S. in biology, magna cum laude, from Morehouse College in 1997. In his independent career, Prof. Sello has been synergistically using experimental methods from chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, and genetics to study biological phenomena and to develop new therapeutics for infections, cancer, and neurological disorders. He has also worked on technologies for the conversion of plant biomass into commodity chemicals.