UCSF TB Faculty

(listed alphabetically by last name)

Jon Budzik, MD: My research is focused on the innate immune mechanisms that control M. tuberculosis infection.  Autophagy is one mechanism that macrophages use to control microbial infection by targeting bacteria for degradation in the lysosome. Activation of autophagy is mediated by kinases that phosphorylate autophagy adaptors, which are proteins that direct cargo to the autophagy machinery.  By using global phosphoproteomics, we are studying the changes in autophagy adaptor phosphorylation levels during TB infection.  My ultimate hope is that a better understanding of the mechanism of autophagy targeting of TB will facilitate the development of host direct therapies for TB.

Adithya Cattamanchi, MD, MAS: My research group focuses on the 1) Development and evaluation of TB diagnostics and 2) Implementation and dissemination of evidence-based interventions to improve TB care in high burden countries. I helped establish a TB/HIV cohort at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. The cohort has resulted in important publications related to the etiology and outcomes of pneumonia and the performance of TB diagnostics in this population. Also in Uganda, I helped establish the Uganda Tuberculosis Implementation Research Consortium (U-TIRC). Within U-TIRC, I am currently PI of an NIH R01-funded trial of a multi-faceted strategy to increase uptake of molecular testing at community health centers in Uganda; PI of an NIH R01-funded study to evaluate three delivery strategies for short-course TB preventive therapy in the context of HIV/AIDS care; co-investigator on an NIH R01-funded study to identify the optimal interventions to reduce TB incidence in high density, urban settings (PI Dowdy, Johns Hopkins University). In addition, I am leading several teams involved in developing and evaluating novel point-of-care TB diagnostics, including an NIH R01-funded study utilizing targeted and whole genome sequencing to improve molecular diagnosis of drug-resistant TB in Manila, Philippines and a NIH R01-funded study of novel, non-invasive tests for diagnosing pediatric TB.

Lisa Chen, MD: The focus of my TB work has been as a clinician, education/training specialist, and global consultant for the programmatic management of drug-resistant TB. I am the principal investigator and medical director of the CDC-funded TB Center of Excellence, the Curry International Tuberculosis Center (CITC). The mission of CITC is to create, enhance and disseminate state-of-the-art resources and models of excellence and perform research to control and eliminate TB in the United States and internationally.  Committed to the belief that everyone deserves the highest quality of care in a manner consistent with his or her culture, values and language, CITC develops and delivers highly versatile, culturally appropriate trainings and educational products, and provides medical consultation and technical assistance. I am a co-editor of the CITC Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: A Survival Guide for Clinicians, and have contributed to the development of the national drug-resistant TB guidelines for the U.S., as well as national guidelines, tools, policy, and programmatic quality improvement initiatives for the high-burden countries of Tanzania, Uganda and Indonesia. I am currently the Senior Director for Global Health, MECOR (Methods in Epidemiological, Clinical and Operations Research) program for the American Thoracic Society. MECOR is a multi-level research methods training course working to build research capacity in low- to middle-income countries through local partnerships in Latin America, Africa, China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Turkey. I also support TB advocacy work as a member of the Coordinating Board for STOP-TB USA since 2015.

Gabriel Chamie, MD: My TB-related research focuses on how HIV influences TB transmission dynamics in Africa. Characterizing recent TB transmission networks, identifying sites of ongoing TB transmission, and understanding how HIV influences TB transmission are all critical steps in developing novel, strategic intensified TB case-finding approaches in Africa. My research aims to address whether recent TB transmission in this high HIV prevalence setting takes place in community gathering and health care sites, as opposed to households, and HIV-infected persons are at significantly increased risk of recent TB transmission compared to HIV-uninfected persons, through analysis of the geographic distribution and social networks of genotype-clustered incident TB cases. We combine molecular epidemiologic, geospatial and social network data to identify TB transmission "hot spots", characterized by high levels of TB transmission. These "hot spots" may occur in commercial, social (e.g. markets, bars, churches), or health care settings. We will investigate how HIV influences where TB is transmitted at a community level and pilot test a place-based intensified TB case-finding strategy at two identified locations of high TB transmission risk.

