Osher Center Fellows
Maria Chao, DrPH, MPA
Osher Fellow, NCCAM Postdoctoral Training Program in Research in Integrative Medicine (TRIM), Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, UCSF
Maria T. Chao, DrPH, MPA is currently a Research Fellow at the Osher Center. She received her masters in public policy and her doctorate in public health both at Columbia University, New York. Her research focuses on socio-medical factors of health behaviors particularly on the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in minority populations. Dr. Chao participated in the first national survey on women’s use of CAM, which included samples of four racial/ethnic groups. Her prior research also includes: examining the interaction between race/ethnicity with socioeconomic status, social networks, and acculturation on CAM usage patterns; exploring knowledge and beliefs of CAM among Chinese-American and African-American women; assessing how minorities’ use of CAM relates to access to and quality of conventional care, including cultural competency and empowerment; and racial/ethnic differences in disclosure of CAM use to conventional medical providers.
Dr. Chao is currently the principal investigator on a study using data from the National Health Interview Survey to examine whether variations in CAM use by social determinants constitute differences or disparities. She is developing a qualitative study to examine the effects of the community acupuncture model on healthcare access and health outcomes. Dr. Chao’s goals are to build linkages between public health and CAM and to understand the role of CAM in mitigating social health disparities.
Publications List > review
Steven Chen, MD
Bravewell Fellow, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, UCSF
Steven Chen, MD, is a Family Medicine Physician practicing at Asian Health Services, a community health center in Oakland Chinatown, serving a diverse pan-Asian immigrant/refugee community with limited English proficiency.
While at Stanford Medical School, he helped found an innovative program to train future physician leaders in community health and public service. After finishing his Famly Medicine residency at UCSF-San Francisco General Hospital, he was a Visiting Scholar at Tzu Chi Buddhist Hospital and Medical Center in Taiwan. He has also worked as a clinical volunteer in Paraguay, Guatemala, and Ecuador.
His focus and areas of interest have been on the integration of social justice, spirituality, and the compassionate delivery of care. His area of expertise is in working in cross-cultural, underserved settings.
As an Associate Fellow in the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, Dr. Chen has a particular interest in emotional literacy, self care, osteopathic manipulative medicine, and acupuncture.
Michael A. Cohn, PhD
Osher Fellow, NCCAM Postdoctoral Training Program in Research in Integrative Medicine (TRIM), Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, UCSF
Michael A. Cohn, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Osher Center. He received his PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan. His work focuses on positive emotions and the ways they influence people's focus of attention, their approach to solving problems, and how they invest their time and energy. He has worked on two randomized controlled trials of loving-kindness meditation, which provided some the first experimental evidence that learning skills for generating positive emotions can make long-lasting improvements in people's mental and physical health. People who experience more pride, amusement, love, and other positive feelings become more satisfied with their lives not just because they feel better, but because these feelings help them build serious and lasting skills for living well.
Dr. Cohn is currently involved in studying a number of other interventions, including a positive emotion skills training program for people with HIV and an online strengths-building program developed with the Gallup corporation.
He is interested in interventions based on positive affect and related coping skills, especially simple, robust, adaptable interventions that can be delivered in groups or over the internet. His goal at the Osher Center is to incorporate physiological and health outcome measures into his work, both to objectively demonstrate the benefits of positive emotion skills and to better understand the mechanisms by which they affect the body and the mind.
Matthew A. Gilmartin, MD
Osher Fellow, NCCAM Postdoctoral Training Program in Research in Integrative Medicine (TRIM), Osher Center, UCSF
Bravewell Fellow, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, UCSF
Matthew A. Gilmartin completed his training in medicine as part of the UCSF/UCB joint medical program and continued on to a post doctoral fellowship in medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before beginning the family medicine residency program at Sutter Medical Center in Santa Rosa. Dr. Gilmartin has a particular interest in osteopathy. In medical school he received training in osteopathic manipulation and wrote a Masters Thesis at UC Berkeley on the early history of the osteopathic profession, and continued to study the history of the profession as part of his postdoctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Dr. Gilmartin's research interests include clinical trials of manual therapies and a history of complementary and alternative therapies in the United States with a focus on the early history of the osteopathic profession. He has also had experience working with underserved Latino communities including working with the San Francisco Department of Health as a field research and coordinator on the Mission Childhood Immunization Study. He has traveled extensively in Central and South America and is fluent in Spanish.
Shieva Khayam-Bashi, MD
Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine
Director, Short-term Skilled Nursing Facility at SFGH
Bravewell Fellow, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine
Shieva Khayam-Bashi, MD, is Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF. She graduated from the University of California at Davis School of Medicine in 1993, and completed her residency in Family Medicine in 1996.
Dr. Khayam-Bashi is the Medical Director of the Short-term Skilled Nursing Facility at San Francisco General Hospital. She teaches medical students and residents on the wards of the hospital, in the outpatient Family Health Center, and at UCSF. Her areas of interest include: teaching compassion and humanism in medical education; promoting inter-disciplinary team models of care; improving end-of-life care; spirituality in medicine; care of under-served populations; and international health.
Akilesh Palanisamy, MD
Clinical Associate, Department of Family and Community Medicine
Bravewell Fellow, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine
Dr. Palanisamy is a family physician with a commitment to relationship-centered, compassionate care for patients of all ages. He believes that a doctor should be a partner and teacher in helping each individual attain optimal health. He has a longstanding interest in integrative medicine, particularly in ayurveda, applied kinesiology, and mind-body techniques. He has made several trips to India to study ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine) and has continued his study with practitioners in the US. He is also training in applied kinesiology, a holistic system that uses manual muscle testing to diagnose and treat imbalances. He completed the Mind-Body Medicine Training under Dr. James Gordon at Georgetown University Medical School and uses a variety of tools to address emotional and spiritual factors impacting health. He is a long-term practitioner of yoga and meditation.
Dr. Palanisamy received his B.A. in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University and his M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. While at UCSF, he published several scientific papers and organized conferences on alternative therapies. He also took a year off and worked at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine as education coordinator, developing classes and programs for patients and providers. He completed his residency in family medicine and served as Chief Resident at the Stanford-affiliated O'Connor Hospital in San Jose. He is currently a Clinical Instructor in the UCSF Department of Family and Community Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, and also practices urgent care at the Camino Medical Group in Mountain View. When not in clinic, he enjoys salsa dancing, tennis, entrepreneurship, and traveling.
