Catherine Lucey Appointed Provost at the University of California, San Francisco

Catherine Lucey will be the next executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, San Francisco. She will take on her new duties in January.

Dr. Lucey currently serves as vice dean for education and executive vice dean of the School of Medicine at the university. Before coming to UCSF in 2011, Dr. Lucey was interim dean of medicine at Ohio State University. Earlier, she served as chief resident at San Francisco General Hospital at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

“Being at UCSF during the AIDS pandemic changed the way I look at medicine,” Dr. Lucey said. “What we saw was transdisciplinary partnerships. Basic scientists were investigating the immune dysfunction. Clinical trials were going on. The social and behavioral scientists were working to understand the human component and support community outreach. And in a relatively short time, we went from facing an unknown pathogen with a rapid and uniformly fatal outcome, to a chronic disease we could manage.”

Dr. Lucey added that “we have to be prepared for the next pandemic. And we must continue to transform. We have a major responsibility to educate the best and most representative healthcare and biomedical workforce for the state and the nation. We need to be thinking across all of our mission areas and schools to meet the healthcare challenges of our time.”

Dr. Lucey earned her medical degree from Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago.