Our Team

Maria Lopez, PharmD is a pharmacist specialist clinician and administrator with experience in implementing clinical services in a community pharmacy. Dr. Lopez oversaw the implementation of HCV point of care testing and One Stop PrEP at Mission Wellness, the first such community pharmacy programs in California. Her work in community pharmacy aims to increase PrEP uptake and HIV prevention efforts in pharmacy, with a focus on at risk populations not engaged in care. She has published and taught pharmacists locally and nationally on the topics of PrEP implementation and testing in a pharmacy. Dr. Lopez also is an Assistant Clinical Professor in the UCSF Department of Clinical Pharmacy and has been an active CBA specialist with getSFcba since 2019.

Nikole Trainor, MPH, MCHES was born and raised in Alameda CA. As a Bay Area native she is passionate about improving the quality of life for all people, specifically among Black/African American communities, as it relates to Sexual and Drug User Health disparities. For the past 25 Years, Nikole Trainor has worked as a Public Health Practitioner, fearlessly challenging systemic inequities, increasing awareness and access to innovative HIV biomedical interventions (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis, Post Exposure Prophylaxis), Lab-based HIV/STI/HCV self-testing resources, and thriving to changing the current narrative about HIV/STI related stigma by collaborating with influential community partners to create safe spaces for communities of color to feel empowered to openly celebrate their sexuality, sexual freedom, and sexual expression. Because GOOD sex isn’t just safe sex. It’s inclusive, it’s void of shame, and it’s for all of us. Everyone deserves to Have GOOD Sex.

Brandon Mizroch, MD/MBBS previously served as the Provider Network Supervisor with the Louisiana Department of Health, leading the office of STD/HIV/Hepatitis Academic Detailing Program and now leads educational efforts with the Utah AIDS Education and Training Center (AETC). He received his MD/MBBS from the University of Queensland/Ochsner Clinical School Program in November of 2016. Since 2017, he has worked with hundreds of doctors in the state of Louisiana on HIV prevention, Syphilis/Congenital Syphilis screening and treatment, and HCV treatment and prevention best practices. Dr. Mizroch joined getSFcba as CBA Specialist after he participated as an attendee in the first Public Health Detailing Institute and for the past several years, along with Alyson Decker, has led public health detailing TA work with the program.

Oscar Macias, MPH has 30 years of experience in Public Health. He is the Quality Improvement Manager for the Community Health Equity & Promotion Branch (CHEP). Oscar has always worked towards improving the health outcomes of Latino communities with a focus on gay men and trans women. Most of his experience revolves around HIV/STI/Hep-C/Overdose prevention and Drug User’s Health. Oscar’s activation during the COVID-19 pandemic was crucial setting up community-based sites to make testing, vaccines, and treatment accessible to disproportionately affected populations. He also worked tirelessly to ensure fair vaccine access to BIPOC populations to stop the spread of mpox among the most affected communities, always bringing an equity lens to his work. In his current position, Oscar leads the efforts to develop performance measures for all CHEP programs and their funded Health Access Points (HAPs).

Leisha McKinley-Beach, MPH is an author, thought leader, inspirational strategist, trainer, and community organizer. Mrs. McKinley-Beach is the founder and CEO of The Black Public Health Academy and Leisha.org. Leisha also serves as a consultant who provides training and community engagement on Black health issues including HIV, medical mistrust, racism in public health, and cultural humility. She has been fortunate to participate in nationally recognized projects such as PrEP in Black America, Risk to Reasons-national movement to retire the word “risk” associated with sexual health for women, the Florida Department of Health Sistas Organizing to Survive (SOS), a first-ever statewide campaign to address HIV among Black women, and initiatives to engage faith-based communities in the HIV response across the South.

In addition to health-related work, Leisha finds time to invest in her other passions that include music and inspiration. Leisha is a 2023 inductee into the University of Florida College of Health and Human Performance Hall of Fame.