Felicia Chow, MD: My research focus is at the intersection of HIV and the brain, with a specific interest in HIV-associated cerebrovascular disease and TB meningitis. The goal of my work is to develop targetedinterventions to preserve neurological health in persons living with HIV in diverse settings. I am currently leading a phase 2 clinical trial investigating the pharmacokinetics of linezolid administered with high dose rifampin in the treatment of TB meningitis in persons living with HIV in Uganda. I am also involved in the development of an AIDS Clinical Trials Group multisite trial of high dose rifampin, high dose isoniazid, and linezolid to improve mortality and neurologic outcomes in TB meningitis, on which I serve in the role of co-chair. As a board-certified neurologist and neuro-infectious diseases subspecialist with formal fellowship training in infectious diseases, I maintain an active clinical practice in neurology and neuro-infectious diseases, attending on the neurology inpatient ward and consult service at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. I also direct the UCSF Neuro-Infectious Diseases Clinic, a clinic embedded within the Infectious Diseases Clinic on the UCSF Parnassus campus, where we care for patients with a wide variety of neurological infections. In this capacity, I provide consultation for challenging management issues that arise in cases of central nervous system TB. 

Joel Ernst, MD: My lab focuses on immunity to tuberculosis, to inform the rational design and development of new TB vaccines.  Our work includes basic studies of mechanisms of immunity and immune evasion in TB, using mouse models. In addition, we study human immunity to TB, and discovered that in contrast to pathogens that employ antigenic variation to evade immunity and cause persistent infection, the human T cell antigens and epitopes of M. tuberculosis are highly conserved, even in strains that diverged from a common ancestor thousands of years ago.  More recently, we have identified rare antigens of M. tuberculosis that show evidence of diversifying selection, and have initiated studies to test the hypothesis that T cell responses to those antigens are associated with superior protective immunity compared with T cell responses to conserved antigens.  Our work on human immunity to TB spans multiple continents, and involves numerous collaborators at UCSF, and at other U.S. and international sites and institutions.

Elizabeth Fair, PhD, MPH: My research is focused on tuberculosis (TB), TB/HIV, global health, and implementation research. Active projects include evaluating the feasibility, yield, and cost-effectiveness of TB contact investigation in Tanzania; exploring TB-associated stigma in Bangladesh; evaluating innovative technologies for TB education and control in Madagascar; and implementing active TB case finding strategies in Mozambique. I serve as a regular consultant for the American Thoracic Society (ATS), World Health Organization (WHO), and the Dutch Tuberculosis Group (KNCV).  I also serve on WHO Steering Committees to develop new policies related to TB case finding and TB international standards of care (ISTC). In addition to my research activities, I serve as Director of the PhD in Global Health with UCSF Institute for Global Health Sciences.

Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH: My current research program is focused on identifying low-cost solutions to measuring antiretroviral levels in resource-poor settings, such as determining drug levels in hair samples, including levels of anti-tuberculosis drugs. I also participate in research efforts on HIV prevention in women.  I have an interest at UCSF in HIV education and mentorship. I co-directed the "Communicable Diseases of Global Health Importance" course in the Global Health Sciences Masters program from 2008-2015, and served as the overall Education Director of the HIV, ID and Global Medicine Division. I also served as the principal investigator of an R24 mentoring grant from the NIH focused on nurturing early career investigators of diversity in HIV research, am the co-Director for the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) Mentoring Program, and am the Chair of the Advisory Board for the UCSF Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health (BIRCWH).

Eric Goosby, MD: Dr Eric Goosby is appointed as the UN Special Envoy on TB.  As Special Envoy, Dr Goosby works to raise the profile of the fight against TB and promote the adoption, financing and implementation of the World Health Organization’s global End TB strategy and its international targets for TB prevention, care and control.     Dr Goosby has dedicated his professional life to tackling global health diseases, particularly HIV/AIDS and TB.  Between 2009 and 2013, he served in the US State department as the Ambassador-at-Large and the US Global AIDS Coordinator, directing the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.  He is a Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Global Health Delivery and Diplomacy, Institute for Global Health Sciences. 

