People

Natasha Spottiswoode, MD, PhD

resident physician

Medicine

Infectious disease physician-scientist with a focused on unbiased diagnostics and developing treatments for uncommon infections.

Dr. Jonathan P. Terdiman is a Professor of Clinical Medicine and Surgery and the Chief of the Gastroenterology Division at UCSF Health. He earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1985 and his medical degree from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1989. Dr. Terdiman then completed his residency in internal medicine and fellowships in critical care medicine and gastroenterology at UCSF before joining the faculty in 1996.

Connor Tomaka, BS

Associate Specialist

Dara Torgerson, PhD, MSc

Associate Professor

Epidemiology and Biostatistics

I co-lead the Torgerson-Hernandez Lab (THeLab) along with Dr. Ryan Hernandez at UCSF. Our group is focused on developing computational approaches to study the interplay between human evolutionary history and environmental contributions to complex disease in the context of genetic ancestry. My background is in population genetics and bioinformatics, and I have specific expertise in integrative genomic and metabolomic studies of respiratory disease in diverse human populations.

Josephine Tsuei

Administrative Officer

Medicine

Josephine Tsuei is the Administrative Officer for the Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine (BCMM). She executes a variety of skills from coordinating, virtual and in-person meetings, events for BCMM to organizing, onboarding additional staffs, and conducting, implementing process improvements plan and managing sensitive data input retrieving and delivering information quarterly to ensure a more efficient workspace by anticipating departmental needs.

Jessie Turnbaugh, PhD

Director, Gnotobiotics

Hooper Foundation

Peter Turnbaugh, PhD

Professor

Microbiology and Immunology

I lead an interdisciplinary group of microbiome researchers committed to understanding host-associated microbes, reducing these complex microbial ecologies to molecular mechanism, and applying these lessons to improve the practice of medicine. Our three major topics of interest right now are pharmacology, nutrition, and phage biology. While we love sequencing and gnotobiotic mice, our work is question-driven not limited to a specific approach.

Vaibhav Upadhyay, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor

Medicine

I'm a K08 funded physician scientist studying impact of gut microorganisms on human health and applying multi-omic technologies to the study of chronic diseases with clinical focus in pulmonary medicine.

Martin Valdearcos, PhD

Assistant Professor

Diabetes Center

Microglia are emerging as critical regulators of brain homeostasis with an expanding array of functions beyond their established roles as immune sentinels such as synaptic remodeling, neuronal excitability, and myelin plasticity. These highly dynamic cells continuously monitor their microenvironment for alterations, and distinct populations and activation states have been identified based on brain anatomical location, sex, and age.