JANUARY 2023
Philips Respironics recently agreed to halt sales of all of its breathing machines, such as respirators and CPAP machines, in the United States after reaching a settlement with the Food and Drug Administration over continuing problems with the devices. Medical device safety is an area that IHPS researchers have a long history of studying.

Sanket Dhruva, MD, MHS and colleagues have looked at more severe recalls of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Class 1 devices, in which the recalled device use can result in serious injury or death.

Dhruva, Rita Redberg, MD, MS and colleagues have also studied physician responses to FDA drug and device regulatory policies, which is important for both clinical decision making and patient discussions.
Building Equity in Healthcare and Careers
Jeff Belkora, PhD, MSc is organizing a symposium on February 7, 2024, on the topic of "Building Equity In Health Care and Careers." This will be a face to face, heart to heart, interactive lunch-and-learn program (ie, in person only) at Millberry Union on UCSF's Parnassus Campus. The program will revolve around sharing lessons learned from the UCSF Patient Support Corps experience to date, and positioning the program for growth. The Patient Support Corps is a service learning program that places students from under-represented backgrounds into multi-year internships at UCSF and VA - and soon, we hope, other health systems around California. At this event, we hope to connect people with a shared mission to increase access to internships as a means of increasing the diversity and capacity of the future health workforce in California. We would like to include clinicians whose teams could benefit from having interns; educators whose students need access to experiential learning opportunities; and funders who would like to invest alongside our coalition of healthcare system, philanthropy, and state funding sources. To learn more, please email jeff.belkora@ucsf.edu. 
IHPS Faculty Spotlight
After graduating from Princeton University, Dan Kelly, MD, MPH, went to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he pursued a Global Health Fellowship after his third year. In Sierra Leone, a local doctor and he were inspired to start Wellbody Alliance, a health and human rights non-profit organization that provides high-quality healthcare to the rural poor. After internal medicine residency and with a Fulbright scholarship, Dan conducted HIV research in Sierra Leone while building the community health work of Wellbody Alliance to care for the half million people living in rural Kono district. Dan was an infectious disease fellow at University of California, San Francisco, and an MPH student at University of California, Berkeley, when Ebola struck Sierra Leone. After a close friend died of Ebola in August 2014, Dan decided to take a leave of absence from fellowship training and the MPH to take a full-time leadership role in the Ebola response. Dan reached out to his long-time mentor Paul Farmer and established a coalition with Partners In Health in Sierra Leone. Dan spent eight months on the ground in Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic and led multiple frontiers of work, ranging from Ebola care to clinical trials of innovative Ebola diagnostics, and integrated Wellbody Alliance into Partners In Health. Dan returned to UCSF and UCB and finished his infectious disease fellowship and MPH. Dan continues to conduct Ebola research in Sierra Leone and Liberia. He employs sero-epidemiology, transmission mapping and modeling techniques, and clinical research cohorts to investigate asymptomatic Ebola virus infection and mild illness. Dan has published on Ebola in New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, and The Lancet.
Upcoming Events
IHPS Grand Rounds: Communication about COVID-19 Health Inequities: Implications for Journalism, Policy, and the Public


Sarah Gollust, PhD
Professor, Division of Health Policy and Management
University of Minnesota School of Public Health
Feb 6, 2024, 12 - 1 pm PT
In-person Mission Hall 1406 (Mission Bay campus)
Zoom here
2024 Chancellor's Health Policy Lecture
Reflections on Federal Service and Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative


Sara Bleich, PhD
Vice Provost for Special Projects at Harvard University, Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute
Professor of Public Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Harvard University
Mar 12, 2024, 12 - 1 pm PT
Research Highlights



Jack Turban, MD, MHS and colleagues published Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria Is Not a Recognized Mental Health Diagnosis in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Media Mentions
Philip R. Lee Fellowship Fund Endowed
Since its founding 50 years ago, IHPS has been dedicated to training the next generation of leaders in interdisciplinary research to solve our most important health policy issues. In celebration of our 50th anniversary and to honor our founders, Phil Lee and Lew Butler, we established an endowment fund for the Philip R. Lee Fellowship. We are pleased to announce the fund has been endowed! We hope to continue to keep this fund and our fellowship program robust. Please consider donating at our dedicated webpage!