Leadership

David (Davey) M. Smith, MD, MAS, FACP, FIDSA, Director of ACTRI

Bio

• Joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2003
• Awarded HIV Researcher of the Year by the HIV Medical Association in 2010
• Promoted to full professor in 2012
• Became the co-director and principal investigator of the San Diego Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) in 2016
• Promoted to Head of Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health in 2017
• Became international protocol co-chair for the ACTIV-2 treatment study, part of the US government’s response to COVID-19 to find therapies for persons with early COVID-19 in 2020
• Appointed the Florence Seeley Riford Chair in AIDS Research at UC San Diego in 2020
• UCSD School of Medicine Mentoring Award in 2021
• Published >350 scientific publications and recognized by Clarivate as being in the top 1% of researchers in the world by scientific citations in 2022 and 2023
• Appointed Assistant Vice Chancellor of Clinical and Translational Research in 2023

Elizabeth (Liz) Johnson

Administrative Director

Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute | PREPARE Institute | The HIV Institute | San Diego Center for AIDS Research

liz@health.ucsd.edu 

Liz Johnson joined the ACTRI as their Administrative Director in August 2024. In this role, she oversees administrative and financial operations as well as contributes to the overall short- and long-term strategic planning of the ACTRI. With 25 years of leadership experience across healthcare, social services, and research administration, Liz brings a wealth of expertise in organizational development, strategic visioning, and operational excellence. Her expertise includes management, compliance, strategic planning, grant writing, and fundraising. Liz’s track record of success is demonstrated by her ability to drive organizational growth and impact.

Since joining UC San Diego Health Sciences in 2016, Liz has played a pivotal role in advancing key institutional programs. She served as the Administrative Director for the UC San Diego HIV Institute, the San Diego Center for AIDS Research, and the PREPARE Institute (Pandemic Response to Emerging Pathogens, Antimicrobial Resistance, and Equity). In each of these roles, she was instrumental in shaping strategic goals, initiatives, and innovative programming.

Before joining UC San Diego, Liz served as the Executive Director of Christie’s Place for 14 years, where she transformed the organization into a nationally recognized human services agency for women, children, and families impacted by HIV.

David Boyle

Co-Director of ACTRI Translational Research Technology (TRT) Division
ACTRI Executive Committee Member

dboyle@ucsd.edu
Phone: (858) 822-0784

Since joining the ACTRI leadership team in 2010, David Boyle, along with Translational Research Technology (TRT) co-director Paul Mills, has guided the TRT Division and transformed it into a one-stop shop of flexible laboratory-based services for translational studies. Under his leadership, the TRT laboratories have provided services for 99 biomarker projects, performed more than 18,000 biomarker assays, and processed more than 19,000 biosamples. In the past two years, Boyle has been instrumental in creating novel programs that integrate services to support molecular methods in clinical trials. He also oversaw the creation of the ACTRI-Cancer Center Biorepository, which is among seven individual biorepositories for UC San Diego investigators hosted by TRT, and the Rady-UC San Diego breast milk research repository. He collaborates with our partners on campus and beyond, including the Moores Cancer Center, Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego, and the San Diego Blood Bank. He is key personnel at UC San Diego on the UC San Francisco subaward for biorepositories, "Engaging University of California Stakeholders for Biorespository Research." A major focus is applying rigorous criteria for assay development and validation to small solid tissue samples in a clinical trial setting.

David Boyle is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology at UC San Diego. His research has focused on inflammation of joint tissue, the role of the fibroblast-like synoviocyte and the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis. He is an internationally recognized researcher in the development and application of biomarker analysis to clinical research, in particular, synovial pathology in rheumatoid arthritis.

Christina Chambers, PhD, MPH

Professor of Pediatrics at UC San Diego and Director of Clinical Research, Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego and Rady Children's Hospital
ACTRI Executive Committee Member

chchambers@ucsd.edu
Phone: (858) 246-1704

Christina Chambers, PhD, MPH, joined the ACTRI Executive Committee in 2012. Dr. Chambers is a professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego and director of Clinical Research for the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego and Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego (RCHSD). She has been instrumental in smoothing the interactions between researchers at UC San Diego and Rady Children's researchers, working closely with ACTRI's Mark Wallace, and in establishing a research-only breast milk biorepository at UCSD/Rady Children's, along with ACTRI's David Boyle.

Dr. Chambers is a perinatal epidemiologist whose research is focused on environmental exposures and pregnancy and child health outcomes. She co-directs the UC San Diego Center for the Promotion of Maternal Health and Infant Development, and leads a number of national and international clinical research projects addressing medication and vaccine safety in pregnancy. She has conducted extensive research on improved diagnosis, prevention and treatment for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders. Dr. Chambers received a PhD in public health/epidemiology in 2002 from the joint doctoral program at UC San Diego and San Diego State University. She is the author of more than 100 research publications and has served as president of the US Teratology Society, as well as president of the North American Organization of Teratology Information Services.

