Our mission is to improve health and health equity through innovative implementation science research in clinical and community settings. We accomplish this by making implementation science methods accessible and meaningful to leaders of public health and clinical programs, and partnering with them to develop and evaluate the best ways to improve delivery and uptake of health services. PRISE Center faculty have expertise and considerable experience in implementation science training, quantitative and qualitative research methods, implementation research study designs and program evaluation.
Dr. Margaret A. Handley
PRISE Center Co-Director
Dr. Handley has a PhD in Epidemiology and a Master in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley. She has helped shape the UCSF Implementation Sciences program from its inception and leads several training initiatives, courses and research studies applying implementation science methods to real-world problems. Dr. Handley is recognized as a leader in the application of implementation science methods to improving health outcomes for populations that have experienced a disproportionate burden of illness or social determinants of health. She is enthusiastic about forming partnerships with local and regional health departments and community groups to co-develop implementation plans.
Dr. Neeta Thakur
PRISE Center Co-Director
Dr. Thakur received her MD and MPH from the University of Arizona and completed the Advance Training in Clinical Research and Implementation Science certificate programs at UCSF. Her work centers on improving asthma and COPD care delivery for individuals from high-burdened communities and addressing social factors, such as early life adversity, to reduce the disease burden. Dr. Thakur applies methods from social epidemiology and implementation science to illuminate the barriers that prevent COPD patients from receiving best-practice care. She has successfully implemented programs that improve access to evidence-based interventions adapted for low-resource safety-net settings, including within the San Francisco Community Health Network. Her success depends on employing community-engaged methods ranging from querying community stakeholders for input on scientific questions and research methods to forming full participatory research partnerships.
Dr. Elaine Khoong
PRISE Center Program Director for Primary Care
Dr. Khoong obtained an MD and Master of Science in Clinical Investigations from Washington University in St. Louis and a Certificate in Implementation Science from the University of California, San Francisco. She is a practicing general internist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Khoong’s research focuses on using informatics to increase implementation of evidence-based practices in safety net systems, with the goal of improving health among vulnerable populations, particularly those with limited health literacy and/or English proficiency. By working closely with health system leaders to design, implement and evaluate interventions to improve primary care management of cardiometabolic diseases, Dr. Khoong’s work aims to work with leaders to help their organizations become learning health systems.
Dr. Janet Myers
PRISE Center Program Director for Population Health
Dr. Myers is a medical sociologist with more than two decades of experience in conducting health services and implementation science research in clinical and public health settings. Her work focuses primarily on implementing and evaluating HIV care and prevention interventions and strategies in clinical settings serving vulnerable populations. She has led several large multi-site demonstration projects integrating different components of the public health system — such as surveillance, counseling and testing and treatment — to develop ways to reach and retain hard-to-reach populations. She also conducts implementation studies to evaluate programs delivered in prisons and jails to enhance HIV care and treatment and models of transitional care.
Dr. Oanh Nguyen
PRISE Center Program Director for Hospital Care
Dr. Nguyen received her MD from the University of California, San Diego, and an MAS in Clinical Research with Specialization in Implementation Science from UCSF. She is a general interest and hospitalist researcher who conducts pragmatic research in real-world practice settings to advance equitable care for patients in safety-net hospitals. Her work focuses on understanding and addressing social risk factors in health care settings to optimize post-hospital recovery and prevent readmissions. She is passionate about achieving health equity using implementation science to implement and disseminate evidence-based practice across safety-net health care settings in partnership with patient, community and health system stakeholders.
Dr. Maria Garcia
PRISE Center Faculty
Dr. Garcia obtained an MD from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, an MPH from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an MAS in Clinical Research as well as a Certificate in Implementation Science from the University of California San Francisco.
As a clinician investigator, Dr. Garcia focuses on co-morbid mental health and chronic diseases and their disproportionate impact on vulnerable and marginalized populations. She conducts research on mental health integration in primary care, with a focus on racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse populations. Dr. Garcia has researched the unique challenges that patients with co-morbid mental health and chronic diseases face and focused on implementation work in mental health integration and improvement of service delivery for populations with language barriers using implementation science and mixed methods.
Dr. Priya Shete
PRISE Center Faculty
Dr. Shete received her MD from Yale University School of Medicine, MPH from the University of California, Berkeley and her Certificate in Implementation Science from UCSF. Dr. Shete combines methods in implementation science, social epidemiology, and health economics to improve access and provision of quality tuberculosis care for vulnerable populations globally and locally. She uses implementation science methods to design and evaluate context appropriate interventions that reduce the social and financial consequences of having TB and accessing TB care as an approach to improving socioeconomic and public health outcomes from this disease. Dr. Shete often uses her skills in Implementation Science by working within public health institutions. She previously worked for the Global TB Programme of the World Health Organization to support high-burden countries in developing research agendas that prioritize implementation research into their existing TB control programs. She served as a public health advisor for USAID in the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance with a focus on health system strengthening. Most recently, she has been leading the Modeling and Analytics team for the COVID-19 Response at the California Department of Public Health.
Dr. Emilia De Marchis
PRISE Center Faculty
Dr. De Marchis is a family physician and health services researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research is based out of the Social Intervention Research & Evaluation Network (SIREN), where she works to assess and improve how we screen for and address social risk factors within health care settings, to reduce health disparities. Emilia values the implementation science focus on moving research into real-world settings, and providing frameworks to account for the many stakeholders and factors contributing to the success of interventions. Through her research and clinical practice, she hopes to advance the health care system’s integration of patient social risk data to provide high quality, patient-centered preventative health care.
Dr. Matthew Spinelli
PRISE Center Faculty
Dr. Spinelli is Assistant Professor in the Division of HIV, ID and Global Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. His research focuses on intervention design and implementation science to improve adherence to PrEP and HIV antiretroviral therapy. He has more recently launched a project to examine the impact of COVID-19 on the HIV epidemic within San Francisco. He sees patients in the Positive Health Program and the PrEP clinic at Ward 86 and in the Infectious Diseases clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
Dr. Jennifer Velloza
PRISE Center Faculty
Dr. Velloza is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Global Health and Infectious Disease Epidemiology. Her research, teaching, and mentoring focus on advancing the field of global mental health and the intersection with HIV prevention specifically for adolescent girls and young women. Specifically, Dr. Velloza uses implementation science methods to design, evaluate, and scale-up integrated care models for psychotherapy and HIV prevention interventions. She collaborates closely with teams in South Africa and Kenya for this work. Dr. Velloza is also the Associate Program Director for Curriculum for the Implementation Science Training Program and works collaboratively with our faculty to ensure that our course content, pedagogy, and delivery approaches are centered on a health equity lens.