UCSF Medical Center

Dr. William Simmons is an infectious disease specialist who cares for patients with complex conditions, including serious bacterial infections in the bloodstream and infections related to surgically implanted devices and hardware. He treats patients in both the clinic and the hospital.

His research focuses on how to use antibiotics to both improve outcomes for patients and reduce the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He is also the medical director of the adult antimicrobial stewardship program at UCSF.

Dr. Daniel Jose Escobar is an infectious disease specialist who cares for patients with a broad range of complex bacterial, fungal and viral infections, including those involving bones, joints, surgical implants and surgical complications.

CLINICAL ACTIVITIES
Jennifer Babik specializes in clinical infectious diseases with a particular focus on infections in immunocompromised hosts. She attends on the Immunocompromised Host and General Infectious Diseases Consult Services at UCSF Health.

Charles Chiu, M.D./Ph.D. is Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases at University of California, San Francisco and Co-Director of the UCSF Clinical Microbiology Laboratory. Chiu currently leads a translational research laboratory focused on the development and clinical validation of metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) and host response profiling assays for diagnosis of infections, outbreak investigation, and pathogen discovery.

The translational research in my lab bridges basic and clinical investigation by engaging genomic technologies to understand relationships between microbes, host response and clinical outcomes. We study lower respiratory tract infections, ARDS, sepsis, nosocomial infections, and emerging pathogens including SARS-CoV-2. One focus area involves developing new diagnostic techniques that combine metagenomic sequencing and machine learning to simultaneously profile both host and microbiome from clinical samples.

Rachel Bystritsky is an infectious disease specialist who sees patients at the UCSF Medical Center. She received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 2012 and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center where she went on to be a chief resident. She completed Infectious Disease Fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, where she has remained on faculty.

Kathy Yang, Pharm.D., MPH is a Health Sciences Clinical Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at the University of California (UCSF) School of Pharmacy and an Infectious Diseases Clinical Pharmacist in the UCSF Medical Center. Dr. Yang specializes in the treatment of multi-drug resistant infections, particularly gram negative bacteria such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Her area of research focuses on the pharmacodynamic optimization of antibiotics for the treatment of biofilm-mediated infections such as cystic fibrosis.