Mid-Career People

Katrina Abuabara, MD
Mid-Career Scholar

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.

Patience Afulani, PhD, MD, MPH
Mid-Career Scholar

Dr. Patience Afulani is an Associate Professor in the Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Reproductive Sciences and Epidemiology & Biostatistics departments at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her primary research centers on the social and health system factors underlying inequities in reproductive, maternal, neonatal, and child health, with a special interest in person-centered care. Dr. Afulani is the Principal Investigator of the Person-Centered Equity Lab at UCSF, where she leads several research projects, including the “Caring for Providers to Improve Patient Experience” (CPIPE) cluster-randomized control trial in Ghana and Kenya, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Matilda Chan, MD, PhD
Mid-Career Scholar

Matilda F. Chan, MD, PhD is a Professor in the UCSF Department of Ophthalmology and the Francis I. Proctor Foundation.

Her basic/translational research program focuses on cellular and molecular mechanisms related to corneal repair and corneal endothelial dystrophies. She is also interested in social challenges related to ophthalmic care, particularly in the housing insecure patient population.

She has an interest in peer review and is on the editorial board of three vision journals. She is the managing director for the Council of Vision Editors Fellowship (CVEF) program which was formed under the guidance of the Director of the National Eye Institute/National Institutes of Health and the Editors-In-Chief of 7 general ophthalmology, optometry, and vision science journals to provide structured mentored training in academic peer review and editorial practice to junior Ophthalmology and Optometry faculty.

Amy Conroy, PhD, MPH
Mid-Career Scholar

Dr. Conroy is an Associate Professor in the Division of Prevention Sciences and a behavioral scientist with multidisciplinary training in public health, psychology, and sociology. Her research focuses on understanding and improving couple and family health in the context of HIV/AIDS, alcohol use, cardiometabolic disorders, nutrition, and mental health. Grounded in relationship science, her work uses mixed methods and dyadic analysis to study and influence health behaviors within couples. Dr. Conroy’s primary research program develops and evaluates couple-based interventions to reduce heavy alcohol use in Southern Africa and the United States. She also leads mixed-methods studies on multimorbidity and disease management among couples living with HIV and cardiometabolic conditions. In addition, her work includes the development and testing of couple-based interventions for perinatal depression using problem-solving therapy. Her research is supported by multiple NIH institutes, including the NIMH, NIAAA, and NHLBI, and has resulted in over 70 publications in leading scientific journals.

Jessica de Leon, MD
Mid-Career Scholar

Jessica de Leon is an Associate Professor at the UCSF Department of Neurology’s Fein Memory and Aging Center (MAC).

Her research aims to advance the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in communities of different backgrounds. Her current projects focus on 1) the role of bilingualism in cognitive resilience, 2) the development of cognitive batteries for speakers of diverse languages, and 3) the identification of dementia risk factors in the Filipino American community. She serves as the lead and founder of the Filipino outreach program at the MAC.

Carly Demopoulos, PhD
Mid-Career Scholar

Dr. Carly Demopoulos is a clinical neuropsychologist and developmental neuroscientist. Her expertise is in utilizing multimodal neuroimaging, behavioral, and neuropsychological data to investigate the impact of sensorimotor abilities on children with neurodevelopmental disorders, with a particular focus on autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Her current research focuses on understanding the sensory, motor, and neural mechanisms that underlie the heterogenous presentation of speech and voice characteristics as well as broader verbal and non-verbal communication in individuals with ASD and associated genetic disorders. She is actively involved in training the next generation of neuropsychologists to be competent in the assessment of children with severe communication impairment. She serves as the Director of the UCSF Neurodevelopmental Assessment Practicum and has received mentorship awards from UCSF School of Medicine and NIH.

Julian Hong, MD, MS
Mid-Career Scholar

Dr. Hong is the Head of AI at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, Medical Director of Radiation Oncology Informatics, and Associate Professor and in the Department of Radiation Oncology, Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation (DoC-IT), and Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, and in the UCSF-UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health. Clinically, he specializes in the treatment of genitourinary malignancies.

Dr. Hong is a physician-scientist whose NIH-funded computational research lab focuses on the development and implementation of computational tools in the clinic to provide personalized, precision cancer care for patients. His group combines clinical domain knowledge with data science expertise to generate insights from real world data, develop actionable artificial intelligence-based tools, and implement and evaluate the benefit of these advances in patient care. He led one of the first randomized controlled studies of healthcare machine learning, developing an electronic health record-based algorithm that accurately directed care to reduce emergency visits and hospitalizations during radiotherapy.

Jerry Ouner, PhD, MS, RN
Mid-Career Scholar

Dr. Jerry Ouner is an Associate Professor in the Family Health care Nursing Department at UCSF. He previously served as the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing Liaison to the United Nations and is the Founder and Secretary General of the Africa Interdisciplinary Health Conference, an annual international meeting that promotes evidence-based practices in the health sector across Africa.

