Leadership

Katherine Van Loon

Katherine Van Loon, MD, MPH
Director, Global Cancer Program

Professor of Clinical Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Van Loon is a Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at UCSF with clinical expertise in the management of gastrointestinal malignancies. Her research is focused on understanding the high incidence of esophageal cancer in East Africa. Currently she is leading studies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in effort to identify environmental exposures and genetic and molecular determinants of esophageal cancer. She is a member of the African Esophageal Cancer Consortium. Dr. Van Loon serves on the ASCO Global Oncology Summit Task Force and and the Conquer Cancer Foundation Global Oncology Grants Task Force. She has served as a Reviewer for the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicine. In 2016, she served as Co-Chair for the 4th Annual Symposium on Global Cancer Research hosted by the National Cancer Institute, UCSF, Stanford, and Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH).

 

 

 Michelle Hermiston, MD, PhD
 Associate Director, Global Cancer Program 
 Professor, UCSF Department of Pediatrics

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Hermiston is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and has served as the Vietnam Site Director for the Global Cancer Program. Over many years, Dr. Hermiston has spearheaded partnerships with the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Ho Chi Minh City and all the hospitals in Vietnam providing pediatric cancer care. As the former Director of the Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program at UCSF, Dr. Hermiston has applied this expertise to develop the first National Fellowship Program in Pediatric Oncology in Vietnam, in partnership with the Vietnamese Ministry of Health and other stakeholders in Vietnam. The Fellowship Program was launched in November 2019, and the first cohort of Fellows will serve as future instructors and leaders of the program in the coming years.

 

  Lindsay Breithaupt, MPH
  Associate Director of Operations, Global Cancer Program
  Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center 

 

 

 

 

 

Lindsay Breithaupt is the Associate Director of Operations for the Global Cancer Program. Her expertise is in international public health program management for implementation  science research and capacity building programs. Lindsay has supported programs in over 15 countries in the fields of family planning and reproductive health, cervical cancer, maternal health, and immunization. Lindsay holds an MPH in Maternal and Child Health from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina. 

 

S. BialousStella Bialous, RN, DrPH
Professor, School of Nursing
 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Bialous is a Professor in the UCSF School of Nursing and President of the International Society of Nurses in Cancer Care. Her work focuses on the implementation of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. In particular, she works to protect health policies from tobacco industry interference. Recognizing the roles health care workers can play in tobacco control, Dr. Bialous conducts research in building nurse capacity to implement tobacco control methods. She executes her research in five countries in Eastern Europe. Moreover, in Brazil, she researches the impact of tobacco images on TV and social media.

 


R.HiattRobert A. Hiatt, MD, PhD
Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Associate Director of Population Sciences, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
 

 

Dr. Hiatt is Professor and Immediate Past Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF and the Associate Director for Population Science of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. His research interests include cancer epidemiology, especially breast cancer, cancer prevention and screening, health services and outcomes research, the social determinants of cancer, and environmental exposures in early development related to cancer. He was the first Deputy Director of the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute and a past president of the American College of Epidemiology and the American Society for Preventive Oncology. Dr. Hiatt was responsible for the development of the UCSF doctoral program in Epidemiology & Translational Science. He has previously lived and worked in Ethiopia and Puerto Rico in field epidemiologic projects on parasitic diseases and has collaborated on cancer research projects in Tanzania. He serves as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board of Environmental Studies and Toxicology. He received his medical degree from the University of Michigan and his doctorate in epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley.

 


P.VolberdingPaul Volberding, MD
Professor, UCSF School of Medicine
Co-Director and Principal Investigator, UCSF-Gladstone CFAR
Professor, UCSF Department of Medicine
Director, UCSF AIDS Research Institute
Director of Research, UCSF Global Health Sciences
 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Volberding is a Professor of Medicine at UCSF. He is Co-Director of the UCSF-Gladstone Center for AIDS Research, an NIH-funded program that supports a large variety of HIV related research across the entire University. As an oncologist, Dr. Volberding has a career-long interest in HIV-associated cancers including those common in resource limited settings. CFAR provides scientific core, mentoring and pilot research grants and work in international sites, especially in East Africa is central to the CFAR mission. Dr. Volberding is also an active supporter of the Infectious Diseases Institute in Kampala, Uganda which is a large and growing part of Makerere University. The IDI provides research training to promising young Ugandan scientists including those engaged in cancer-related research.

 

 

  Geoffrey C. Buckle, MD, MPH
  Assistant Professor, Division of Hematology/Oncology,
  Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Geoffrey Buckle is a medical oncologist who specializes in caring for patients with gastrointestinal cancers. Buckle's research focuses on improving outcomes for people with cancer in underserved settings, with a particular focus on the growing cancer burden in sub-Saharan Africa. He studies region-specific risk factors for cancer and is working on developing ways to improve early cancer detection. Buckle earned his medical degree at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in medical oncology at UCSF. He also completed a master of public health degree at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Buckle is a member of the UCSF Global Cancer Program, American Society of Clinical Oncology and African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer. In 2022, he received a Global Oncology Young Investigator Award from the Conquer Cancer Foundation of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

 

 

  Rebecca J. DeBoer, MD, MA
  Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology,
  Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebecca (Becky) DeBoer, MD, MA is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at UCSF. She received her BA in Human Biology from Stanford University and her joint MD and MA in Medical Humanities and Bioethics from Northwestern University, and wrote her master’s thesis on The Ethics of Global Cancer Care and Control. She completed residency in internal medicine at the University of Chicago and fellowship at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. During her medical training, she conducted qualitative research on cancer treatment decision-making and research ethics in Mumbai, India, and pursued clinical oncology rotations in Uganda and Nigeria. After residency she worked as an oncology clinician at the Butaro Cancer Center of Excellence in rural Rwanda with Partners In Health, where she was engaged in direct patient care, clinical research, and programmatic initiatives. As an oncology fellow at UCSF and HDFCCC Global Cancer Fellow, she conducted ethics research and implementation science projects in Rwanda and Tanzania with support from a Fogarty GloCal Health Fellowship and a grant from the Greenwall Foundation.

 

 

  Li Zhang, PhD
  Professor of Medicine, UCSF

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Li Zhang is a Professor of Department Medicine and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and a member of UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (HDFCCC). Dr. Zhang has over fifteen years of experience in applying statistical method in medical research including epidemiology studies, basic science studies, clinical trials design and high-throughput sequencing data. Her statistical methodological research interests are cancer epidemiology and immunoinformatics, and she has more than 100 publications. Currently, Dr. Zhang serves on Global Action Plan 6 Project Steering Committee for Movember Foundation as a UCSF PI and American Society of Clinical Oncology as a statistical reviewer.

 

 

  Priscilla Espinosa Tamez, MD
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Priscilla (Priz) Espinosa Tamez is a researcher in the Center for Population Health Research at the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico City, Mexico. Dr. Espinosa received her medical degree at the University of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon, Mexico. As the Manager of the UCSF-Mexico Cancer Collaboration in Mexico, she contributed to the analysis of results of the Mexican National Cancer Institute and the University of Veracruz colorectal cancer screening studies. She managed the study to evaluate the feasibility of colorectal cancer screening in Mexico City, which developed a context-appropriate screening program that aims to overcome barriers at multiple levels. She is a Fulbright-García Robles scholar studying at the University of California, San Francisco in the Ph.D. in Epidemiology and Translational Science. The UCSF Global Cancer Fellowship will support her studies in the design and implementation of context-appropriate screening interventions in the primary care health system in Mexico.