Emily Valadao, MPH (she/her) has nine years of experience in providing community-centered, whole-person care for people who use drugs. Her specialization is providing capacity building and technical assistance around syringe access services, harm reduction, and overdose prevention. As a People Who Use Drugs (PWUD) Sexual Health Program Coordinator program coordinator, Emily works to ensure health equity and prioritize the health and safety of those in need by coordinating efforts and collaborating effectively with front-line workers.

Chioma Nnaji, MEd, MPH has 20 years in the fields of HIV/AIDS, sexual health, equity, racial justice, and immigrant health. As a Program Director at the Multicultural AIDS Coalition (MAC), she developed services for people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS; advocated for policy changes; applied cultural competency frameworks to training public health and clinical professionals; and established community engaged research projects that are ‘for, by and with’ the people most impacted by inequities. Serving as PI or Community PI on various projects, she primarily conducts qualitative studies using participatory methods.

Since 2016, she has been immersed in Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) as a Project Lead on PCORI Engagement Awards. She currently is the Project Lead for Culturally Based Capacity Building for African Immigrant Patient Partners (#EACB-26965), which aims to implement a peer-to-peer culturally based capacity building approach that builds and sustains a national infrastructure for organizations indigenous to the African immigrant community to engage meaningfully in the PCORI enterprise and lead PCOR/Comparative Effective Research partnerships. For the past 3 years, Chioma has served as an SNS-focused and racial equity TA provider with getSFcba.

Sarah Illling is an independent consultant in the Social Justice sector with nearly 12 years’ experience in evaluation, project management, research, data analysis, and strategic learning. Sarah strives to bring a thoughtful, antiracist, queer, feminist, disability justice lens that centers the expertise and wellbeing of everyone impacted by her work. She devotes much of her time to social sector consulting and ~one-third to community care which deeply informs her practice. She is currently serving as the Lead Evaluator for the getSFcba program.

Alyson Decker, NP, MPH is a Clinical Prevention Consultant and nurse practitioner with Disease Prevention and Control at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. She helped develop San Francisco’s first HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) detailing program. Her role consists of detailing with community providers to increase PrEP prescribing and promote best prescribing practices. She trains healthcare providers and frontline staff on improving sexual healthcare and STD testing and treatment. She also sees patients at San Francisco City Clinic. Alyson has spearheaded Public Health Detailing related TA for getSFcba including the creation of Syndemics-focused Public Health Detailing Institutes.

Shannon Weber, MSW is a dedicated social entrepreneur with 25 years of leadership experience, known for pioneering successful public health initiatives and facilitating impactful change. As the Director and Founder of PleasePrEPMe.org, she launched a bilingual (English/Spanish) Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) Provider Directory and expanded services to a national level. Shannon recently led the development of a health equity based global oncology corporate giving strategy at a Fortune 500 company. Shannon excels at capacity building, training and facilitation, creating community, and connecting people with the necessary tools for excellent outcomes. Her expertise extends to stakeholder training, workforce development for health departments and community-based organizations and implementing programs on trauma-informed care. She is committed to using technology as a tool for supporting decision-making and increasing access ford communities, as seen in her work with digital platforms supporting sexual and reproductive health. With a Master of Social Work degree from Tulane University, Shannon brings a Justice oriented perspective and a deep understanding of systems theory to her work. She is also the author of Show Up Hard: A Road Map for Helpers in Crisis, and a dedicated facilitator and coach, supporting leaders and communities in navigating change and finding meaningful solutions. Shannon was awarded the 2018 UCSF
Chancellor Award for Public Service and was recognized in 2023 by Advocate for Community Wellness with a Champion for Health Equity Award.

Pierre-Cedric Crouch, NP is a psychiatric-mental health and adult nurse practitioner working in outpatient community mental health in San Francisco and in private practice in Portland. His goal is to incorporate mental health and substance use care into Hep C and HIV prevention and treatment. He grew up in New Orleans, LA where he obtained his BSN from LSU Health Science Center. He later moved to San Francisco, CA, earning his MSN and PhD from UCSF. In his career, he helped develop an inpatient addiction medicine consult service, the largest nurse-led PrEP health program, a Hep C treatment program in a syringe access center, and the first PrEP 2-1-1 program in the USA.

