Wednesday, January 11 • 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
For this salon, two well-established Bay Area scientists and doctors, Dr. Monica Gandhi (UCSF) and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), will share about their work in science and medicine, and how it has rubbed up against questions of policy—and even politics—in the context of Covid-19. Notably, Dr. Bhattacharya was co-author of The Great Barrington Declaration, which called for a more nuanced approach to the pandemic than widespread lockdowns. During Covid-19, Dr. Gandhi wrote multiple articles on ways to mitigate the pandemic through non-pharmaceutical interventions such as face masks, and also wrote on the effectiveness of Covid vaccines once they became available, including the need for global vaccine equity. Her book on the pandemic, Endemic: Lessons from HIV for Covid-19 (Mayo Clinic Press) will be published in 2023.
Our Salon Series continues throughout the year. Check back to our Salon home page for information about our next event.
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Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research. He directs Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics. Dr. Bhattacharya’s recent research focuses on the epidemiology of Covid-19, as well as an evaluation of policy responses to the epidemic. His broader research interests encompass the implications of population aging for future population health and medical spending in developed countries, the measurement of physician performance tied to physician payment by insurers, and the role played by biomedical innovation on health. He has published 135 articles in top peer-reviewed scientific journals in medicine, economics, health policy, epidemiology, statistics, law, and public health among other fields. He holds an MD and Ph.D. in economics, both earned at Stanford University.
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Monica Gandhi MD, MPH is Professor of Medicine and Associate Division Chief (Clinical Operations/ Education) of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital. She also serves as the Director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) and the Medical Director of the HIV Clinic at SFGH ("Ward 86"). Dr. Gandhi completed her MD at Harvard Medical School and then came to UCSF in 1996 for residency training in Internal Medicine. After her residency, Dr. Gandhi completed a fellowship in Infectious Diseases and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, both at UCSF. She also obtained a Masters in Public Health from Berkeley in 2001 with a focus on Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
Dr. Gandhi's current research program is on identifying low-cost solutions to measuring antiretroviral levels in resource-poor settings, such as determining drug levels in hair and urine samples. Dr. Gandhi also works on pre-exposure prophylaxis and treatment strategies for HIV infection in women. Dr. Gandhi also has an interest at UCSF in HIV education and mentorship. She also served as the principal investigator of an R24 mentoring grant from the NIH focused on nurturing early career investigators of diversity in HIV research, from which launched the annual "Mentoring the Mentors" workshop for HIV researchers held annually by the UCSF CFAR to train mentors in specialized tools and techniques of effective mentoring.