Colin Depp, PhD

Director of ACTRI Education, Training and Career Development
ACTRI Executive Committee Member

cdepp@ucsd.edu
Phone: (858) 822-4251

Colin Depp, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, a faculty member at the Sam and Rose Stein Institute for Research on Aging at UC San Diego and a staff psychologist in the VA San Diego. He became director of ACTRI's Education, Training and Career Development Unit in 2014, after serving as associate director of the unit from 2011 to 2014. He has spearheaded multiple ACTRI initiatives, including the Mentoring Core, research published on training methods, the Clinical Research Enhancement through Supplemental Training-Master of Advanced Studies (CREST-MAS) behavioral science curricula and the Day of Translational Science symposium. Dr. Depp has extensive experience in collaborative interventional research in the area of mental health and wireless technology, receiving continuous funding from NIH, VA, foundation and other sources for 10 years. He leads a multidisciplinary research group comprised of clinicians, clinical trialists, behavioral scientists, community health workers, biostatisticians, software engineers and patient stakeholders. An accomplished translational researcher, teacher and clinician, Dr. Depp has mentored more than 40 trainees through epidemiologic, translational, randomized, interventional and implementation science studies. Dr. Depp has served on multiple editorial boards, NIH and international review panels and collaborative networks, and has published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and commentaries.

Dr. Depp received a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Louisville. He then completed a pre-doctoral internship at the Palo Alto Veteran's Administration and a National Research Service Award post-doctoral fellowship in the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry at UC San Diego.

Kathryn A. Gold

Co-director of the ACTRI Division of Clinical Research Services (CRS)

kagold@ucsd.edu

Dr. Gold co-leads the CRS with Mark S. Wallace, MD, who has served as director of the division since 2010. Dr. Gold joined ACTRI as associate director of CRS in July 2017. Dr. Gold co-directs the day-to-day functions of the unit, which manages a dedicated research clinic, voucher applications and the Scientific Review Committee. The research clinic includes 18,000 square feet of state-of-the-art facilities to support all phases of clinical research and presently supports nearly 300 clinical research projects each year.

Dr. Gold is an associate professor at UC San Diego Department of Medicine and board-certified in internal medicine and medical oncology. Her clinical and translational research interests include lung and head and neck cancer, with a focus on target therapies and immunotherapies. Prior to joining UC San Diego Health, Dr. Gold was an assistant professor in the Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Dr. Gold completed a fellowship in medical oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center, where she was selected for her clinical and leadership abilities to serve as chief fellow. She completed a residency in internal medicine at Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Dr. Gold received her medical degree from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Gold has presented her work at both national and international medical conferences. She has coauthored many articles, and her research has appeared in The Lancet Oncology, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and The New England Journal of Medicine, among others. She is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Association of Cancer Research and the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.

Michael Hogarth, MD

Director of ACTRI Biomedical Informatics
ACTRI Executive Committee Member

mihogarth@ucsd.edu

Michael Hogarth, MD, joined the ACTRI Executive Committee in 2017. Dr. Hogarth is an Internist and UCSD faculty in the Division of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) and currently serves as UCSD’s inaugural Clinical Research Information Officer (CRIO). As CRIO, Dr. Hogarth leads efforts to align and integrate resources in Information Services with clinical research informatics, including ACTRI services. He also develops and optimizes strategies to use our current technology and systems to support the integration of research with patient care, including the use of the electronic health record (EHR) for clinical research. Dr. Hogarth graduated from the biomedical engineering program at Texas A&M University and received his medical degree from the University of Texas-Southwestern. Dr. Hogarth completed Internal Medicine training and a medical informatics fellowship at UC Davis. He subsequently joined the faculty at UC Davis where he practiced as an Internist in the Division of General Medicine and served as Vice Chair of Informatics in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine with primary responsibility over the laboratory information system.  Dr. Hogarth has taught and conducted research in medical informatics in the University of California for over two decades and currently teaches in the UCSD informatics curriculum, the ACGME-accredited clinical informatics fellowship, and the DBMI internship program for undergraduate and high school students. His current research interests include the use of clinical natural language processing,  large language models, and knowledge representation with biomedical ontologies. He has won the prestigious UC Sutter award for innovations in information technology and has been a primary contributor on several informatics endeavors including UC-Research eXchange (UC-ReX), pSCANNER, the I-SPY2 adaptive breast cancer trial, the WISDOM breast cancer screening trial, the California Integrated Vital Records System (Cal-IVRS), and CTSA’s ENACT (Evolve to Next Generation Accrual to Clinical Trials).

Eric Mah

Assistant Dean for Clinical and Translational Research 
ACTRI Executive Committee Member

emah@ucsd.edu
Phone: (858) 822-4700

Eric Mah joined the ACTRI Executive Committee in 2015. He is the Assistant Dean for Clinical and Translational Research at UC San Diego. Mah is responsible for clinical research administration across Health Sciences and has administrative oversight of the clinical research administrative core units, including the ACTRI, the Office of Clinical Trials Administration (OCTA), the Office of Coverage Analysis Administration (OCAA), and the Human Research Protections Program (HRPP). He is also responsible for ACTRI affiliations and strategic and operational management. Mah has extensive experience in research administration and compliance. Prior to joining UC San Diego, he served as senior director of research compliance at UC San Francisco and program director of regulatory, knowledge and support for UCSF's Clinical and Translational Science Institute. In these positions, including regulatory director for UC BRAID (a consortium of the five UC academic medical centers), Mah provided guidance and direction to address research compliance regulations and policies in clinical research. He was responsible for identifying emerging issues, leading projects and process efficiency redesigns, coordinating internal and external communications, and ensuring that regulatory matters were managed in a timely and appropriate way.

Murray Stein

Co-Director of ACTRI Translational Research Alliance
ACTRI Executive Committee Member

mstein@ucsd.edu
Phone: (858) 534-6451

Murray Stein, MD, MPH, joined the ACTRI Executive Committee in 2016. Dr. Stein is a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Family Medicine and Public Health at UC San Diego. He has successfully led the ACTRI Pilot Project Program since 2012 and has demonstrated remarkable strength in helping ACTRI create infrastructures that facilitate collaboration and actively bring various groups together. He continues to have oversight of the pilot program. In addition, he serves as the faculty lead for the UC Cures for Alzheimer’s Initiative RFA launched in early 2016 by the University of California.

Dr. Stein is also a staff psychiatrist at the VA San Diego Healthcare System. He graduated from the University of Manitoba and completed his residency and post-residency fellowship at the University of Manitoba, the University of Toronto and at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He subsequently completed a master of public health degree at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

Dr. Stein’s research interests include the epidemiology, neurobiology, and treatment of anxiety and trauma-related disorders, especially social phobia, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. He has written or co-written over 550 peer-reviewed scientific articles on these topics, including in journals such as Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, American Journal of Psychiatry, and JAMA Psychiatry. His federally funded research has included studies of interventions for anxiety disorders in primary care, pharmacological approaches to treatment-resistant anxiety and stress-related disorders, and functional neuroimaging research in anxiety and trauma-related disorders. Dr. Stein is Co-Editor-in-Chief for UpToDate in Psychiatry, and Deputy Editor for the journal Biological Psychiatry. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF), and a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP).

Mark Wallace, MD

Director of ACTRI Division of Clinical Research
ACTRI Executive Committee Member

mswallace@ucsd.edu
Phone: (858) 822-0776

Mark Wallace, MD, joined the leadership team at ACTRI in 2010 and has overseen the establishment of the ACTRI Center for Clinical Research (CCR), including the opening of a Phase I clinical trials unit with an investigational pharmacy. Dr. Wallace has been responsible for extensive growth in the CCR, which provides assistance with study design and biostatistics analysis, nursing and clinical coordinator services, and regulatory and pharmacy services. He has overseen the growth of the clinical coordinator core from two coordinators to 11, and the biostatistics team from 1.5 to four. With the help of Christina Chambers, he also has been instrumental in establishing a larger ACTRI presence at Rady Children's Hospital and is currently on a steering committee to streamline the clinical trials application process.

Dr. Wallace is the Chair, Division of Pain Medicine in the Department of Anesthesiology of University of California at San Diego, which is actively involved in clinical care, teaching, and research. A nationally recognized lecturer on pain medicine, he has extensive experience in all aspects of pain management and is involved in numerous ongoing clinical trials for the management of pain, including acute, chronic, and cancer related pain. Under his direction the UCSD Center for Pain Medicine has received the American Pain Society Center of Excellence Award in 2010 and 2014. His research interests include human experimental pain, spinal drug delivery, and the use of the cannabinoids in pain management. Dr. Wallace earned his medical degree at Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska. He then completed an internship in general surgery at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, DC, a residency in anesthesiology at the University of Maryland, and a Fellowship in Pain Medicine at UCSD Medical Center. He has authored and coauthored more than 180 articles, abstracts, books, and book chapters concerning pain research and management. Dr. Wallace is an associate editor of The Clinical Journal of Pain and sits on numerous other editorial boards.

