W. John Boscardin, Ph.D. is a biostatistician with a joint appointment as Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology & Biostatistics. His primary roles with the Department of Medicine are as Director of the Statistical Laboratory in the UCSF Division of Geriatrics, Co-leader (with Mike Steinman) of the UCSF Pepper Center Data and Analysis Core, and Co-leader (with Amy Kelley) of the Analytics Core for the UCSF/Mount Sinai DEVELOP AD Research Program Project. The laboratory is comprised of ten Master’s and Ph.D. level statisticians and provides data management, analytic support, and methodological input to dozens of investigators at UCSF and other institutions. He has been a core faculty member for the CTSI K-Scholars Program based out of the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics since 2008, serving as statistical mentor to numerous junior investigators over the past several years. Dr. Boscardin received his Ph.D. in Statistics in 1996 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a faculty member at UCLA in the Departments of Biostatistics and Medicine before moving to UCSF in 2008. His areas of methodological expertise include analysis of longitudinal, repeated measures, and time to event data, treatment of missing data, Bayesian statistical modeling, and computational methods.

Dr. Kizer’s research program seeks to advance understanding of risk factors for heart disease and stroke in order to improve prevention, risk stratification, and treatment of these disorders. These investigations leverage molecular epidemiology and cardiovascular imaging to identify biochemical markers and endophenotypes involved in the initiation, development and progression of cardiovascular diseases.

Dr. Joseph (An Thanh) Vu is an MR Physicist specializing in ultra-high field (UHF), high spatiotemporal resolution neuroimaging. Dr. Vu obtained his PhD from the joint UC Berkeley – UCSF Bioengineering graduate program in 2011. He served as a research associate in Radiology at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Magnetic Resonance Research from 2012-2015, where he developed advanced fMRI and dMRI methods for the 7T Human Connectome Project. Subsequently as a senior research scientist at Advanced MRI Technologies, Dr. Vu continued to advance the field of high spatiotemporal resolution fMRI through multiple BRAIN Initiative projects. In 2016, Dr. Vu took on the roles of physicist in Radiology at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Health Care System (SFVAHCS) and Technical Director for the Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIND) at the SFVAHCS, where he developed internationally patent pending fMRI technology, spear headed major upgrades and expansions of the 7T MRI system at the SFVAHCS, and serves on both the UCSF and VA MRI Safety Committees. In March of 2019, Dr. Vu accepted the position of assistant adjunct professor in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at UCSF and at the SFVAHCS, where he serves as Director of Advanced Imaging Technologies for the Veteran Affairs Advanced Imaging Research Center (VAARC).

Dr. Woolley has been studying the underpinnings of social deficits in schizophrenia and examining oxytocin's potential as a treatment for the social dysfunction observed in patients with schizophrenia. A primary focus is to examine whether supplementary oxytocin administration can improve social cognition in individuals with schizophrenia, which may ultimately lead to stronger relationships, improved social and occupational functioning, and a higher overall quality of life.

Dr. Ford and her colleagues at the Brain Imaging and EEG Lab at SFVAMC record brain signals that accompany self-initiated actions from patients with schizophrenia and from healthy controls. These signals are an "early warning system" that tell a person the resulting sensations are self-generated. This signal from the brain may ultimately give biological reality to the phenomenon of auditory hallucinations.