Judith Hahn, PhD: My research interests lie in the epidemiology at the intersection of substance use and infectious diseases. My research team is currently conducting a NIH-funded R01 study to examine changes in alcohol consumption in the course of HIV care in Uganda. We are using novel biomarkers of alcohol consumption to gain objective measurements of alcohol consumption, as well as in-depth interviews to examine reasons for changes in alcohol consumption. We have built on the Uganda Alcohol Research Collaboration on HIV (ARCH) cohort to (1) evaluate the safety and tolerability of TB preventive therapy for HIV-infected alcohol users, (2) compare HIV-infected alcohol-users' adherence to a 6-month versus a 3-month regimen, and (3) conduct decision analytic modeling to determine whether the benefits of TB preventive therapy outweigh the risks in this population. Our results will provide important new data for revisiting the question of how to best deliver TB preventive therapy to alcohol using, HIV-infected persons at high risk for TB disease.

Diane Havlir, MD: The goal of my research is to develop therapeutic strategies that reduce the HIV burden on an individual and population level. Antiretroviral therapy has been one of the greatest successes in medicine, yet we are unable determine how to use it to eradicate HIV or deploy it to turn the HIV epidemic around globally. Further, antiretroviral therapy can reduce the global TB and malaria burden, but the optimal strategies have not been determined. Current areas of focus of our group include translational and intervention studies targeting the gut as a major residual reservoir for HIV in antiretroviral treated patients. Internationally, through the Makerere University - UCSF (MU-UCSF) research collaboration and the ACTG we are studying 1) optimal treatment strategies for HIV and TB, including new TB agents 2) strategies to reduce HIV and malaria burden in children and pregnant women. We are also developing approaches to treat HIV earlier in the course of disease in a sustainable manner that benefits the overall health, education and economics of communities in East Africa.

Philip Hopewell. MD: I began my career as a consultant in TB control to the Nigerian government in the war-affected areas of eastern Nigeria. Later, my interest in TB control in developing countries was fostered by my work in the Pan-American Health Organization in 1980-1981 and with the Stop TB Partnership, based at the World Health Organization in Geneva in 2003. I have been on the faculty at UCSF, based at San Francisco General, since 1973, where I served as Chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine from 1989 to 1998 and Associate Dean 1998 to 2004. Today, I continue to practice clinical pulmonary and critical care medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, serving as an attending physician on the pulmonary consultation service and in the medical intensive care unit. I also provide consultation and technical assistance to the World Health Organization and numerous TB programs in high-burden countries. I am the founding director of the Curry International Tuberculosis Center, a CDC-funded model center that provides education, technical assistance and training in TB to domestic and international audiences. I am co-developer of the International Standards for Tuberculosis Care.  

Laurence Huang, MD: My research focus is on pulmonary diseases affecting persons with HIV. Currently, I am PI/Co-PI on 3 main studies, 1) IHOP: The International HIV-associated Opportunistic Pneumonias (IHOP) Study is a multi-national cohort study whose goal is to improve our understanding of the epidemiology, etiology, and outcome of pneumonias in persons with HIV infection. 2) Lung MicroChip: The Lung Microbiome in Cohorts of HIV-Infected Persons (Lung MicroChip) Study is a multi-cohort study whose goal is to examine the composition and function of the lung microbiome in persons with HIV. Lung MicroChip was part of the Lung HIV Microbiome Project, a collaborative multi-U01 consortium established by the NHLBI to study the lung microbiome in HIV infection. 3) I AM OLD: The Inflammation, Aging, Microbes and Obstructive Lung Disease (I AM OLD) Study is a multi-cohort study whose goal is to examine potential mechanisms for development of obstructive lung disease and progression of airflow obstruction in a multi-national cohort of HIV-infected subjects with pneumonia, including TB.

