New faculty
Alexis Beatty, MD, MAS, joined UCSF from Apple Health in early 2020. An alum of our MAS program, Beatty earned her MD from Duke University and trained at Massachusetts General. Beatty holds have a joint appointment with the Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, practicing at UCSF Health. She co-leads the Training in Clinical Research programs.
John A. ("Tony") Capra, PhD holds a joint appointment in the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. Before coming to UCSF in the fall of 2020, he was an assistant and associate professor at Vanderbilt University. His lab builds computational and machine learning methods for integrating large-scale genomic and phenotype data, specializing in understanding how evolutionary processes shaped human genetic diversity and how genetic variation influences risk for disease.
Jean Feng, PhD, MS, joined us in July of 2020 from University of Washington, where she was a PhD student in Biostatistics. A member of the Bioinformatics division, Feng develops statistical methodology for improving the reliability and interpretability of machine learning models and collaborates with regulatory experts to understand how we can safely deploy and update machine learning-based medical devices.
Yulin Hswen, SciD, MPH, also joined our faculty in July, coming from Harvard University, where she received a doctoral degree in social and computational epidemiology. She holds a joint appointment in the Bakar Computation Health Sciences Institute and works in the life course division with research focused on analyzing unfiltered conversations on social networks to better understand the connections between social experiences and health.
Vasilis Ntranos, PhD, research into single-cell RNA-seq. He works with the Diabetes Center and holds a joint appointment in Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute.
Rosalyn Plotzker, MD, MPH, joined us in early 2020 after completing a fellowship in Sexually Transmitted Diseases in UCSF’s Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences. In addition to practicing in UCSF’s Anal Neoplasia Clinic Research and Education Center, Dr. Plotzker mentors residents interested in careers in public health and, with Dr. Rutherford, teaches the preventive medicine residency seminar.
Vinayak Prasad, MD, MPH, joined us from the University of Washington in mid-2020 as an associate professor. Prasad practices hematology-oncology at ZSFG and focuses on bolstering our educational programs curricula in critical thinking and appraisal of evidence-based medicine. With a grant from Arnold Ventures, he has brought on a postdoctoral fellow and two research assistants to help him advance his data-driven assessment of the things doctors, health care providers and health care systems do that don’t work – that are ineffective – as well as those that do work but deliver too little for their cost.
Dara Torgerson, PhD, joined the Department from McGill University, where she was an assistant professor in human genetics. Her research is focused on integrative genomic and metabolomic studies of complex disease, including asthma and respiratory outcomes of preterm infants. She uses computational approaches to study the interplay between genetic and environmental drivers of respiratory disease in the context of ancestry, race, and ethnicity.
Efstathios “Stathis” Gennatas, PhD, joined us as an assistant professor in August. He came up the peninsula from Stanford, where he was a research scientist. He is involved in the development of machine learning methods to address key challenges in biomedical research and clinical predictive modeling. He also works with multimodal, high-dimensional data to study brain development, neurological disease, and psychopathology.
Nooshin Razani, MD, MPH, joined the Department in May from UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, where she continues to direct the Center for Nature and Health and the SHINE (Stay Healthy in Nature Everyday) program. Her research focuses on childhood trauma and opportunities for outdoor play. Dr. Razani explores local nature with children and families who have received a prescription for time in nature, and develops models for partnership between healthcare providers, community-based organizations and parks and open spaces.
