Our mission is to advance health equity through community partnerships and transformative implementation research. 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.
PRISE Center Faculty
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. Jennifer Velloza
PRISE Center Co-Director
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.
Dr. Elaine Khoong
PRISE Center Faculty, Executive Committee Member
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. Oanh Nguyen
PRISE Center Faculty
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, Executive Committee Member
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. Matthew Spinelli
PRISE Center Faculty, Executive Committee Member
Dr. Spinelli is an 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. More recently, he leads projects on development of adherence measurement techniques for doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis, including a directly observed therapy randomized trial. He sees patients in the Positive Health Program and the PrEP clinic at Ward 86 at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where he is the PrEP Medical Lead. In terms of educational initiatives, he is the course director for the Individual-Level Intervention Design Course in the Department of Epidemiology.
PRISE Center Staff
Leah Murphy, MPH, RDN
PRISE Center Director of Operations and Strategy
Leah Murphy oversees PRISE Center staff, budget, operations, and implementation of our strategic plan. She has over 14 years of experience in public health and social service program implementation, evaluation, and management of large multi-sectoral initiatives with academic, local government, and non-profit partners. Prior to working at UCSF, Leah worked for Sonoma County Health and Human Services Departments for 7 years, University of Washington/I-TECH for 3 years on Country-led health systems strengthening initiatives in Haiti and Zimbabwe, and as a clinical and public health nutritionist in domestic and global settings. Leah holds an MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a certificate in Implementation Science from UCSF. Additionally, she has been certified as a registered dietitian nutritionist for over 20 years.
Tiese Etim-Inyang, MPH
PRISE Center Program Manager
Tiese Etim-Inyang is responsible for the overall project management of PRISE Center training and implementation science research awards and supports center-wide communications, meetings and events, grant writing, and knowledge management. Tiese has over five years of experience in research and public health program management and is passionate about improving access to healthcare and health resources through evidence-based interventions. Prior to joining the PRISE Center, she worked as a Research Coordinator supporting malaria elimination efforts in countries within Southern Africa and Southeast Asia. She holds an MPH in Global Health and a graduate certificate in Maternal and Child Health from the University of South Florida, Tampa.
Aliza Adler, MPH
PRISE Center Research Data Analyst
Aliza Adler oversees data management and analysis for Dr. Jen Velloza’s research portfolio and provides data analysis and visualization support to other PRISE Faculty. Prior to joining the PRISE Center, Aliza spent over five years managing research and evaluation projects for Innovating Education in Reproductive Health, a program of the UCSF Bixby Center that creates video curricula on sexual and reproductive health topics for medical learners. Her research interests span the field of public health, but she is particularly interested in using data to increase equitable access to healthcare, specifically within stigmatized sectors of care. She holds an MPH in Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health and a Graduate Data Science Certificate from the University of California, Berkeley.
PRISE Center T32 Postdoctoral Fellows
2023-2024 Cohort
Alan Zambeli-Ljepović, MD, MHS
Dr. Zambeli-Ljepoviç is a PRISE Center T32 postdoctoral fellow and general surgery resident at UCSF with interests in abdominal transplantation and global health. He earned a BS in biomedical engineering from Columbia University, as well as an MD and MHS (Master of Health Sciences) from Duke University. His research focuses on generating evidence to guide the safe and ethical expansion of kidney transplantation services in low- and middle-income countries. Dr. Zambeli-Ljepović is also a fellow of the National Clinician Scholars Program and the UCSF Center for Health Equity in Surgery and Anesthesia. Outside of his academic work, he is a founding member of the Buck Fellows Program, mentoring local high school students applying to college. Originally from Croatia, he speaks Serbo-Croatian and Spanish.
Canice E. Christian, PhD, MSc
Dr. Christian is a PRISE Center T32 postdoctoral fellow in the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She received her MSc in Global Health and Population from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and her PhD in Global Health Sciences from UCSF. Dr. Christian's research focuses primarily on using implementation science methods for infectious disease prevention, including studies on TB and HIV prevention in Uganda as well as COVID-19 vaccine access in California.
Elizabeth Ambriz, DrPH
Dr. Ambriz is a PRISE Center T32 postdoctoral fellow and qualitative researcher in the UCSF Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She holds a DrPH from the University of California, Berkeley and an MPH in Health Systems and Policy from the University of Washington. Dr. Ambriz's research experience includes leading NIH-sponsored studies focused on perceptions of "successful aging," knowledge about Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), and motivations for participating in ADRD research among midlife Latinas. She has extensive experience working with diverse stakeholders to advance equity and social justice, including spearheading cross-departmental practice change to address health inequities in King County, WA, and overseeing mental health services and prevention programs at the Monterey County Health Department.
2024-2025 Cohort
Arturo Gasga, MD
Dr. Gasga is a PRISE Center T32 postdoctoral fellow and a cardiology fellow in the Department of Medicine at UCSF. He obtained his MD from the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, and completed his Internal Medicine Residency and Chief Residency at UCSF. As a PRISE T32 postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Gasga's work centers on improving cardiovascular care across safety net healthcare settings by leveraging technology and implementation science. He aims to develop and implement strategies to improve access to evidence-based cardiovascular care in underserved communities.
Giovanni Ramos, MD
Dr. Ramos is a PRISE Center T32 postdoctoral fellow and an incoming Assistant Professor in Clinical Science in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley (July 2025). He received his PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Ramos' research aims to advance mental health equity among racially and ethnically minoritized populations by identifying risk and resilience factors, enhancing the cultural fit of evidence-based treatments, and using digital tools to increase the accessibility of mental health services in disenfranchised communities.
Rebecca Sugrue, PhD
Dr. Sugrue is a PRISE Center T32 postdoctoral fellow in the UCSF Department of Medicine. Dr. Sugrue received her PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. She conducts research on the impacts of air pollution and climate-related hazards on respiratory health. As part of Dr. Neeta Thakur's CLEAR Lab, she explores how local decision-making and climate resilience planning influence the effectiveness of interventions designed to mitigate the health impacts of wildfire smoke events, with a special focus on environmental justice communities. Dr. Sugrue is committed to advancing the intersection of environmental and health sciences to inform policies that address existing health burdens through evidence-based environmental interventions.