Peter Hunt, MD:  My primary research focus is on the inflammatory consequences of HIV infection. Our clinic-based translational research program seeks to understand the determinants of persistent immune activation both in the presence and the absence of antiretroviral therapy, and to assess the impact of immune activation on clinical outcomes. I collaborate extensively with a multi-disciplinary team of investigators to assess the impact of persistent immune activation despite viral suppression on mortality and chronic diseases associated with aging (i.e., cardiovascular disease) and conduct pilot clinical trials of novel immune-based interventions designed to decrease immune activation. I also leads a translational research program in Mbarara, Uganda, focused on the determinants of immune recovery during suppressive antiretroviral therapy in that setting. I am currently studying the impact of TB co-infection on the reservoir of persistent HIV in vivo.

Babak Javid, MD, PhD: Dr. Javid is a physician scientist and Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF.  Dr. Javid maintains research interests in tuberculosis, infectious diseases and protein translational fidelity. He completed his Bachelors at the University of Cambridge in 1995, a M.B. B.Chir. at Cambridge Clinical School in 1997 and a Ph.D. at Cambridge Institute for Medical Research in 2004 focusing on antigen processing and presentation with Paul Lehner. Dr. Javid completed his post-doctoral training on mycobacterial genetics with Eric Rubin at Harvard. Dr. Javid is an appointed Investigator of the Wellcome Trust (since 2017),  Adjunct Associate Professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, visiting faculty at the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, and Honorary Consultant Physician at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where he still attends as an infectious diseases physician. Dr. Javid joins UCSF from Tsinghua University School of Medicine. 

Midori Kato-Maeda, MD, MSc: I lead the Mycobacterium tuberculosis research laboratory at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. The first goal of my laboratory is to fundamentally advance molecular diagnostics for pre-XDR and XDR TB by identifying new biomarkers of drug resistance in a rapid and unbiased manner, and by identifying causes that may decrease the efficiency of molecular methods such as the presence of hetero-resistance. The second goal is to determine the contribution of bacterial factors in the transmission and pathogenesis of tuberculosis.

Nevan Krogan, PhD: My lab at UCSF focuses on developing and applying quantitative, systematic proteomic and genetic approaches to study complex biological and biomedical problems. At present time, my group is focused on studying cancer, infectious disease, including tuberculosis, and psychiatric disorders.

Chaz Langelier, MD, PhD: My lab employs metagenomic sequencing technologies to advance understanding of infectious and pulmonary disease pathophysiology, develop new diagnostics based on host and microbe transcriptional profiling, and track the transmission of pathogens during outbreaks.  I am a co-investigator on an NIAID R01-funded study that is employing a novel combination of metagenomic next-generation sequencing coupled with a CRISPR/Cas9-based targeted enrichment method to detect TB and antimicrobial resistance genes in cerebrospinal fluid from patients with suspected TB meningitis while also performing longitudinal host transcriptional profiling to better understand TB meningitis pathogenesis. This work is being done in collaboration with Drs. Michael Wilson at UCSF, Dr. David Boulware at University of Minnesota, Dr. Emily Crawford at the CZ-Biohub and Drs. David Meya and Conrad Muzoora at the Infectious Diseases Institute at Makerere University in Uganda. I also collaborate with Laurence Huang at UCSF on a study leveraging Cas9 targeted sequencing methodology to understand etiology of pneumonia in HIV-positive Ugandan adults and assess novel genomic pulmonary TB diagnostics. In addition to my research activities, I am an attending physician in the UCSF Division of Infectious Diseases and serve as Associate Medical Director of UCSF Hospital Epidemiology and Infection Prevention.

Janice Louie, MD, MPH: I am the Medical Director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) Tuberculosis Clinic at Ward 94 located at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. In addition to overseeing the clinical team in San Francisco, I also have experience working overseas in tuberculosis surveillance. I am board-certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases and continue to consult on infectious diseases at the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center. I have a 15+ year history of working in infectious diseases and public health at an international, national, state and local level. San Francisco has one of the highest incidence rates of tuberculosis in California at ~13/100,000 (>4 times higher than the national rate). I love working at the SFDPH Tuberculosis Clinic, where our mission is to evaluate and manage or co-manage all cases of active tuberculosis in San Francisco. We average over 100 cases annually, as well as manage and provide expert consultation on patients with multi-drug resistance and complicated or difficult-to-treat latent tuberculosis infection. We participate in multiple collaborative training and research endeavors with our partners at UCSF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the California Department of Public Health TB Control Branch, and the Curry International Tuberculosis Center.

