As precision medicine continues to be a priority at UCSF and central to its overarching advancing health worldwide mission, UCSF Precision Medicine serves to improve personal health, population health, and health equity through efforts to use data-driven tools and analyses equitably to develop new insights, diagnostics, therapeutics, and prevention measures.

One priority of UCSF Precision Medicine is to identify how structural racism impacts the goals, structures, and practice of precision medicine, and to advise on strategies and actions to help ensure that precision medicine combats rather than perpetuates racial inequities.

Learn more about our initiatives and campus collaborations related to diversity, equity, and inclusion:

Algorithmic Justice: An inaugural workshop titled “Toward Algorithmic Justice in Precision Medicine” held on November 7, 2023 aimed at identifying and prioritizing specific challenges and proposing actionable recommendations. It convened community members along with health systems professionals, biomedical investigators, and artificial intelligence (AI) tool developers to consider systematic flaws in data collection, datasets, and AI tools that perpetuate or exacerbate structuralized inequities, and how resultant algorithmic injustices can be uncovered and addressed, enabling the equitable implementation of precision medicine.

Precision Medicine Platform Committee: UCSF’s inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Research - Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (AVC Research - IDEA), Tung Nguyen, joined the committee to bring expertise and advocacy for community engagement and participatory research in precision medicine activities.

Precision Medicine World Conference (PMWC): At the 2023 PMWC, a new session featuring PMPC member Bob Hiatt as a speaker on “Using Real-World Evidence to Uncover and Address Health Disparities,” covered strategies for building diversity in datasets and other topics. Health equity perspectives will continue to be presented by experts from UCSF and elsewhere throughout the conference program.

Policy advocacy: Vice Chancellor Keith Yamamoto has focused on diversity topics across a wide variety of policy advocacy activities, including advising efforts by the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine (CIAPM) to focus funding and administrative agencies on addressing health disparities and prioritizing the collection, integration, and analysis of social determinants of health data; participating in the National DEI Strategy Partnership with OSTP and in the AAAS Sea Change Program; contributing to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus study on Advancing Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEM Organizations; and co-chairing a consensus study on creating a framework, grounded in justice and equity, for emerging science and technology in health and medicine.

Marcus Program in Precision Medicine Innovation (MPPMI): The Research Development Office (RDO) posted the inaugural MPPMI Call for Proposals, which for the first time included an Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (IDEA) in Precision Medicine mechanism to fund research to support the development of best practice frameworks for precision medicine research relative to IDEA involving historically excluded populations.

Differences Matter: UCSF Precision Medicine is part of the next phase of the Differences Matter initiative, represented on the Stakeholder Advisory Council group tasked with supporting the focus area “Generate, Disseminate, and Apply New Knowledge” by advising on efforts to analyze and explore how race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and oppression play out in all of UCSF’s mission areas.