Douglas White, MD is an emergency medicine physician at the Alameda Health System, Highland Hospital in Oakland, California where he directs the HIV, HCV, and Syphilis Screening Program. Since 2004, he has advocated for routine HIV screening in US emergency departments through platforms of implementation science research, expert guidance and technical assistance, and health policy reform and advocacy. He pioneered early integration of opt-out universal HIV screening into standard emergency department care, the use electronic health record algorithms to support screening processes, and the delivery of rapid antiretroviral therapy for emergency department patients newly diagnosed with HIV. Over the past 20 years, he has shared his expertise with health jurisdictions both locally and nationally by providing webinar-based trainings, grand rounds presentations, technical advising, and screening toolkit development in the field of ED-based HIV screening implementation and linkage to care.

Andy Scheer, LCSW is the Ending the HIV Epidemic Community Program Coordinator for San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH)’s HIV Health Services. He worked as a bilingual (English/Spanish) Medical Social Worker for nine years at SFDPH’s San Francisco City Clinic where he focused on low barrier, rapid entry and re-entry into care for people with HIV who faced complex insurance and other barriers to care engagement. In 2014, Andy co-founded the SF HIV Frontline Organizing Group (SF HIV FOG) a grassroots community organizing effort focused on capacity-building, professional development, and cross-agency collaboration among San Francisco’s client-facing workers in the field of HIV and is one of the co-authors of the SF HIV FOG Mentor Program (FMP) which furthers FOG’s key goals by supporting new workers in the field of HIV care and prevention and drug-user health.

Mazdak Mazarei (he/him) is Senior Director of Equity & Health Justice at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation where he leads and oversees the organization’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) initiatives. Mazdak has more than 20 years’ history providing capacity building assistance to the nation’s HIV workforce, informed by his experiences providing direct services at AIDS service organizations in the Bay Area and lessons learned from staff at the agencies he’s worked with across the country. During this time, Mazdak supported CDC-funded community-based organizations, clinics and health departments to better operationalize their JEDI-related values while implementing evidenced-based interventions.

Montica Levy, MPH currently serves as a Health Educator for HIV, STI, and other communicable disease-related projects at the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH). Previously, she directed San Francisco City Clinic’s nationally regarded biomedical prevention (HIV PrEP and Doxy-PEP) program, and was SFDPH’s first Citywide PrEP Coordinator, overseeing citywide PrEP implementation efforts under Project PrIDE. In addition, she carries a wealth of experience in transgender health, having served in multiple roles focused on HIV prevention for transgender women, as well as having served as Program Manager for the first publicly provided transgender surgery access program in the United States, based at SFDPH.

Alan McCord is currently eLearning Writer/Editor at HealthHIV. Having lived on both coasts and in Ohio working in the HIV field for more 30 years, Alan has been involved in HIV prevention and treatment education by designing and directing national and regional programs that integrate accessible educational content with community information needs. He has worked for various local, regional, and national programs, including the San Francisco Department of Public Health Capacity Building Assistance program, PleasePrEPMe, Project Inform, National Task Force on AIDS Prevention, Planned Parenthood Essex County, NE Ohio Task Force on AIDS, and Tri-County AIDS Coalition. Alas has been a technical writer with getSFcba for the past period, supporting the development of several CDC-cleared toolkits.

Erin Antunez has been working in the field of harm reduction and HIV prevention and treatment since starting as a volunteer community health outreach worker at the Santa Cruz AIDS Project in 1998. Throughout her career, Erin has played pivotal roles in various programs aimed at promoting sexual health and preventing the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, ranging from being a frontline navigator escorting people with HIV to care appointments, to coordinating a diverse team of Disease Intervention Specialists and Navigators offering linkage to care and treatment, partner services, and navigation support. Erin has a special focus working in working with LGBTQ+ people, people experiencing homelessness, and people who use drugs. Her passions include health promotion for both clients and staff and lowering barriers to care.