His research focuses on maternal and child health, with an emphasis on understanding how environmental, social, and economic factors influence the health of women and children. He is particularly interested in HIV/AIDS in low-resource settings and among minority populations in the United States, and he applies socioecological and behavioral frameworks to address health disparities in vulnerable populations.

Dr. Ouner earned his PhD in Nursing from Drexel University and completed postdoctoral training in Global Health and Health Policy at Princeton University. He also holds a master’s degree in Nursing and Health-care Leadership from the University of California, Davis, and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana

He was inducted into the American Academy of Nursing in 2023 and is a Carnegie African Diasporan Scholar.

Tiffany Scharschmidt, MD
Mid-Career Scholar

Dr. Scharschmidt is a dermatologist-scientist whose work focuses on how the skin microbiome—our community of beneficial microbes—shapes the developing immune system, particularly early in life. She cares for adult dermatology patients at UCSF’s Mt. Zion campus and leads a research laboratory at the Parnassus campus. Her team studies how interactions between microbes and the immune system influence healthy skin development and conditions such as eczema, with the goal of developing new, more targeted therapies.

Dr. Scharschmidt’s research combines advanced animal models with studies of human immune cells and microbiome samples to better understand these complex interactions. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including awards from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation. She serves as Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Dermatology and holds leadership roles in UCSF’s ImmunoX Program and the Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine.

Jenise Wong, MD, PhD
Mid-Career Scholar

Jenise Wong, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at UCSF. She is a co-Program Director for the Pediatric Endocrinology Fellowship Program and the Director of Quality and Safety for Pediatric Diabetes and Endocrinology at Benioff Children's Hospital in San Francisco. As a clinical research, her goal is to understand and optimize the use of technology to improve clinical, behavioral, and patient-centered outcomes in youth with diabetes. Her current research, with collaborators throughout California, uses peer support and shared medical appointments to enhance use of diabetes devices and improve diabetes management in historically marginalized and underserved youth with diabetes. In addition, her work in quality improvement has led to initiatives addressing disparities in care and in promoting health equity in diabetes management, technology utilization, and clinical outcomes.

Christina Mangurian, MD
Mid-Career Program Director

Dr. Mangurian is a Professor of Psychiatry and Vice Chair for Diversity and Health Equity in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Mangurian founded and directs the UCSF Program of Research on Mental health Integration among Underserved and Minority populations (PReMIUM) and her NIH-funded research program focuses on improving preventative health care of people with severe mental illness (e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder), particularly among underserved minority populations. Dr. Mangurian received the 2018 UCSF Academic Senate Distinction in Mentoring award and the 2017 UCSF Chancellor’s Award for the Advancement of Women.

Claire Brindis, DrPH
Mid-Career Program Faculty

Claire Brindis, DrPH, is a Distinguished Emerita Professor of Pediatrics and Health Policy (on Recall), Department of Pediatrics and Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Health Sciences and Emerita Director of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (PRL-IHPS) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Brindis is also the Co-Director of the Adolescent and Young Adult Health National Resource Center and a Founding Director of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and PRL-IHPS, UCSF. She serves as the lead evaluator for the Clinical and Translation Sciences Institute, as Core Faculty of the ARCHES Program, leading its evaluation efforts, as well as serving as Senior Advisor to the UC Center on Climate, Health and Equity. An Elected Member of the National Academy of Medicine, she served as a Council member (2018-2021) and its Vice-Chair (2021-2024). Between 2022-2024, she served as Chair of the Standing Committee on Reproductive Health, Equity. and Society for the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) in Washington, DC. In 2025, she served as the Chair of the Advisory Board, Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Education (DBASSE) for the National Research Council/NASEM.

Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH
Mid-Career Program Faculty

Urmimala Sarkar MD, MPH is Professor of Medicine at UCSF in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Associate Chair for Faculty Experience for the Department of Medicine, Associate Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations. Dr. Sarkar’s research expertise is innovating for health equity, using novel approaches to enhance the quality and safety of outpatient care in safety-net health care settings. She holds a K24 mentoring grant from the National Cancer Institute, serves as the principal investigator for the primary care research training T32 grant, and joint principal investigator for UCSF‘s LEAP learning health systems K12 early-career faculty training grant. She received the 2017 School of Medicine’s Pathways to Discovery Mentoring Award, the 2019 ZSFG Department of Medicine’s Mentoring Award, and the 2021 Society for General Internal Medicine National Mid-Career Mentoring Award.

Catherine Waters, RN, PhD, FAAN
Mid-Career Program Faculty

Dr. Catherine Waters is a professor in the Department of Community Health Systems, a member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and former appointed member of the San Francisco Health Commission. Her program of research focuses on health promoting lifestyle interventions in collaboration with public and private community partnerships.