UCSF’s innovative, collaborative approach to patient care, research and education spans disciplines across the life sciences, making it a world leader in scientific discovery and its translation to improving health.
Matilda Chan is a cornea specialist at the F.I. Proctor Foundation. Her clinical expertise is the diagnosis and management of patients with corneal and ocular surface diseases. Her basic and translational research program focuses on understanding the cellular and molecular responses to corneal injury.
Tissue engineering and regeneration are the next evolutionary step in surgical practice. Today, surgeons resect, reconstruct, and transplant to treat a diverse array of diseases. In the near future, our armamentarium will increase to include using our surgical skills to induce tissue regeneration in situ or to implant ex vivo engineered organs. Accelerating advances in biotechnology, stem cell biology, and minimally invasive surgery are ripe for convergence, which will lead to the creation of novel surgical treatments to replace diseased or dysfunctional tissues.
Victoria Chu, MD, MPH is a pediatric infectious diseases physician-scientist and hospital epidemiologist. Her research involved utilizing metagenomic sequencing to understand antimicrobial resistance acquisition and hospital-acquired infections. In addition, she serves as an Associate Medical Director of Hospital Epidemiology and Infection Prevention at Benioff Children's Hospital - San Francisco. In this role, she collaborates with the medical staff and ancillary services to address hospital-acquired infections and high-consequence special pathogens preparedness.
Dr. Clelland, PhD, MD, MPhil, is an Assistant Professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology. As a neurologist, she specializes in caring for patients with dementia and cognitive symptoms at the UCSF Memory & Aging Center. Her lab at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences develops novel therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. Her current work centers on creating novel CRISPR gene therapies for genetic forms of neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia (FTD), Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD) and amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
I am a neuroscientist, a vascular biologist, and a physician in Neonatal-Perinatal medicine. My lab, the Neurovascular Development lab at crouchlab.ucsf.edu, studies how brain blood vessels grow and interact with other brain cells. In part, this interest is inspired from the preterm babies that I care for clinically. Approximately 20% of preterm babies born between 24-28 gestation weeks will develop germinal matrix hemorrhage (GMH). This hemorrhage can cause hydrocephalus, cerebral palsy, and death, and unfortunately there are currently no treatments.
Fanny Elahi is a board-certified neurologist with specific expertise in the evaluation and management of patients with cognitive and behavioral disorders due to degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. She completed her bachelor's degree at Columbia University, her MD from Icahn School of Medicine, at Mount Sinai, and her DPhil from Oxford University.
My lab is interested in the complex interplay between bacterial pathogens and host cells. In particular, we study two important human pathogens, Chlamydia trachomatis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Our strengths include using multidisciplinary approaches to these studies—allowing the pathogen to be our tutor.
Dr. Feeney is a Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Global Health at UCSF. She is the Principal Investigator of several NIH-funded projects focused on the immune response to malaria and CMV in infants and children. Dr. Feeney is board certified in Pediatric Infectious Diseases and provides clinical care for children with complex infections at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, where she also teaches students and housestaff.
Dr. Sandy Feng is a transplant surgeon who performs liver, kidney and pancreas transplants.
In her research, Feng studies transplantation tolerance, a transplant recipient's ability to maintain normal organ function with minimal or no use of immunosuppressive drugs. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, she has led several multicenter clinical trials to study tolerance in both adult and pediatric liver transplant recipients.