Jillian Banks-Kong has been in graphic design for over 20 years. She has worked with a wide variety of clients in the retail, education and public service sectors. She is particularly grateful to be involved in projects that support marginalized communities, especially trans and queer youth. Jillian also has a degree in Ceramic Sculpture from California College of the Art. Her sculpture has been in galleries and collections nationally. Jillian has partnered with getSFcba for the past period to help create compelling designs for CDC-cleared toolkits and other resource materials.

Lorren Dangerfield, MSW(c) is the Pathways Coordinator with the Center of Learning & Innovation (CLI) at the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH). She is a proud San Francisco Native splitting her time between the Bayview and Fillmore neighborhoods. Lorren is passionate about social justice, working on local campaigns for youth like, “Free MUNI for Youth” and “Ethnic Studies for All.” She has worked with a diverse group of youth in health education, college access and in college success programs. She graduated with a degree in Sociology and American Multicultural Studies from Sonoma State University and will be finishing a Masters degree in social work at the San Francisco State University. Lorren has over 5 years of experience offering PrEP and social service navigation for People Living With HIV (PLWHIV), and helped to jumpstart long-acting injectable PrEP in one of the city’s largest clinics serving people experiencing homelessness and who have high behavioral health needs.

Todd Watkins has worked in the field of HIV/HCV/STI for the past twelve years, with the last five years working in the San Francisco Department of Health (SFDPH) in a variety of roles. He is currently a Health Program Coordinator for the Community Health and Equity Promotion Branch, where he is the lead trainer for SFDPH’s HCV/HIV/STI test counseling program and Program Liaison for two Health Access Points for MSM and youth. He was a Community Health Educator with The Desert Aids Project, Workforce Development Lead/Supervisor for SF City Clinic, and the Case Investigation and Contact Tracing Training Coordinator COVID-19 Command Center. He has 22 years of lived experience with drug and alcohol dependency, sex work, domestic violence, and incarceration. He brings this lived experience, non-profit background and commitment to health and social justice to his work.

Moctezuma García, PhD has over 20 years of experience addressing access and engagement to HIV-related services for Black and Latino/a/x sexual and gender minorities (LSGM). His research places an emphasis on the implications of health inequities based on social stratification and the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender for historically excluded racial and highly marginalized populations. He led a CDC-funded demonstration project (1 out of 4 in the nation) to implement Molecular HIV Surveillance (MHS) for the Houston Health Department. He was responsible for establishing a community advisory board and supplement HIV Cluster Detection and Response (CDR) interventions with Social Network Strategy to strengthen access to HIV services for LSGMs and their social networks throughout Houston.

Joshua Cristantiello, MA is a Spanish linguist pulled into disease intervention by the COVID-19 pandemic. He has helped to manage health programs related to disease intervention and outbreak response for the past four years. Joshua works with an interdisciplinary team in the Disease Prevention and Control Branch to provide cross training to Disease Intervention Specialists and case investigators to ensure sufficient surge capacity for future outbreaks.

Rachel Grinstein is the Viral Hepatitis Coordinator for the San Francisco Department of Public Health Community Health Equity & Promotion (CHEP) branch and is a part of CHEP’s Wellness Initiative for Sexual Health, Equity & Safer use (WISHES) team. She is also a member of End Hep C SF (EHCSF), representing SFDPH in their Coordinating Committee and acting as Co-Lead for the Community Research & Data Stewardship workgroup. Rachel supports community partners’ efforts to eliminate hepatitis C through staff trainings, materials development and program support, and strengthens community partnerships by facilitating HCV care coordination meetings, building relationships, and supporting collaboration between programs and individuals. These efforts are all bolstered by the work of Rachel’s colleagues at CHEP and of End Hep C SF and its members.