Annie Luetkemeyer, MD:  I specialize in HIV/AIDS and have clinical responsibilities including outpatient services at the San Francisco General Hospital HIV clinic as well as inpatient services on the HIV/AIDS, general medicine, and infectious diseases consult services. I direct the HIV Clinical Trials Group at SFGH, which conducts investigator-initiated and industry HIV trials. I am site investigator for the Adult AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), and my research interests include HIV and TB coinfection, development of novel TB diagnostics, and HIV and viral hepatitis coinfection.

Carina Marquez, MD: My research focuses on elucidating the drivers of the large latent TB reservoir in East Africa and developing interventions to prevent TB infection and to improve the TB care continuum for HIV-infected and uninfected children and adults living in sub-Saharan Africa. Clinically, I am the Assistant Director of the Infectious Diseases Clinic at ZSFG, and direct the SALUD clinic, a clinic within the Positive Health Practice "Ward 86" at ZSFG, that is dedicated to providing multidisciplinary care to monolingual Spanish-speaking HIV-infected patients.

Joseph (“Mike”) McCune, MD, PhD: Mike is a Senior Advisor for the Global Health Discovery and Translational Science Team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and a Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. His lab has focused on the analysis of HIV pathogenesis, prevention, treatment, and cure. After studies at Harvard College, Cornell University Medical College, and Rockefeller University, Dr. McCune started to treat patients with HIV disease as a resident in internal medicine at UCSF in 1982. After postdoctoral studies at Stanford, he co-founded the companies SyStemix (in 1988) and Progenesys (and 1991), serving as Scientific Director and leading research efforts on the preclinical development of antiviral compounds and hematopoietic stem cell-based gene therapy to treat HIV disease. In 1995, Dr. McCune returned to academia as an investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology and then (starting in 2006) as the Chief of the Division of Experimental Medicine (which he founded) at UCSF. Concomitantly, he was the founding PI (and Senior Associate Dean) of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute at UCSF (from 2005-08). In recent years, he has helped to form multidisciplinary, collaborative research teams to find a cure for HIV disease. Throughout this time, he has actively mentored graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in academia or biotech/pharma. He has served as a board member for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Project Inform, The Rockefeller University, and for the biotechnology companies, SyStemix, Progenesys, and Prosetta.

John Metcalfe, MD, PhD, MPH: I have a particular interest in clinical management of multidrug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in high HIV burden settings in Southern Africa. My research includes the development of non-invasive pharmacokinetic measures to enhance MDR-TB drug development and clinical trials. I am a member of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group TB Transformative Science Group, and have specialized training in epidemiology, statistical prediction, and diagnostic test evaluation. I am a specialty editor for respiratory diseases at PLoS Medicine.

Paul Ortiz De Montellano, PhD:  Cholesterol is crucial for infection of macrophages and survival of the mycobacteria in that environment. Our research group has identified three M. tuberculosis cytochrome P450 enzymes able to initiate cholesterol catabolism. Our studies have identified an intermediate, cholest-4-en-3-one that accumulates when these P450 enzymes are knocked out. This intermediate inhibits growth of MTB on several carbon sources. We are seeking to identify the site and mechanism of action of cholest-4-en-3-one, as it is a potential drug target. Furthermore, we plan to undertake the development of mechanism-based inhibitors of the two primary enzymes involved in degradation of the cholesterol side-chain, as their inactivation will not only block cholesterol utilization but will lead to accumulation of cholest-4-en-3-one. Our research program also aims to characterize and define the biological roles of two P450 enzymes related to virulence that are proposed to oxidize methyl-branched hydrocarbon chains. Through these P450 studies, we will advance our work to define the structures, substrates, and roles of the other M. tuberculosis P450 enzymes.

