Marina is currently an Assistant Professor at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at UCSF. Prior to that she was the Lead Research Scientist in the Division of Systems Medicine at Stanford University and has worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Pfizer where she focused on developing Precision Medicine strategies in drug discovery. She completed her PhD in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University, where her graduate work focused on predicting drug-disease relationships based on gene expression to identify novel therapeutic indications for known drugs.

Dr. Lai is a practicing general/transplant hepatologist and board-certified Physician Nutrition Specialist who specializes in caring for patients across the entire spectrum of liver disease, from diagnosis to liver transplant.

I am a physician-scientist with research interests that lie at the intersection of infectious diseases, placental biology, host immune response to infections, and global health. My research program is translational—focused on maternal-fetal immune responses to perinatal infections, including malaria, Zika and COVID-19. Our goal is to understand how inflammatory responses at the maternal-fetal interface influence pregnancy outcomes.