Angelo “Asa” Clemenzi-Allen, MD is board-certified Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine physician who leads HIV programming for San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Jail Health. He completed internal medicine residency and infectious diseases fellowship at UCSF, where his research has focused on social determinants of health with an emphasis on evaluating clinical outcomes for people living with and at risk for HIV who experience housing instability and who are justice-system involved. Asa has led projects that enhance our understanding of how unstable living arrangements impact HIV care metrics across a continuum of housing instability, including virologic suppression, uptake of routine primary care, and acute care utilization. He also aims to design and implement patient centered clinical care models to improve retention in care for homeless, unstably housed, and justice system-involved persons.

Geoffrey Hart-Cooper, MD is the Medical Director of Stanford’s Virtual PrEP Program for Adolescents and Young Adults and a primary care pediatrician. He completed an applied epidemiology fellowship in the Divisions of HIV and STD Prevention at the CDC and has focused on adolescent and young adult sexual
health since. During his pediatric residency at the University of California – San Francisco, he developed PrEP provider trainings and conducted a national adolescent provider survey regarding PrEP knowledge, attitudes and practices. As an HIV prevention specialist for getSFcba, he has worked with various Health Departments and organizations to develop and implement PrEP telehealth programs. His expertise focuses on leveraging telemedicine to improve PrEP care for adolescents and young adults.

Vincent Fuqua, PsyD is a Health Program Coordinator in the Community Health Equity Promotion (CHEP) Branch and Office of Health Equity at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Dr. Fuqua’s professional experience with the Health Department spans 21 years, working on numerous projects targeting men who have sex with men (MSM), including vaccine trials and behavioral interventions. His foci of expertise include community planning, community organizing and health education, with an emphasis on African American MSM. He coordinated the development and implementation of the African American Action Plan as well as the Black Men Testing Project. Currently, he is CHEP’s African American specialist/liaison for all local, statewide, and national efforts. He has consulted with Sociometric, Black Men’s Project, as well as NASTAD regarding African American MSM, and has been published several times for his work around African American Gay/MSM. Dr. Fuqua completed his doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at the California Center of Integral Studies where he explored how internalized racism among black gay men influences their risk for HIV and other health disparities.

Lluvia ‘Rain’ Ramirez has been working in the HIV Prevention Field since 2007, where they started off as a Social Networks recruiter because of their popularity in doing drag in Milwaukee, WI. They served as the TGNC Youth HIV Prevention Program Manager of CDC’s PS17-1704, also known as the VOICES project at the Broadway Youth Center, a program of Howard Brown Health. There, Lluvia was committed to creating safe spaces and programming to help dismantle systems that cause barriers for Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Youth leading safe, fruitful and visible lives. Lluvia has been a part of various leadership programs such as the Wisconsin Leadership Fellowship for People of Color, Illinois Getting to Zero Campaign, Howard Brown Leadership Fellowship and the NMAC Reclaiming Our Place at the Table policy and advocacy program. Through getSFcba, Lluvia has been a CBA specialist for the past 3 years supporting TA efforts around Social Network Strategy implementation.

Sarah Jane Smith, MPH, MA has more than 15 years of experience working on public health issues in the areas of reproductive health, racial justice, vaccine equity, immigrant rights and worker health through public health programming, implementation and evaluation, grassroots organizing, health education, and capacity building. She has experience working with federally qualified health centers, domestic and global non-profit organizations, academic institutions, worker’s centers, federal, state, county and city agencies on a range of public health and social issues. Sarah Jane is inspired by critical public health perspectives that emphasize the “upstream” social determinants of health. Her current interests and passions include strategic facilitation, training, health equity and working in partnership with organizations to provide training and technical assistance on capacity building. She has also been an Evaluation and Capacity Building Coach with the Capacity Building Center for States for the last 3 years.

Kristefer Stojanovski, PhD, MPH is a Research Assistant Professor and Research Director at Tulane University in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Kristefer has been conducting community-based mixed methods and applied research since 2010. His research explores the social and structural determinants to sexual health and HIV outcomes among key populations in the U.S., Southeastern Europe, and Africa.