Dr. Nahid, MD, MPH is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. His research includes the conduct of clinical trials and translational research in TB with the goal of improving the care of patients with TB and HIV/TB worldwide. Dr. Nahid attended medical school at the University of California, Irvine and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Scripps Clinic in 2001. Dr. Nahid attained his Masters in Public Health at San Diego State University and completed his Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco in 2004. Dr. Nahid’s research focuses on patient-focused clinical trials, epidemiological and translational TB research in international settings. He is Principal Investigator of the Tuberculosis Trials Consortium (TBTC) Clinical Trials Units (CTU) in Hanoi, Vietnam and San Francisco, CA, which are funded by the CDC. He co-Chairs the FDA-registered Phase 3 clinical trial of a rifapentine-based short-course treatment regimen for active tuberculosis (TBTC Study 31 / ACTG A5349), launched in March 2016 across 30 international sites, recently having completed enrollment with top-line results to be shared in Q4 2020. Dr. Nahid has served as co-Chair of the Critical Path to TB Drug Regimens (CPTR) Biomarkers and Clinical Endpoints Working Group, which has focused on the regulatory aspects of both clinical endpoint determinations for trials as well as TB biomarker discovery. Dr. Nahid Chairs the CDC TB Trials Consortium’s Core Science Group, which guides the scientific agenda of the CDC-TBTC. He leads two NIAID-funded TB biomarker-focused RO1’s including the Express 31 RO1, which is evaluating sputum-based M.tb RNA and transcriptional profiling assays as treatment effect biomarker and pharmacodynamic marker for clinical trial applications. Dr. Nahid Chairs the WHO Task Force on New Drugs and Regimens for TB, and has served as a member of the WHO Task Force on Global TB Research Strategy. Dr. Nahid has served on several WHO Guideline Development Committees and as consultant on Technical Reports on TB therapeutics and vaccines.

Patrick Phillips, PhD: The objective of my research is to design, implement, and optimize clinical trials for new treatments for drug-sensitive and drug-resistant tuberculosis in order to deliver safer and more efficacious regimens for patients. A key focus of my research has been to improve the design of TB clinical trials so that regimen development is faster and more efficient. This was motivated by my PhD thesis evaluating surrogate endpoints for TB trials, and has grown in a number of areas through the various collaborations and consortia that I contribute to. As Senior Statistician at the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL, I have gained extensive experience as senior biostatistician of record for phase II and phase III clinical trials in both drug sensitive and drug resistant TB. I led the analyses of the REMoxTB and RIFAQUIN trials, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2014, and am senior statistician for the STREAM trials in MDR-TB that are ongoing. I have extended and implemented adaptive designs in clinical trials, most notable the Multi-Arm Multi-Stage (MAMS) design in the PanACEA MAMS-TB trial and the TRUNCATE-TB trial. Whereas my focus is primarily on TB trials, I have also worked in trials in Alzheimer’s disease and regularly contribute to the design and thinking of colleagues’ research in HIV and other infectious diseases of global significance. 

Michael Reid, MD: I am an Assistant Professor working on TB-related policy measures in the Institute for Global Health Diplomacy and Delivery, under the mentorship of Dr Eric Goosby.  I am board certified Infectious Disease physician and hold Masters Degrees in Political Sciences and Public Health.  My research includes the  study of how TB programs can be leveraged to achieve universal health coverage, and developing strategies to optimize delivery for HIV, TB and NCD programs in resource-limited settings.  

Oren Rosenberg, MD, PhD: I am a physician-scientist who specializes in Infectious Diseases. The goal of my laboratory is to discover and exploit molecular vulnerabilities in bacteria in order to design faster, cheaper, less toxic and more effective therapeutics to treat life-threatening infections. My laboratory, established in 2015 at UCSF, uses cutting edge techniques in microbial genetics and structural biology to understand the mechanistic basis for virulence in pathogenic bacteria. We use a multicomponent and multidisciplinary approach that leverages expertise in mycobacterial genetics and in the mechanistic dissection of virulence systems to produce biological samples appropriate for study with structural biology. We then use the insights gained from structural determination to feed back to further mechanistic studies. Efforts in structural biology rely on hybrid approaches to examine systems on a range of scales from the atomic level using crystallography to the nanometer scale using electron microscopy, x-ray scattering, proteomics and structurally guided biochemical experiments. 

