Faculty and Staff

Dan Dohan is Professor of Health Policy, Surgery, and Humanities and Social Sciences at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. He received his PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley. His publications address medical sociology, health policy, culture and inequality, and ethnographic research methods. He has written one book, The Price of Poverty: Money, Work, and Culture in the Mexican-American Barrio (UC Press 2003).

Sarah B. Garrett, PhD, is a medical and cultural sociologist. She works to promote health equity via stakeholder-informed mixed-methods research, focusing in particular on maternal health. She is core faculty at the Phillip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (IHPS) at UCSF.

Research Interests: The social construction and experience of addiction; Co-morbidity (HIV, substance abuse, mental illness), homelessness, and US urban health; Chronic non-cancer pain, clinical uncertainty, and scientific evidence; Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bi-polar disorder, and the US welfare state; Gender, reproduction, motherhood and citizenship.

Dorothy Dolan's (nee Porter) research interests are in the history of public health, social medicine and the formation of the nation state since the eighteenth century. She has also published on the history of the experience of health and illness by patients and healers in the context of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Alissa Bernstein, PhD, MPH, MA is a medical anthropologist and health policy researcher focused on understanding and improving the assessment, diagnosis, and care of people with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, with a specific focus on primary care in safety net settings. She also conducts research focused on care navigation to support people with dementia and their caregivers and building palliative care approaches in memory care settings. Dr.

Dr. Paul D. Blanc MD MSPH is Professor of Medicine and holds the Endowed Chair in Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, where he has been on faculty since 1988. He received his BA from Goddard College (Plainfield, Vermont), where he first became interested in health and the environment, later training at the Harvard School of Public Health (in industrial hygiene), the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, and Cook County Hospital (in a joint Occupational Medicine and Internal Medicine Residency).

I am interested in philosophical and ethnographic issues regarding how bodies, media, viruses and bacteria, narratives and songs, and race constantly get mixed up, sometimes fatally. I have engage these issues by investigating epidemics of cholera and rabies in Venezuela, struggling with relatives, doctors, nurses, healers, and epidemiologists to figure out why so many people die from preventable diseases. My concern with infectiousness spreads from microbes to narratives, to thinking about who produces the stories of H1N1, Ebola, diabetes, etc.

Dr. Silvia Camporesi is a bioethicist with an interdisciplinary background in biotechnology, ethics, and the philosophy of medicine. She holds two PhDs: the first in Foundations of Life Sciences and Ethics, a joint program of the European School of Molecular Medicine and the University of Milan (2010); the second in Philosophy of Medicine awarded by King's College, London (2013), funded by the Wellcome Trust Centre for Humanities & Health.

Lawrence Cohen's primary field is the critical study of medicine, health, and the body. His book No Aging in India is about Alzheimer's disease, the body and the voice in time, and the cultural politics of senility. His two current projects are India Tonite, which examines homoerotic identification and representation in the context of political and market logics in urban north India, and The Other Kidney about the nature of immunosuppression and its accompanying global traffic in organs for transplant.

Dr. Dzeng is a sociologist and hospitalist physician conducting research at the nexus of sociology, medical ethics, palliative care, health equity, anti-racism, and human-centered design. She is an Associate Professor "In Residence" at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the Division of Hospital Medicine and Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology program, Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.

Jim V. Gatewood, PhD, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, RN is an assistant clinical professor in the Community Health Systems Department in the School of Nursing at UCSF. He began his professional career as a professor of twentieth-century U.S. intellectual, cultural, immigration and Asian American history. He was the interim head of the urban community and environmental studies concentration in the B.A. program in Liberal Studies at Antioch University Los Angeles before entering the MEPN program at UCSF.

My research focuses on the anthropology of the biochemical sciences, global pharmaceutical politics, and postcolonial engagements with intellectual property, copying, and the politics of innovation and appropriation. These themes animated my 2003 book, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico, which examined the consequences of novel drug discovery partnerships linking global drug companies, Latin American research scientists, and indigenous communities.

Since February 2012 when she was appointed the UCSF Archivist Polina E. Ilieva has been managing the UCSF Archives and Special Collections (this department consists of Special Collections that includes materials in all formats on the history of the health sciences and ancillary disciplines, the University Archives and Manuscript Collections). Polina started working at the UCSF Library in 2006, for five years she was a Project Archivist for the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) at UCSF processing and indexing tobacco industry audio-visual materials.

My research interests are the epidemiology and prevention of infectious and tropical diseases of public health importance, both internationally and domestically, with a primary focus on HIV and AIDS. My work is funded primarily by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. I also have smaller projects dealing with the epidemiology of tuberculosis in California, the prevention of childhood injury, immunizations and bioterrorism. I am a member of the AIDS Research Institute's Executive Committee.

Dr. Rachel Schwartz is a mixed-methods Communication Scientist and Health Services Researcher focused on system-level interventions for improving clinician and biomedical scientist retention and well-being, optimizing interprofessional team communication, efficiency of practice, and patient safety.

She is the lead editor of Emotion in the Clinical Encounter (McGraw Hill, 2021), a medical education textbook that provides clinicians with tools for navigating psychosocial aspects of the medical encounter.

Areas of Interest: Sociology of health and illness; social inequalities in health; science, technology, and medicine studies; race, gender, and class; qualitative research methods.

Medical Anthropologist. Areas of research and publication include: Family Planning; Afghan Refugees; LGBTQ Families; Sperm, Egg and Kidney Donation/Sale; Reproductive Technologies and Bioethics; Cross-border Fertility Travel; Sexuality and Gender; Critical Medical Anthropology; Reproductive Health Policy; Mixed Methods Research; Documentary Film; Iran, Middle East, Spain, US.

An award-winning author, Dr. Guenter B. Risse is a native of Argentina. He was born in Buenos Aires on April 28, 1932 of German parents and obtained his baccalaureate degree from the prestigious Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires in 1951 before being admitted to the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine. Despite obligatory military service during the revolutionary campaign that successfully deposed President Peron in 1955, he managed to graduate magna cum laude three years.