Dr. Andrea Park is a facial plastic surgeon who cares for patients who have irregularities of the head or neck, whether these conditions are congenital, acquired or results of cancer treatment. Aiming to help her patients look and feel their best, she believes that trust, service and open communication are essential to a thriving patient-physician relationship.
My research uses computational methods to study the dynamic interplay between disease progression, treatment regimen, and drug and biomarker response across relevant scales (molecule, cell, tissue, organ & whole body) to determine causal links underlying variability in (safety and efficacy) clinical outcomes. By integrating multi-scale, and multi-level clinical data, we aim to determine the right dose, schedule, and treatment duration of various therapies, potentially bringing novel, precise and personalized treatment options to patients with unmet need more quickly.
Dr. Cherry Leung is an Associate Profressor at the Department of Community Health Systems, UCSF, with a program of research focused on identifying modifiable biological risk factors for adolescent depression, with particular emphasis on the gut microbiome and inflammation. Her current work aims to advance the development of novel, biology-informed interventions that improve mental health outcomes in youth. Dr.
Dr. Merisa L. Piper is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who specializes in breast reconstruction and general reconstruction, with expertise in all methods. With the goal of restoring appearance after partial or complete breast removal, she focuses particularly on microsurgery and free tissue transfer, using skin, fat and muscle from another part of the body.
Cancer, fundamentally, is a disease of disordered gene expression. Cancer cells rely on deregulated expression of oncogenic and tumor suppressive pathways to initiate and maintain the transformation process. Thus, delineating how cancer cells achieve such pathologic gene expression states is a crucial step towards understanding and ultimately treating cancer as a disease.
Professor Dean’s research involves in vitro and bioinformatic approaches to study the obligate intracellular bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis infection and disease among human populations by evaluating host-pathogen interactions, bacterial functional genomics, host immune responses and microbiomes, including their metabolic pathways and resistomes.. Her group was the first to identify genomic recombination in this human pathogen. The Dean lab also studies the evolution of zoonotic chlamydial species.
