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.
I am a physician-scientist with research interests that lie at the intersection of infectious diseases, placental biology, host immune response to infections, and global health. My research program is translational—focused on maternal-fetal immune responses to perinatal infections, including malaria, Zika and COVID-19. Our goal is to understand how inflammatory responses at the maternal-fetal interface influence pregnancy outcomes.
Dr. Hannah Glass is a pediatric neurologist, founding co-director of the Neurointensive Care Nursery (NICN), and Director of Neonatal Critical Care Services at the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. She is also the program director of the Neonatal Neurology Fellowship Program.
Dr. Glass specializes in brain focused care for children with neurological conditions diagnosed in the newborn period, including hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, stroke and seizures, as well as brain injury following preterm birth. She sees children during the neonatal period, and through childhood.
I am a physician-scientist with an interest in airway epithelial dysfunction in asthma. Specifically, my lab focuses on understanding how genetic risk variants that are associated with asthma at a population level, actually confer risk of disease at a molecular level. We use novel techniques such as conditionally reprogrammed primary airway epithelial cells, CRISPR gene deletion, and biospecimens from large numbers of human subjects to discover the function of genes associated with asthma and elucidate the causal single nucleotide polymorphism.
Dr. Maria Luisa Gorno Tempini is a behavioral neurologist, currently directing the Language Neurobiology laboratory of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and serving as the neurology lead of the UCSF Dyslexia Center. She obtained her medical degree and clinical neurology specialty training in Italy, and has a PhD in the neuroimaging of language from University College London.
Dr. Jennifer R. Grandis received her medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pennsylvania, and completed her internship from the same institution. Dr. Grandis completed both a residency and an Infectious Disease fellowship from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pennsylvania. Prior to joining UCSF, Dr. Grandis was the UPMC Endowed Chair in Head and Neck Cancer Surgical Research and Distinguished Professor of Otolaryngology and Pharmacology and Chemical Biology at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Lea Tenenholz Grinberg is a neuropathologist specializing in brain aging and associated disorders, most notably, Alzheimer's and neurological basis of sleep disturbances in neurodegenerative diseases. Currently, she is a Full Professor and a John Douglas French Alzheimer's Foundation Endowed Professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, part of the Executive Board of the Global Brain Health Institute and a member of the Medical Scientific Advisory Group for the Alzheimer Association. She is also a Professor of Pathology at the University of Sao Paulo.
The Halkias lab studies the cellular and molecular signals that drive human immune development with a focus on understanding how early life host-microbe interactions influence adaptive immune responses to perinatal inflammatory disorders such as preterm birth. Early life is a critical time in immune development marked by rapid exposure to environmental antigens. Microbial colonization of mucosal tissues plays a key role in the development and education of the host immune system and influences the susceptibility to immune-mediated disease later in life.
