Core Faculty Members
Nicole (Nicki) Bush, PhD
Nicole (Nicki) Bush joined the faculty after completing a postdoctoral fellowship as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the UCSF/UCB site. Prior to that, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in children’s physiologic stress reactivity at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD in Child Clinical Psychology from the University of Washington and completed her child clinical training internship at the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She has a background in basic research as well as clinical and community intervention with families from high-stress contexts, and she is actively involved in policy-oriented projects.
Her research has examined relations among biobehavioral predispositions (e.g., temperament and physiology) and stressful life circumstances (e.g., poverty, parenting, and neighborhood) in the prediction of a broad range of children's mental health outcomes. In recent years, Dr. Bush has expanded her examination of contextual risk effects by infusing her models with a new understanding of biology (physiology, genetics, epigenetics) throughout early development, including the prenatal period. Her work integrates insights from social epidemiology, sociology, clinical psychology, and developmental psychobiology to elucidate the interplay of biology and context in youth development, as physiological systems mature and social environments change. Her examinations of how social disadvantage interacts with and alters children’s biological stress response systems aim to clarify the etiology of children’s mental and physical health outcomes and subsequent adult health.
Elissa Epel, PhD
Elissa Epel, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, at University of California, San Francisco. She studies the biopsychosocial mechanisms of healthy aging, and applies basic science to scalable interventions. She is the Director of the Aging, Metabolism, and Emotions Lab, and Associate Director of the Center for Health and Community. She studies psychological, social, and behavioral pathways underlying chronic psychological stress and stress resilience that impact cellular aging. She also studies the interconnections between stress, addiction, eating, and metabolic health. With her collaborators, she is conducting clinical trials to examine the effect of self regulation and mindfulness training programs on cellular aging, weight, diet, and glucose control. She co-leads studies funded by NIH (NIA, NCCIH, NICHD, and NHLBI) Epel studied psychology and psychobiology at Stanford University (BA), and clinical and health psychology at Yale University (PhD). She completed a clinical internship at the Palo Alto Veterans Healthcare System. Epel has received several awards including the APA Early Career Award, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research Neal Miller Young Investigator Award, and the Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine award for Sociophysiology. She is among the top 1% of researchers globally for citation impact. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She was named Innovator of the Year by McLaughlin group and received the 2017 Silver Innovator Award from the Alliance for Aging Research.
Her research has been featured in venues such as TEDMED, NBC’s Today Show, CBS’s Morning Show, 60 minutes, National Public Radio, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Wisdom 2.0, HLTH 2.0, and in many science documentaries. She co-authored "The Telomere Effect" (2017) with Elizabeth Blackburn, a NYT bestseller under the category of Science, and the Stress Prescription, an independent book store best seller.
Laura Gottlieb MD, MPH
Laura M. Gottlieb, MD, MPH is a Professor of Family and Community Medicine and Associate Director of the Center for Health and Community at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research explores healthcare sector programs and policies related to identifying and addressing patients’ social risk factors in the context of healthcare delivery. She is the founding co-director of the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network, a national research network that catalyzes, conducts, and disseminates research on healthcare strategies to improve social conditions.
Dr. Gottlieb completed her medical degree at Harvard Medical School and her internship, residency, and public health training at the University of Washington. She subsequently fulfilled her National Health Service Scholar obligation in a federally qualified health center in New Mexico. She returned to her native California in 2009 as a UCSF-UCB fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Health and Society Scholars Program and then joined the UCSF faculty in 2011. Dr. Gottlieb has received numerous awards, including the inaugural Academic Pediatrics Association's Joel Alpert Award for her research supporting families experiencing social barriers to health, and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Danielle Hessler Jones, PhD
Danielle Hessler Jones is co-Director of the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN) and a Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on strengthening social care and patient centered care delivery in the health care sector. Bringing a health psychologist lens, her research seeks to understand the impact and implementation of programs for individuals across the lifespan aimed at screening and addressing social risks/needs (such as food insecurity, housing instability), assessing and improving patient reported experiences of healthcare, and the emotional side of living with chronic conditions.
Kaja LeWinn, ScD
Kaja LeWinn, Sc.D., is a social epidemiologist and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Child and Adolescent Division at the University of California, San Francisco. She is an interdisciplinary scientist, integrating rigorous, methodological approaches from her home discipline, social epidemiology, with expertise in the biological mechanisms linking social experience and brain development to understand how multiple aspects of a child’s environment shape neurodevelopment and mental health in population-based samples. Her goal is to improve the rigor, reproducibility, and public health relevance of neurodevelopmental research, with a focus on improving generalizability to all US children. Across over 150 peer reviewed publications, she has contributed to a number of critical issues in neurodevelopment and pediatric mental health. Her work has demonstrated the importance of including representative samples in neuroimaging research and advanced understanding of the social and environmental drivers of cognitive development and child mental health. She is a leader in multiple collaborative, team science studies focused on neurodevelopmental outcomes, including the NIH ECHO Cohort, a national collaborative study of over 60,000 children across the United States.
Dr. LeWinn attained her doctorate in Social Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health and completed fellowships at UCSF through the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program and the NIH T32 Clinical Services Research Training Program, a program she now co-directs.
Matt Pantell MD, MS
Matt Pantell worked at the Health Policy Center of the Urban Institute before attending the UC Berkeley - UCSF Joint Medical Program for medical school, where he earned an MD and a Master's in Health and Medical Sciences focusing on social epidemiology. He then completed his residency in pediatrics and was Chief Resident at the University of California, San Francisco. He was also a fellow in the Clinical Research Training Program at the NIH, where his work focused on biomarkers of social adversity. Currently he is an assistant professor at UCSF, where his clinical work is as a pediatric hospitalist and urgent care physician. His research is conducted with the UCSF Center on Health and Community and the UCSF Preterm Birth Initiative, and focuses on the utility of incorporating social information into clinical decision making, data mining and the analysis of large datasets, and biological manifestations of the social determinants of health.
Aric Prather, PhD
Aric Prather is an assistant professor in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry. He is also a faculty member in the Health Psychology Postdoctoral Program, the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Postdoctoral Scholars Program, and on the Executive Board of the UCSF Center for Obesity Assessment, Study, and Treatment (COAST). His research focuses on the inter-relationship between psychological stress and sleep as dynamic predictors of physical and mental health. His research utilizes epidemiologic, naturalistic, and laboratory based studies to understand the extent to which sleep disturbance serves as a critical behavioral pathway to poor health. With specialized training in psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), he primarily focuses on immune outcomes implicated in infectious disease, inflammatory conditions, and accelerated immunosenescence. He is also dedicated to investigating how larger social construct (e.g, social disadvantage) drive variation in stress and sleep disturbance and ultimately contribute to health disparities.