Kristefer’s work interrogates how stigma drives HIV risk and infection using complex systems theory, agent-based, and multilevel modeling. Kristefer also translates his research into policy and decision-making. Through getSFcba, he provides technical assistance to Health Departments and community organizations to develop their high-impact HIV testing strategies, with a focus on the use of the Social Network Strategy. Kristefer also supports learning on evaluation and monitoring efforts on public health program.

Phillip Coffin MD, MIA is a board-certified and practicing internist, infectious disease specialist, and addiction medicine specialist. He directs the Center on Substance Use and Health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, including clinical trials assessing medications for multiple substance use disorders and interventions for opioid safety, overdose prevention, HIV prevention, and Hepatitis C treatment. Dr. Phillip Coffin also conducts several studies into the impacts of changing opioid prescribing practices on vulnerable populations, substance use epidemiology, and initiatives addressing substance use and opioid safety in clinical care. Dr. Coffin is prepared to offer several webinars on study results to be released over the next several years focused on biobehavioral strategies addressing substance use and HIV.

Albert Liu MD, MPH is the Clinical Research Director at Bridge HIV at the SFDPH. He has led clinical and behavioral studies of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention over the last 19 years. He is leading local PrEP implementation efforts as Chair of the PrEP Committee of the Getting to Zero Consortium San Francisco and spearheaded a cross-county effort to develop a regional approach to RAPID ART linkage and initiation in the Bay Area. He is committed to ensuring equitable implementation of long-acting injectable PrEP in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also Protocol Chair for an implementation science study of long-acting injectable cabotegravir/rilpivirine for HIV treatment in transgender women and with Dr. Fuchs, developed PrEPmate, a CDC-endorsed evidence-based digital intervention to support PrEP persistence.

Hyman Scott MD, MPH is board certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases and is the Clinical Research Medical Director at Bridge HIV at the SFDPH. He also provides care for patients living with HIV at UCSF and SFDPH at Ward 86. Dr. Scott focuses on the epidemiology of HIV-related racial/ethnic disparities among men who have sex with men (MSM), and interventions to reduce these disparities. Dr. Scott has conducted research exploring mobile app-based combination HIV interventions of home HIV self-testing, STI self-collection, and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake among young Black and Latino MSM in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Scott also serves as the Medical Director of Magnet which is one of the largest sexual health providers in San Francisco committed to serving the LGBT+
community.

Authored Resources

Shelley Facente, PhD, MPH is a senior public health consultant with over a decade of experience working with government agencies and community-based non-profits. Shelley earned a Master of Public Health in Health and Social Behavior with a specialty in multicultural studies, and a PhD in Epidemiology, from the University of California, Berkeley. After her MPH Shelley worked for six years with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, assisting community-based organizations to plan and implement rapid HIV testing programs. This role helped her hone her skills in bridging the gap between people developing policies and those implementing policies in the field. In 2009, Shelley founded Facente Consulting, a health equity-based public health consulting firm that now has 10 full-time staff who live and work throughout the United States. She has worked extensively with getSFcba as a facilitator and program evaluator.

Thomas Knoble has been doing HIV/STD/HVC testing work in San Francisco since 1991 with a focus on gay and bisexual men, transgender females and people who inject drugs. Thomas currently serves as the Ending the HIV Epidemic Manager for the Community Health Equity and Promotion Branch. They are a California HIV State Certified Trainer charged with training all new test counselors. Within this role, they coordinated and oversaw a team of health workers to implement and evaluate the California State HIV Basic Counselor Training and to develop materials. Their efforts have raised awareness around testing quality assurance issues throughout California and the critical role of integrated HIV, STI and HCV prevention, with a key focus on social determinants of health for marginalized communities. Thomas worked extensively during the COVID-19 and Mpox responses to center the strength and resilience of communities to equitably respond.

Authored Resources