Christina Homer, MD, PhD is a physician scientist in the Division of Infectious Diseases of the Department of Medicine. She is passionate about understanding fungal pathogens and enabling better diagnoses and treatments. She completed the UCSF Medical Scientist Training Program, where she discovered quorum sensing in the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans under the mentorship of Dr. Hiten Madhani.  This work was the first characterization of a quorum sensing system required for fungal virulence and revealed the system’s structure as an example of convergent evolution when compared to gram positive bacterial quorum sensing systems. Christina completed Internal Medicine Residency at UCSF and then continued in the Infectious Diseases Fellowship. She completed additional training in Immunocompromised and Transplant Infectious Diseases, a subspecialty which includes a number of patients with fungal infections. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Anita Sil, she studied the important human fungal pathogen Coccidioides. She discovered a family of Coccidioides proteases that are required for it to develop into its unique parasitic structure, known as the spherule. As a UCSF Physician Scientist Scholar, she aims to unlock the role of these proteases during infection, characterize novel secreted virulence factors, and use knowledge of the mysterious spherule to ultimately develop better treatments for coccidioidomycosis.

Josiah Gerdts, MD, PhD is an autoimmune neurologist in the Department of Neurology at UCSF. His research focuses on T cell antigen discovery to advance diagnostics and treatments for autoimmune neurologic disorders. Josiah completed his MD/PhD degrees at Washington University in St. Louis in the laboratory of Jeffrey Milbrandt, where he discovered fundamental regulatory steps in programmed axon destruction, which includes identifying that the protein SARM1 triggers catalytic NAD+ breakdown in injured axons. This work identified an essential and pharmacologically targetable step in axon degeneration, and it illuminated an evolutionarily ancient innate immune damage response mechanism. Josiah completed Neurology residency and fellowship in Autoimmune Neurology at UCSF supported by NIH R25 fellowship. As a postdoctoral fellow in Wendell Lim’s Lab at UCSF, Josiah developed a new synthetic biology approach for multiplexed discovery of T cell antigen targets. As a UCSF Physician-Scientist Scholar, Josiah will combine his expertise in autoimmune Neurology and synthetic biology to discover and characterize autoantigens driving autoimmune neurologic disorders and advance engineered cell therapy technologies for neurologic disorders.