Our Team

Sophia Kass has an international diploma in Project Management from UC Berkeley Extension. Before coming to the United States in 2015, Sophia spearheaded a World AIDS Day campaign with the only sexual health center serving the underground LGBTQIA+ community in Beirut at the time, spreading awareness and shifting narratives away from rigid societal taboo and stigma. In 2016, she interned at the San Francisco LGBT Center where she organized a referral database and met with several of the city’s organizations providing HIV/AIDS medical and ancillary services, with the core objective of improving client navigation and handoff. Later, Sophia worked with the Transgender Law Center’s Positively Trans program coordinating a national network of TGNC BIPOC living with HIV/AIDS to tell their stories and generate data in an ongoing effort to advocate for a better quality of life, and to combat inequities and discrimination. Most recently, Sophia was the finance and operations manager for the Positive Women’s Network USA, where she previously had also been part of their policy fellowship and Gender Justice trainer programs.

Originally from Orlando, Florida, Frank is passionate about improving community health and equity. He has over 11 years of public health experience which began while volunteering for a local AIDS Service Organization in Central Florida. Frank has since worked and volunteered in both clinical and community settings where he administered HIV testing to patients, supported quality improvement efforts for health care teams, performed street outreach for the homeless, and delivered HIV and STI prevention education to LGBTQ+ youth. He was drawn to the progressive environment and diversity of San Francisco, as well as the history and contributions to the field of HIV/AIDS. Frank relocated to the city in 2016 where he immediately joined the San Francisco AIDS Foundation at Strut and later joined the San Francisco Department of Public Health the following year. He was recently involved in the city’s response to COVID-19 and MPX to help educate and prevent further spread by delivering accurate information to essential workers and other at-risk communities. In his free time, Frank enjoys playing the piano and is an avid supporter of the performing arts.

Dr. Susan Buchbinder is the Director of Bridge HIV at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and Clinical Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF. Dr. Buchbinder focuses her research on risk factors for HIV acquisition and interventions to prevent HIV infection, including HIV vaccines, PrEP, behavioral interventions, rectal microbicides and combination modalities. She serves in leadership positions in the HIV Vaccine and Prevention Trials Network, and has participated in numerous NIH and UCSF advisory committees including the AIDS Research Advisory Committee, Prevention Sciences Working Group, Office of AIDS Research Advisory Committee, the UCSF Center for AIDS Research Internal Advisory Board, and the UCSF AIDS Research Institute Scientific Council.

Dr. McFarland’s experience ranges from mentoring undergraduate students to mid-career faculty as well as providing training, technical assistance, and capacity building to personnel of local health departments and national ministries of health. He also serves as Joint-PI for the SFDPH Summer HIV/AIDS Research Program (SHARP) for underrepresented minority undergraduate students. He oversees UCSF’s training programs for visiting scholars from Africa and the Middle East and has directly mentored over 50 young investigators from 18 countries for degree and short-term training programs. Dr. McFarland’s long term capacity building goals are to increase the representation of minority scholars and health officials and ensure that trainees from biomedical disciplines are bridged to the methods, perspectives, and advances in prevention research from diverse social sciences fields.