As Division Manager for HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine in UCSF’s Department of Medicine, I am responsible for the administrative, financial, operational, and strategic functions of a busy research and teaching division at San Francisco’s “Sanctuary of Sanctuaries.” My management style centers on our mission, our faculty, our partners, and our front-line staff. I believe the best work happens when people connect to the organization—and to one another—from the heart. I am passionate about values-based, mission-driven work rooted in compassion and led with love and grace, structure and accountability.
In my previous roles as Division Manager for ZSFG Neurology and Research Program Director, I helped develop vibrant networks ranging from dozens of faculty, staff, and trainees to hundreds of research collaborators around the world. These discovery communities connected clinicians, families, advocates, Deans and Vice Chancellors, hospital leaders, NIH, foundations, and industry. My commitment to mutually supportive, joyful, transparent relationships and excellence in operations helped our clinical and research families strive toward “the impossible” for one project after another.
Together, we rebuilt pillars of academic medicine from compensation and culture to staffing, finance, research, education, and clinical operations, developing a deep understanding of our services and systems and achieving long-term financial stability. In research, we built global networks that helped define the role of the exome and rare genetic variation in epilepsy, created new models of collaboration, and demonstrated again and again the importance of patients and the front line as copilots of discovery. Across all of this work, I have learned that strong systems and human connection are not competing priorities: structure creates room for people to bring their curiosity, expertise, creativity, and humanity to the work.