Dr. Sorbarikor Piawah is a gastrointestinal oncologist with a particular interest in colorectal cancer. She also treats patients with sarcoma, a group of rare cancers that affect the bones and connective tissues.
Piawah has a background in public health research, particularly in health care disparities among racial and ethnic minorities and low-income patients with cancer. Her current research is focused on understanding the roles that the gut microbiome (the population of microorganisms living in the intestinal tract), diet and lifestyle play in disparities among those with colorectal cancer and on designing therapies that target these factors.
Piawah earned her medical degree at Harvard Medical School and a Master of Public Health degree at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She completed a residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, one of Harvard's teaching hospitals. She completed a fellowship in hematology and oncology at UCSF.
Piawah belongs to the American Society of Clinical Oncology. She has received awards for her research from the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, the UCSF Center for Aging in Diverse Communities, and the V Foundation for Cancer Research.
Li Zhang, PhD is an Associate Professor in the UCSF Department of Medicine and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She is an associate member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (HDFCCC). Professor Zhang has over 15 years of experience in applying statistical methods in medical research, including epidemiology studies, basic science studies, clinical trials design, and high-throughput sequencing data. Her statistical methodological interests are cancer epidemiology and immunoinformatics. Currently, Professor Zhang serves on the Global Action Plan 6 Project Steering Committee for the Movember Foundation and the American Society of Clinical Oncology Career Development Award as a statistical reviewer. She has more than 60 publications.
Dr. Palefsky is a professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the UCSF School of Medicine. He is founder and chair of the HPV Working Group of the NCI AIDS Malignancy Consortium and the head of the AMC HPV Virology Core Lab. He is the protocol chair of the ANCHOR study, an eight-year, 15-site NCI/NIH-funded randomized controlled trial designed to determine whether treatment of anal high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions prevents anal cancer in HIV-infected men and women. As the founder and director of the Anal Neoplasia Clinic, Research and Education Center at UCSF, he oversees training of clinicians from around the world in high-resolution anoscopy, anal biopsy, and office-based treatment. He has an active international research program, including studies in India, Costa Rica and Thailand. He is the principal investigator of several laboratory-based and clinical research studies of HPV-associated neoplasia, particularly in the setting of HIV infection.
Dr. Potter is a professor in the School of Medicine, director of the San Francisco Bay Area Collaborative Research Network (SFBayCRN) and associate director for Practice-Based Research in the CTSI Community Engagement and Health Policy Program. SFBayCRN is UCSF's primary healthcare practice based research network, with participation from the UCSF Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Dentistry. Dr. Potter’s current work focuses on interventions to increase cancer screening rates and enhance self-management support for chronic illnesses such as diabetes and sickle cell disease. He is co-chair of the Professional Education and Practice Implementation task group for the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable and co-leads the colorectal cancer task group for the San Francisco Cancer Initiative. He recently served as faculty for a dissemination and implementation training program jointly sponsored by the governments of Argentina and the United States.
Dr. Ekstrand is professor of Medicine in the Prevention Science Division at the UCSF School of Medicine and Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the St John’s Research Institute of the St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences in Bangalore, India. Her primary research interests include measuring and improving treatment adherence and the role of stigma in global health, with a focus on HIV, mental health, cancer and pain control. She is currently PI or MPI of five NIH R01 awards in India and is in the process of starting an India research program in palliative medicine, in collaboration with researchers from St John’s Medical College in Bangalore and the Cicely Saunders Institute of Palliative Care at Kings College, London.
Dr. John Zeigler is Professor Emeritus in the UCSF School of Medicine. In 1967, Dr. Ziegler began a long collaboration with Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, studying Burkitts lymphoma and other indigenous cancers. Together with Ugandan counterparts, he developed curative therapies for lymphoma and established the Uganda Cancer Institute that today has expanded to a major center of excellence in sub-Saharan Africa under Ugandan leadership. He was recipient of the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award in 1972 for his outstanding contribution in increasing the cure rate of Burkitt's tumor by chemotherapy. During the early years of the AIDS pandemic, Ziegler and colleagues made important contributions to this field both in California and in Uganda through discovery of viral causes of Burkitt’s lymphoma and Kaposi sarcoma. Dr. Ziegler was the Founding Director of the Masters Degree Program in Global Health at UCSF. As an Emeritus Professor, he has remained active in teaching oncology and global health at UCSF.
