Four UC San Francisco faculty members are among the 100 new members and 10 international members elected this year to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.
Election to the NAM recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service in the medical sciences, health care and public health. This year, this distinguished group welcomes four UCSF faculty:
- Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, associate professor of medicine
- Laura M. Gottlieb, MD, MPH, associate professor of family and community medicine
- Diane Havlir, MD, professor and associate chair of clinical research, Department of Medicine; and chief, Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine
- Kristine Yaffe, MD, Roy and Marie Scola Endowed Chair and vice chair of research in psychiatry; professor of psychiatry, neurology and epidemiology
Adler-Milstein is an expert on policy and management issues related to the use of information technology in health care delivery. She is the inaugural director of the Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research, which studies the application of digital tools to improve the quality and value of health care.
Adler-Milstein’s work has focused on electronic health records and interoperability, identifying obstacles to progress and ways to overcome them, and has been used by researchers, health systems, and policymakers. She has testified before the U.S. Senate Health, Education, and Labor and Pensions Committee and has received the New Investigator Award from the American Medical Informatics Association. She joined the UCSF faculty in 2017.
Gottlieb is founding director of the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN), which aims to improve health and health equity by advancing research at the intersection of social and medical care.
Her research focuses on evaluating programs and policies that help identify and address social risk factors in care delivery. Recent work has addressed issues ranging from food insecurity in health care settings to bias in medical coding.
She is also an associate director of the Robert Wood Johnson Evidence for Action National Program.
Havlir’s research aims to develop therapeutic strategies to improve the lives of persons living with HIV, locally and around the world. Her current areas of focus include optimal HIV treatment approaches for vulnerable population in San Francisco, optimal treatment strategies for HIV and tuberculosis, strategies to reduce the burden of HIV and malaria in children and pregnant women, and testing innovative, community-based approaches to early treatment of HIV in East Africa.
In this last area, she leads the Sustainable East Africa Research in Community Health (SEARCH) study, which has shown that community-based interventions for HIV testing and treatment in rural Kenya and Uganda nearly doubled rates of HIV viral suppression in two years.
Yaffe, a member of the Weill Institute of Neurosciences and director of the Center for Population Brain Health, studies the epidemiology of cognitive aging and dementia. She is a leading expert in the modifiable risk factors of dementia, including research that has linked low physical activity and concussions to cognitive decline later in life.
Yaffe served as co-chair of the Institute of Medicine’s (now the NAM) Committee on Cognitive Aging and currently serves on the Governor’s Task Force for Alzheimer’s Prevention and Preparedness. Her awards include the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry’s Distinguished Scientist Award and the American Academy of Neurology’s Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Research.
New members to the NAM are elected by current active members. This year’s elections bring UCSF’s membership in the NAM to 110.
The National Academy of Medicine, established in 1970 as the Institute of Medicine, is an independent organization of eminent professionals from diverse fields including health and medicine; the natural, social, and behavioral sciences; and beyond. It serves alongside the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering as an adviser to the national and the international community.