George Rutherford, MD: My research interests are the epidemiology and prevention of infectious and tropical diseases of public health importance, both internationally and domestically, with a primary focus on HIV and AIDS. My work is funded primarily by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. I also have smaller projects dealing with the epidemiology of tuberculosis in California, the prevention of childhood injury, immunizations and bioterrorism. I am a member of the AIDS Research Institute's Executive Committee.

Rada Savic, PhD: With an emphasis on TB therapeutics, my research uses computational methods to study the dynamic interplay between disease progression, drug and biomarker response across relevant scales (molecule, cell, tissue, organ & whole body) in order to determine causal links underlying variability in (safety and efficacy) clinical outcomes. By integrating multi-scale, and multi-level clinical data, we aim to determine the right dose, right schedule and right treatment duration of various therapies, potentially bringing novel, precise and personalized treatment options to patients with unmet need more quickly.

Priya Shete, MD: I focus on two main areas of TB research: 1) Implementation and operational research to improve programmatic outcomes of TB diagnostic and treatment care using evidence-based guidelines; and 2) Social protection research aimed at improving patient and public health outcomes by implementing social protection interventions to overcome socioeconomic barriers to TB care and evaluating both economic and TB outcomes of these approaches. My current projects include an implementation research project in Uganda to improve effectiveness of TB diagnostic evaluation strategies and treatment initiation by using patient centered social protection interventions such as incentives to improve outcomes.  I serve as a Consultant for the World Health Organization’s Global Tuberculosis Programme, where I manage a global level portfolio focused on providing technical assistance to high-burden countries in developing targeted implementation research agendas. In addition, I have been leading projects aimed at analyzing the impact of TB control strategies on high-risk vulnerable populations in Brazil, South Africa, and Vietnam.  I have a technical assistance project in Brazil focused on integrating social protection intervention in programmatic TB settings. As TB Team Lead at UCSF for a multicenter CDC cooperative agreement, I manage a multidisciplinary team with the goal of modelling domestic and California specific TB elimination strategies. I also serve on the WHO Global TB  Research Task Force, and the Social Protection Action Research and Knowledge (SPARKs) Advisory Board. I am Associate Director of the UCSF Implementation Science Training Program.

Joshua Vasquez, MD: My work is focused on understanding the role of HIV associated tissue myeloid cell dysfunction in promoting lung diseases, including TB pneumonia. To study these questions we use a combination of novel in situ hybridization and mass cytometry based techniques to assess tissue myeloid cells from HIV infected individuals.

Michael Wilson, MD, MAS: My lab employs genomic technologies, including metagenomic next-generation sequencing, immune repertoire sequencing, bulk and single cell transcriptomics and phage display assays for viral and autoantibody detection to better understand the pathophysiology of a variety of neuroinflammatory syndromes ranging from multiple sclerosis to infectious and autoimmune meningitis and encephalitis. I am a PI on an NIH (NIAID) R01-funded study that is employing a novel combination of metagenomic next-generation sequencing coupled with a CRISPR/Cas9-based targeted enrichment method to detect TB and antimicrobial resistance genes in cerebrospinal fluid from patients with suspected TB meningitis while also performing longitudinal host transcriptional profiling to better understand TB meningitis pathogenesis. In addition to my research activities, I am a board-certified neurologist with subspecialty training in neuro-infectious diseases who sees patients with complications of neurological infections and other neuroinflammatory syndromes at the UCSF Multiple Sclerosis and Neuroinflammation Center.

Christina Yoon, MD, MPH: My research is focused on identifying accurate and affordable TB diagnostic tools to improve the efficiency of TB diagnosis and delivery of TB preventive therapy for high-risk populations in resource-limited settings. I have experience in leading international studies of diagnostic accuracy and longitudinal cohort studies.