Margot Kushel named Director of UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations

It gives me great pleasure to announce Margot Kushel, MD as the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations (CVP) at Zuckerberg San Francisco General and Trauma Center (ZSFG). 

Dr.  Kushel is Professor of Medicine and a member of the Division of General Internal Medicine at ZSFG.  She has been a core faculty member of UCSF’s Center for Vulnerable Populations. She is a preeminent researcher on the causes and consequences of homelessness and housing instability who has worked toward the goal of preventing and ending homelessness and ameliorating the effects of homelessness on health.  Dr. Kushel’s research seeks to inform clinical practice, programs, and policies. She holds investigator-initiated grants from the National Institutes on Aging (NIA) to study the causes and consequences of homelessness in older homeless adults and also a K24 grant from the NIA to mentor researchers interested in aging in vulnerable populations. She is also the principal investigator of a T32 training grant and the Director of UCSF’s Primary Care Research Fellowship, which trains primary care physicians to do policy-oriented research.  Dr. Kushel is evaluating several county-wide initiatives to alleviate chronic homelessness.  She is a frequent speaker at the local, state, and national level about issues of homelessness and its relationship to health and healthcare.

Dr. Kushel maintains a clinical practice at the Richard Fine People’s Clinic at ZSFG, attends on the ZSFG inpatient medicine service and is a faculty affiliate of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.  She obtained her AB from Harvard University and her MD from Yale School of Medicine. She completed residency at the UCSF/ZSFG Primary Care Internal Medicine program, chief residency in medicine at ZSFG, and a fellowship in General Internal Medicine at UCSF/ZSFG.

The CVP is dedicated to improving health and reducing disparities through discovery, innovation, policy, advocacy, and community partnerships.  The CVP seeks to develop effective strategies to prevent and treat chronic diseases in communities most at risk.

I thank Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS for her leadership of the CVP over the past six years.  Dr. Bibbins-Domingo will continue to work closely with the CVP in her roles as Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Vice Dean for Population Health and Health Equity.  I also thank Drs. Sue Carlisle, Diane Havlir and Dean Schillinger for serving on the search committee.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Kushel to this important leadership position at UCSF and ZSFG.

Sincerely, Neil Powe, MD, MPH, MBA, Chief of Medicine, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital