Kelsey H. Collins, PhD completed her undergraduate work in Exercise Biology at University of California, Davis, and earned her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at University of Calgary under the direction of Dr. Walter Herzog. During her postdoctoral studies in the Guilak Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, she created a tissue engineering and regenerative medicine platform to determine the signaling mechanisms between adipose and musculoskeletal tissues.

I am a physician-scientist with an interest in airway epithelial dysfunction in asthma. Specifically, my lab focuses on understanding how genetic risk variants that are associated with asthma at a population level, actually confer risk of disease at a molecular level. We use novel techniques such as conditionally reprogrammed primary airway epithelial cells, CRISPR gene deletion, and biospecimens from large numbers of human subjects to discover the function of genes associated with asthma and elucidate the causal single nucleotide polymorphism.

The Gardner lab studies fundamental mechanisms of immune tolerance -- how the immune system learns to distinguish self from non-self -- and how this understanding can be applied in the context of autoimmunity, transplantation, maternal-fetal tolerance, and cancer immunology.

I am an author and Associate Professor Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where I created and direct the adult inpatient bone marrow transplant massage service. I am board-certified in both internal medicine and addiction medicine. I am faculty at the Osher Center for Integrative Health in San Francisco where I provide consultations in integrative oncology and integrative medicine, and I am chair of their educational case conference series. I teach the “Food as Medicine” CODA series for residents and students at the university.

Dr. Laura Jelliffe-Pawlowski is the Chief of the Division of Lifecourse Epidemiology and a Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatistics and of Global Health Sciences in the UCSF School of Medicine. She is also the Director of Precision Health and Discovery with the UCSF California Preterm Birth Initiative, the Lead and Founder of the UCSF HOPE Research Consortium, the Primary Investigator of the HOPE Study, and a Primary Investigator (multi-PI) of the PROMPT Study.

Joseph Cuschieri M.D. earned his Bachelor of Science Degree in Biochemistry from the University of Michigan, and his Medical Degree from Wayne State University School of Medicine. He completed his general surgery residence and surgical critical care fellowship at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. Upon completion of his clinical training, he completed a 2-year NIH T32 Fellowship in the field of Trauma/Burn/Inflammation.

Dr. Cuschieri is certified by the American Board of Surgery in General Surgery with subspecialty certification in Surgical Critical Care.