Dr. Sara Whetstone is an obstetrician and gynecologist whose specialties include family planning and fibroids. She has particular interests in caring for underserved women, health disparities, workforce diversity, patient-centered care and minimally invasive gynecologic surgery.
Whetstone is also interested in medical education, and she serves as an instructor on patient care in obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences for the UCSF School of Medicine. She is also the director of the obstetrics and gynecology residency program.
Dr. Velloza is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Global Health and Infectious Disease Epidemiology. Her research, teaching, and mentoring focus on advancing the field of global mental health and the intersection with HIV and STI prevention specifically for adolescent girls and young women. In her current NIH-funded projects, Dr. Velloza uses implementation science, epidemiology, and behavioral science methods to design, evaluate, and scale-up integrated psychotherapy and HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) delivery models.
Ariana Thompson-Lastad, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health and the Department of Family and Community Medicine. Dr. Thompson-Lastad is trained as a medical sociologist and conducts qualitative and community-engaged research focused on the role of integrative healthcare in advancing health equity. Her work primarily examines innovative approaches to primary care, including integrative group medical visits implemented in US community health centers and the community midwifery model of postpartum care. Dr.
Kathleen Tebb, Ph.D., is a developmental and health research psychologist whose research focuses on developing, evaluating, implementing, and disseminating evidence-based interventions to promote health equity among diverse and underserved adolescents, young adults, and their families. Her specific areas of study involve understanding and promoting factors that contribute to positive youth development, health behaviors, and resilience among adolescents and young adults, with an emphasis on sexual and reproductive health. Dr.
I have developed deep expertise in patient and community engagement in healthcare settings to improve quality and safety outcomes.
Specifically, I have skills in building and maintaining representative and ethical patient advisory councils, mixed-methods research, implementation science, quality improvement, community-engaged research, and reproductive health. Most of my work has focused on the public healthcare network, serving patients that our society has structurally and historically disinvested and marginalized.
Dr. Shankar is a physician with a passion for gender justice, intersectional feminism, reproductive and mental health, and health equity. She is a graduate of the UCSF Pediatric Leaders for the Underserved Residency Program and also is the co-founder of the award-winning organization called Girls Health Champions which fights gender bias by training youth globally as gender and health peer educators. She was a former Fulbright-Nehru Scholar to India from 2009 to 2010 and a Fogarty-NIH fellow from 2020 to 2022 where she focused on global adolescent health.
As a UCSF faculty member I am honored to demonstrate my interest for STIs through research, teaching, and patient care. I currently serve as the Medical Director for the California Prevention Training Center and am the site PI for the multicenter CDC-funded HPV-Impact project,which monitors the population-level effects of HPV vaccination.
