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.
My laboratory is interested in the molecular mechanisms of viral pathogenesis. We focus on a variety of viruses including HIV-1, Hepatitis B and C Virus (HBV and HCV), Zika and SARS-CoV-2. We believe that identifying common host pathways involved in different viruses can lead to the discovery of panviral therapeutics. All are important public health problems and with HCV and HIV sharing common traits including high propensities to establish chronic infections and a lack of efficient vaccines, and Zika and SARS-CoV-2 causing global pandemics leading to death and disability.
Our laboratory studies the cellular and synaptic mechanisms of glaucomatous neurodegeneration, neuronal plasticity and repair, and regeneration. We are particularly interested in understanding the earliest steps of inner retina circuit disassembly in response to injury.
Dr. Joanna Phillips is a neuropathologist, specializing in the examination of central nervous system tissue to help diagnose neurological diseases. Her particular goal is to improve brain tumor treatment through both patient care and research.
Phillips' research focuses on understanding how invading tumor cells interact with the components of the brain tumor microenvironment (the biological components immediately surrounding the tumor), and how these key interactions influence the development of a glioma (a type of brain tumor) and its response to therapy.
Dr. Piao is a physician-scientist with a focus in both neonatology and developmental neuroscience. She received her PhD with Alan Bernstein from University of Toronto, before completing her Pediatric residency at NYU and Neonatology fellowship as well as a post-doctoral fellowship with Chris Walsh at Harvard Medical School. Working in neonatal intensive care unit and laboratory, Dr. Piao’s career follows the bedside-to-bench-to-bedside paradigm.
Dr. Prahl is a clinician-scientist engaged in translational research evaluating human immune responses to infectious diseases during pregnancy and early childhood to facilitate the development of novel strategies for disease prevention.
I am an infectious disease (ID) physician and clinical researcher whose work focuses on the intersection of alcohol, HIV, and tuberculosis in sub-Saharan Africa. I am currently an assistant professor in the Division of HIV, ID, and Global Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). I am trained in infectious diseases, HIV and TB prevention and epidemiology, and work as a physician in the Ward 86 HIV clinic and the inpatient Internal Medicine and HIV/ID consult services at San Francisco General Hospital.
Dr. Quandt is an endocrinologist at UCSF and the San Francisco VA with particular interest in endocrine autoimmune disease like type 1 diabetes and endocrine complications of cancer treatments, particularly immunotherapy. She does clinical and translational research trying to better understand who gets these complications and why. She is the clinical lead for adults eligible for teplizumab, an immunotherapy approved to delay the onset of type 1 diabetes.
Instructor in Pediatric Oncology with clinical and research focus in childhood leukemia and the development of novel engineered cell therapies using natural killer cells as an effector platform.
