March 2024 Newsletter

Salma Shariff-Marco, PhD, MPH, and Iona Cheng, PhD, MPH, will study the effects of structural racism on mortality in a variety of racial and ethnic minoritized groups.

Catie Oldenburg, ScD, MPH, will study the use of azithromycin as an adjunct to nutritional care in children with severe acute malnutrition.

Alison Cohen, PhD, MPH, is studying the economic and educational factors on young adults’ cardiometabolic health at two California public universities.

PhD student Leah Koenig, MSPH, is co-author of a large national study that finds that video visits, texting, and mailing pills are all safe and effective in providing medical abortion. This study was featured in UCSF News, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Alexis Beatty, MD, MAS, received an award to study cardiac rehab participants and the efficacy of navigation and text messaging interventions for increasing participation in a food is medicine program.

Aaron Scheffler, PhD, MS, received his first R01 award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to study Bayesian object-oriented modeling of multi-modal imaging data.

Master in Advanced Studies (MAS) student Daisy León-Martínez, MD, is a 2024 School of Medicine Dean’s Population Health and Health Equity Scholar. She will study the risk factors for prenatal cardio-metabolic disease in Medicaid-eligible pregnant people and whether group prenatal care may mitigate the risks.

Third-year medical student William “Aidan” Pace will work with June Chan, ScD, and team on examining inflammation markers pre- and post-exercise using blood samples from their Active Surveillance Exercise Trial. 

Suzanna Martinez, PhD, MS, and team won the White House Challenge to End Hunger and Build Healthy Communities for their work to reduce food insecurity among University of California students.

Kala Mehta, DSc, MPH, received an award in recognition of her redesign of “Justice and Advocacy in Medicine,” a course on social determinants of health through an advocacy lens that is taken by UCSF medical students.

Photo collage from the study's website of healthy food and people being active.

The Tools To Be Fit study, led by Erin Van Blarigan, ScD, has expanded to include survivors of bladder, breast, colon, endometrial, kidney (renal cell carcinoma), ovarian, prostate and rectal cancers. This study was also selected for the CDI2/UC BRAID Health Data Warehouse Pilot Project to test clinical study recruitment across the UC campuses.

Katie Pollard, PhD, received a grant from the Biswas Family Foundation to establish a new Center for Transformative Computational Cancer Biology.

Jean Feng, MS, PhD, and Mi-Ok Kim, PhD, MS, MA, each received supplemental funding from PCORI for “Methods Supplement to Support Innovative Research on AI and Large Language Models in Patient-Centered Clinical Effectiveness Research.”

Two separate initiatives—the UC-CDPH Modeling and Advanced Analytics Consortium and the California Collaborative for Pandemic Recovery and Readiness Research—were created to inform COVID-19 recovery efforts. They have expanded into additional public health research areas and merged into the California Collaborative for Public Health Research (CPR3).

June Chan, ScD

Improving fitness may be linked to a 35% lower risk of prostate cancer, study finds



NBC News

Alison Cohen

Opinion: California's 24-hour isolation recommendation will lead to more long COVID (subscription required)



Sacramento Bee

Statistical and Machine Learning Strategies in High-Dimensional Data Analytics

March 20, 2024 | 3 to 4 p.m. PST, MH-2700 & Zoom

Guest speaker: Syed Ejaz Ahmed, MD, Professor of Math & Statistics, Brock University

• Ladder Rank Faculty Position – Associate or Full Professor
• UCSF DREAM Lab Student Interns
• K Scholars Program Faculty, General
• K Scholars Program Faculty, Qualitative Research

“Torch-eCpG: a fast and scalable eQTM mapper for thousands of molecular phenotypes with graphical processing units.”

BMC Bioinformatics. Feb. 14, 2024. Kober KM, Berger L, Roy R, Olshen A.

“Temporary childbirth migration and maternal health care in India.”

PLoS One. Feb. 8, 2024. Diamond-Smith N, Gopalakrishnan L, Patil S, Fernald L, Menon P, Walker D, El Ayadi AM.

“Factors associated with anxiety during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States: An analysis of the COVID-19 Citizen Science study.”

PLoS One. Feb. 6, 2024. Cozen AE, Carton T, Hamad R, Kornak J, Faulkner Modrow M, Peyser ND, Park S, Orozco JH, Brandner M, O'Brien EC, Djibo DA, McMahill-Walraven CN, Isasi CR, Beatty AL, Olgin JE, Marcus GM, Pletcher MJ.

“Improving the Safety of Computed Tomography Through Automated Quality Measurement: A Radiologist Reader Study of Radiation Dose, Image Noise, and Image Quality.”

Investigative Radiology. Jan. 25, 2024. Smith-Bindman R, Wang Y, Stewart C, Luong J, Chu PW, Kohli M, Westphalen AC, Siegel E, Ray M, Szczykutowicz TP, Bindman AB, Romano PS.

“Forest-goers as a heterogeneous population at high-risk for malaria: a case-control study in Aceh Province, Indonesia.”

Malaria Journal. Jan 30, 2024. Gallalee S, Zarlinda I, Silaen MG, Cotter C, Cueto C, Elyazar IRF, Jacobson JO, Gosling R, Hsiang MS, Bennett A, Coutrier FN, Smith JL.

Our faculty published 105 articles from January through February 2024.

APPLY BY MARCH 15

Junior faculty members who are conducting cardiovascular or pulmonary disease research and interested in implementation science are invited to apply for RISE - Research in Implementation Science for Equity - Summer Institute.

Post

Our Implementation Science Training Program @ImSatUCSF

welcomes Patience Afulani, PhD, MD, MPH, as course director.

@PAfulani will develop a new course in mixed methods for Spring 2025.

Post