Samuel R. Ward, PT, PhD

Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery & Radiology
Affiliate Professor of Bioengineering
Interim Vice Dean of Research, School of Medicine
Vice Chair of Research and Innovation- Orthopaedic Surgery
Director, Device Acceleration Center, ACTRI

s1ward@health.ucsd.edu

Phone: (858)534-4918

View Dr. Ward's Bio Page

Samuel R. Ward, P.T., Ph.D. is a Professor in the Departments of Orthopaedic Surgery, Radiology, and Bioengineering at UC San Diego. He is the Director of Translational Research in the School of Medicine, the Vice-Chair of Research and Innovation in Orthopaedic Surgery, Director of the Device Acceleration Center, and Director of the Muscle Physiology Laboratory.

Dr. Ward received his PhD from USC (1999-2003) and moved to UC San Diego for a post-doctoral fellowship (2003-2006). He is a clinician-scientist and his research program focuses on musculoskeletal design and plasticity. He has published 175 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has been continuously funded by the NIH, DoD, and other agencies since he started his faculty appointment in 2006. His scientific accomplishments include defining the structural features of human skeletal muscle that predict function in the extremities and spine. This work has been extended to understand normal and pathological muscle biology and physiology in the presence of joint disease. His current focus is on understanding chronic muscle atrophy and cell death in mature adults, with an emphasis on the use of stem cells and regenerative medicine approaches to treat these disease processes. His work has led to career achievement awards including the Kappa Delta Award from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, and Marion Williams Award from the American Physical Therapy Association. He is also a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Orthopaedic Research Society, American Physical Therapy Association, and a Distinguished Alumn at the University of Southern California and California State University Long Beach.

Dr. Ward is also an avid craftsman, photographer, and outdoorsman. His artistic work has been featured and won awards at several local and state competitions.

Gary S. Firestein, MD

Distinguished Professor of Medicine
Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences at UC San Diego

transmed@health.ucsd.edu
Phone: (858) 822-0591

View Dr. Firestein's Bio Page

Gary S. Firestein, MD, is the senior associate vice chancellor for health sciences at UC San Diego. Dr. Firestein joined the faculty at UC San Diego School of Medicine as assistant professor of Medicine in 1988. Four years later, he was recruited by Gensia, Inc. to be director of immunology, where he supervised drug discovery efforts focusing on the potential role of purines in inflammation.

In 1996, he returned to UC San Diego where he served as chief of the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology from 1998 until 2010. In 2008, he became the dean of Translational Medicine. In 2010, he became associate vice chancellor of translational medicine and director of the newly established ACTRI, which is funded in part through the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program. In 2020, the ACTRI was awarded its third consecutive successful NCATS CTSA U54 Award under Dr. Firestein's leadership, with an additional $55 M over the next 5 years dedicated to the advancement of clinical and translational science. In 2020, he was named senior associate vice chancellor for health sciences.

He is the co-founder of lgnyta, Inc., a biotech company that went public in 2015 and was acquired by Roche in 2018. Its lead drug entrectinib was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for certain cancers. He is the co-creator of the University of California CTSA consortium called UC BRAID and served as its chairperson from 2013-2015. During his career, Dr. Firestein has served as the principal investigator on grants totaling more than $150 million in research funding, including numerous NIH and commercial-sponsored research grants and clinical trials.

Dr. Firestein's research interest focuses on the pathogenesis and treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. He was among the first to map the cytokine profile of RA and demonstrate the dominance of macrophage and fibroblast products. These studies played a pivotal role in the development of highly effective anti-TNF and other anti-cytokine therapies for RA.

More recently, his research has included studies to evaluate immune dysfunction in individuals at risk for developing rheumatoid arthritis. His Google Scholar H index is 109 with over 50,000 citations. Dr. Firestein has received the Carol-Nachman Prize for Rheumatology, the Arthritis Foundation Lee C. Howley Sr Prize for Arthritis Research, the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Distinguished Investigator Award, and the Jane Wyman Humanitarian Award. He has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians and holds a Doctor of Science (hc) from University of Glasgow, awarded in 2019. Most recently, he was elected as a Master of the ACR and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Dr. Firestein has served as editor and then the editor-in-chief of Firestein and Kelley's Textbook of Rheumatology from the 7th through 12th editions. He has written over 400 articles and book chapters, and is past deputy editor of Arthritis & Rheumatism. Dr. Firestein is past chairperson of the FDA Arthritis Advisory Committee and has served on the Board of Directors of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), ACR Research and Education Foundation, as chairperson of the ACR Committee on Journal Publications, on the ACR Committee on Research, on the Arthritis Foundation Research Committee, on the Board of Directors for the Veteran's Medical Research Foundation, and on the NIH National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) Advisory Council.