People

The TRANSPERS Center includes core collaborators, advisors, and board members representing an array of interests and disciplines. Our work integrates national and international academic groups, government agencies, cross-cutting research organizations, health plans and payers, patient advocates, and industry representatives.

Founding Director

Kathryn A. Phillips, PhD

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Kathryn A. Phillips, PhD, is Professor of Health Economics and Health Services Research in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at UCSF. A leader in the application of new technologies to improve healthcare, she is the Founding Director of the UCSF Center for Translational and Policy Research on Precision Medicine (TRANSPERS). She is a core faculty member in the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and is affiliated with the Institute for Human Genetics, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Baker Computational Health Sciences Institute, and Global Health Sciences.

Kathryn focuses on the value of new technologies and how to most effectively and efficiently implement them into health care. Her core specialty is precision medicine — a new era of healthcare where medical interventions can be tailored to individual patients based on their unique genetic make-up. Her work spans multiple disciplines, including basic, clinical, and social sciences, and brings together leading experts in academia, industry, healthcare, payers, and government. Her pioneering research on the application of health services research to precision medicine has revealed insights on how to bridge the gap between emerging technologies and their use in the clinic. Kathryn led one of the earliest studies on the societal implications of pharmacogenomics, underscoring its potential to reduce the incidence of adverse drug reactions (JAMA, 2001). Kathryn has also conducted seminal work on HIV, as her analysis of HIV home testing informed the FDA’s decision to approve the first home collection HIV test (New England Journal of Medicine, 1995).

Kathryn has published over 150 articles in major journals including JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, Science, and Health Affairs and has had continuous funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health as a Principal Investigator for over 25 years. She serves on the editorial boards for Health Affairs (rated as the top policy journal), Value in Health (a leading outcomes research journal), JAMA Internal Medicine, Genetics in Medicine (section editor), and leading journals on precision medicine. Kathryn has served on national and international scientific advisory committees and workshops including the Board of Directors for Genome Canada, National Academy of Medicine, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. She has also served as an advisor to various international and industry organizations, including ~50 biotechnology companies and venture capital firms. In 2016, she was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation award to pursue work on global health. She serves as Chair of the Global Economics and Evaluation of Clinical Sequencing Working Group and is serving on an evidence review committee for the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER).

Core Collaborators

Jeroen P. Jansen, PhD

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Jeroen Jansen, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at UCSF. Jeroen is a senior member of the TRANSPERS team and working, primarily as a methodologist, at the intersection of evidence synthesis, biostatistics, and health economics.

Jeroen has 15 years of research experience and has led or supervised numerous projects to understand the value of healthcare technologies. Prompted by the challenges encountered in applied research projects, he has performed methodological research. Notable contributions are the development of novel statistical methods to overcome the typical challenges in model-based cost-effectiveness evaluations characterized by gaps in the evidence base and complex evidence structures. Furthermore, Jeroen led initiatives to develop guidance for consumers and producers of network meta-analysis studies. He has promoted a more transparent and credible approach to model-based health economic evaluations and led the development of open-source simulation models to illustrate its feasibility. Furthermore, Jeroen has been involved in the ongoing development of an R software package to develop simulation models for health economic evaluations.

His current research interests are the clinical and economic value of precision medicine, incorporating novel elements of value and health disparities in health economic modeling studies, and statistical methods for evidence synthesis. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and is widely cited. He is co-author of a textbook on network meta-analysis for decision-making. Jeroen has a PhD in epidemiology from the Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

Grace A. Lin, MD

Grace Lin, MD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine and core faculty in the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, UCSF. She works with TRANSPERS on a variety of projects on clinician and policy decision-making for precision medicine.

Grace’s research program focuses improving the quality and appropriateness of healthcare provided by helping patients and physicians make high-quality decisions that are reflective of both evidence from the literature and the patient’s individual values. She hypothesizes that improving medical decision-making can improve the quality and efficiency of care and help address disparities in care. The recent focus on greater patient-centered care and more shared decision-making between patients and providers make research in this area imperative.

Grace’s activities have included assessing the current state of clinical decision-making using quantitative and qualitative methods, developing programs to assist physicians and older adults in screening for and prevention of geriatric syndromes, assessing implementation of shared decision-making tools into primary care, and evaluating the clinical and economic value of new therapies. She has also worked on development and validation of an instrument to measure decision quality in patients with coronary artery disease in a national network of cardiology clinics and catheterization laboratories, developing an intervention to assist older adults and patients in assessing the risks and benefits of continued cancer screening, and assessing how insurance coverage, price, and reimbursement may affect ordering of genetic testing for hereditary cancer syndromes. Finally, she works with the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review on assessing the effectiveness and value of new and emerging therapies.

