Celebrate the Career of Claire Brindis and the Establishment of the Brindis Professorship

Dr. Berkowitz is involved in international and national research and programs focused on the development and adoption of technology-enabled health innovations for at-risk populations. Her work has tackled some of the most crucial social and environmental problems of our time: ensuring access to quality health services, behavioral health, substance-use treatment, and education; promoting financial inclusion; and reducing the impact of climate change, among others. Dr. Berkowitz has held leadership positions at several foundations in the US and Canada, including the MasterCard Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation.

As vice chancellor for research, Dr. Collard oversees and stewards UCSF's research mission. He previously served as associate vice chancellor of clinical research and director of UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. In this role, Dr. Collard helped position the university as a leader in the National Institutes of Health’s national consortium of clinical research institutions and developed programs to support the needs of its clinical trialists and biospecimen-based researchers. During this time, he also helped lead the UCSF research community through the early phases of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, advocating strongly for their needs. As a professor of medicine and health policy and an internationally recognized clinical researcher, Dr. Collard has written seminal articles on the epidemiology, natural history, and management of interstitial lung disease. 

Dr. Darney joined the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps as a surgical intern then served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC sponsored his master’s degree in demography at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1971-1972. Dr. Darney was board-certified in preventive medicine and obstetrics and gynecology after training at the CDC and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He previously taught at Brigham and Women’s, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Oregon Health and Science University. In 1981, he came to UCSF, where he was chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital until 2012.

Dr. Decker’s research focuses on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and positive youth development. Currently, she is conducting a study using a systems-thinking approach to improve the health of adolescents in rural communities in California's Central Valley. She also is collaborating with the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico to assess the experiences and needs of unaccompanied young female migrants. For the past decade, Dr. Decker has evaluated the California Department of Public Health’s adolescent sexual health education programs. Her research interests include authentic community and youth engagement, social and structural determinants of health, and health equity. 

Dr. Foster led the Turnaway Study, a nationwide longitudinal prospective study of the health and well-being of women who sought abortion and either received it or didn’t. Currently, she is leading a Turnaway Study in Nepal and an examination of the health, legal, and economic consequences of the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. She is the author of more than 120 scientific papers and the 2020 book, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having – or Being Denied – an Abortion. In 2022, the journal Nature named her one of the 10 most influential scientists of the year for the Turnaway Study.

Dr. Grumbach is a founding director of the UCSF Center for Excellence in Primary Care and director of the Community Engagement Program for the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. He served as chair of the UCSF Department of Family and Community Medicine from 2003 to 2022 and as vice president for population health for the UCSF Health system from 2015 to 2018. Dr. Grumbach’s research and scholarship on the primary care workforce, innovations in primary care, racial and ethnic diversity in the health professions, and community health improvement and health equity have widely influenced policy and practice.

Dr. Kearns is one of the first academics to rigorously study the influence of the sugar industry on health and health policy. She first saw the devastating effects of sugar as a dental director for clinics serving low-income populations and as a manager of dental operations at the Kaiser Permanente Dental Care Program. She has helped identify more than 600,000 pages of food industry-related documents now available online to researchers and the public as part of UCSF’s Food Industry Documents Archive Library Project.

Dr. Luft’s research and teaching have addressed HMOs, hospital competition, outcomes of hospital care, primary care delivery, care for patients with advanced cancer, and health care reform. A core theme is how better information and improved incentives can lead to increased value. Dr. Luft has been involved in postdoctoral training for more than four decades. He has authored or co-authored and edited five books and is published widely in scientific journals. 

Dr. Ralph is an epidemiologist whose research examines the context in which women, and in particular adolescents, make decisions around pregnancy and childbirth, and the consequences of unintended childbearing on women’s health and well-being. Her current work includes research on the longitudinal effect of being denied a wanted abortion on women’s health and well-being; the effect of abortion restrictions, particularly parental involvement requirements, on young women’s experience seeking abortion care. As a current UCSF-Kaiser BIRCWH scholar, Dr. Ralph is expanding these areas of research to characterize adolescents’ capacity for autonomous decision-making around pregnancy and better understand the causal impact of unintended childbearing on women’s educational trajectories.

Dr. Soleimanpour’s primary research interests focus on the influences of school environments and health services on children’s health and education outcomes, with an emphasis on school-based health centers (SBHCs), school-based mental health services, and community-based participatory research. She is the principal investigator on several evaluations of school health initiatives throughout California. Dr. Soleimanpour also currently leads the 2022 National Census of School-Based Health Centers in partnership with the School-Based Health Alliance and contributed to the development of national performance measures for SBHCs.   

Dr. Weiser‘s research over more than two decades has concentrated on the impact of food insecurity, extreme weather events, and other social and structural factors on treatment outcomes for HIV and other chronic diseases domestically and internationally. She also evaluates sustainable food insecurity and livelihood interventions as a way to improve health. Dr. Weiser currently serves on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Climate Security Roundtable and on the University of California Global Climate Leadership Council.

Dr. King began his career at UCSF in 1997 as chief of medical services at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. A physician-scientist, his research has focused on inflammatory and immunologic lung injury. Dr. King is best known for his pioneering work in management of interstitial pneumonias, a scarring process that often leads to death. His bibliography comprises more than 300 publications, and he has co-edited eight books, including the acclaimed reference book Interstitial Lung Disease, now in its fifth edition.

Claire Brindis, DrPH, is a distinguished professor of pediatrics and health policy and the Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor at UCSF. Her research focuses on ameliorating the impact of social, health, and economic disparities among ethnic/racial populations, with a focus on women and adolescents and Latino/a health. She is a member of the UCSF Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, emerita director of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, and a founding director of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. Dr. Brindis also is the co-director of the Adolescent and Young Adult Health National Resource Center and a senior scholar with the UC Center for Climate, Health and Equity. As an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), Dr. Brindis serves on the NAM Council and on the National Research Council. 

Ralph Brindis, MD, MPH, MACC is a clinical professor of medicine at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF and has focused his career on promoting cardiovascular (CV) quality. Following a thirty-year career at the Northern California Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, he served as president of the American College of Cardiology (ACC). Dr. Brindis was the previous chair and is now current chief medical officer of the ACC’s National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR), where he helped launch and expand the NCDR to a portfolio of eight CV registries now used by more than 2,500 US hospitals. He serves on the US Food and Drug Administration CV device panel and the California Technology Assessment Forum panel, and he is chair of the Department of Health Care Access and Information Clinical Advisory Panel for cardiovascular public reporting. He also is the president of AC Wellness Medical Group, which delivers primary care to Apple employees.

Dr. Spetz’s research focuses on the economics of the health care workforce, organization of health care services, and quality of health care. She directs the UCSF Health Workforce Research Center on Long-Term Care and is an internationally known expert on the nursing workforce, leading studies of nurse supply, demand, education, earnings, and contributions to the quality of care across health care settings.