Maren Scheuner, MD, MPH

Maren T Scheuner, MD, MPH, is the acting National Program Director for Genomic Medicine in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the Director of the Clinical Genetics Program at the San Francisco VA Health Care System. She is a Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology-Oncology and Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Medical Genetics at the UCSF School of Medicine. She collaborates with TRANSPERS on a range of studies examining the clinical and policy implications of precision medicine.

Maren is an internist and medical geneticist. She has conducted health services and implementation research in the VA since 2008. Her research activities focus on the integration of genetic services and genetic testing applications into clinical practice. Areas of focus include: care coordination for genomic medicine in the VA; delivery models for clinical genetic services; outcomes of precision medicine and their value; clinical validity and utility of family history tools in risk assessment and disease prevention; genetic testing technologies and communication processes between the laboratory and ordering provider; and the intersection of health information technology and genomic medicine.

Julia R. Trosman, PhD

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Julia Trosman, PhD, is Director and Co-Founder, Center for Business Models in Healthcare, a practice of Executive Frameworks, Ltd, a health services research organization focused on researching, developing and implementing innovative models for collaborative care delivery, adoption of medical and care innovation, and reimbursement. She is also an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy, University of California San Francisco, and Assistant Adjunct Professor, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL. She has collaborated with TRANSPERS since 2007 and provides leadership on payer coverage decision-making studies.

Julia’s research is focused on the area of precision medicine insurance coverage and reimbursement, with an emphasis on payer coverage decision-making. She has conducted innovative primary research with the largest US private payers on factors and criteria of coverage for novel genomic technologies since 2007. The research has focused on a spectrum of relevant diseases (e.g., cancer, prenatal genetic disorders, pediatric developmental and neurologic disorders) and clinical settings (e.g., hereditary syndrome risk assessment in asymptomatic populations and disease management setting). In collaboration with TRANSPERS, she has facilitated numerous multi-stakeholder meetings on precision medicine, including payers. She has collaborated on numerous previous and current grants, studies, and publications, including two NIH grants funded by the National Cancer Institutes and National Human Genome Research Institute.

Christine B. Weldon, MBA

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Christine Weldon, MBA, is Director and Co-Founder, Center for Business Models in Healthcare, a practice of Executive Frameworks, Ltd, a health services research organization focused on researching, developing and implementing innovative models for collaborative care delivery, adoption of medical and care innovation, and reimbursement. She is also an Adjunct Instructor at Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL. She has collaborated with TRANSPERS since 2007 on payer coverage decision-paying studies.

Christine’s research has been focused on the area of coverage/reimbursement and care delivery for precision medicine for many years and barriers to adoption, as well as developing and implementing relevant interventions. She co-led a national survey of the NCI-designated cancer centers on testing practices for tumor mutation testing. As a collaborator with Dr. Phillips and UCSF TRANSPERS, she has participated in coverage policy and payer decision-making studies, with a focus on hereditary and tumor multi-gene testing and whole genome and whole exome sequencing. In the area of provider decision-making, she has led a study to examine gaps and barriers in cancer care delivery, including decision-making on adoption of genetic testing, at 54 hospitals in the Chicago area and over 20 sites serving vulnerable breast cancer patients.

Postdoctoral Fellows and Students

TRANSPERS is currently accepting applications for Postdoctoral Fellows. See advertisement.

Current and Previous Participating Organizations

Academic and research organizations

  • American Institutes for Research
  • Baylor University School of Medicine
  • Center for Business Models in Healthcare
  • Center for Medical Technology Policy
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
    • Evaluation of Genomic Applications in Practice and Prevention (EGAPP)
  • Dana Farber Cancer Institute
  • Harvard Medical School; Brigham and Women’s Hospital
  • Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute
  • Research Triangle Institute
  • Stanford University
  • Tufts University Medical Center
  • University of Calgary
  • University of Chicago Medical Center
  • University of Oxford
  • Veteran's Affairs Medical Center San Francisco

Health plans and payers

  • Aetna
  • Anthem
  • Beacon Laboratory Benefit Solutions
  • Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
  • Blue Shield of CA
  • CIGNA
  • EviCore
  • Health Care Services Corporation (BCBS of IL, TX, NM, OK)
  • HealthNet
  • HealthPartners, Inc.
  • Highmark Inc. (a BlueCross BlueShield affiliate)
  • Humana Inc
  • Independence Blue Cross
  • Kaiser Permanente
  • Oklahoma Health Care Authority
  • Premera
  • UnitedHealth Group