Medical and Physics residents and faculty convened at the end of January 2026 for Residents Research Day – a full day of insightful presentations, engaging round table discussions, a guest faculty lecture and Bakar Computational Health Sciences (BCHSI) affiliated faculty speakers sharing their data science research. Catherine Park, MD, chair of the department and Steve Braunstein, MD, PhD, vice chair of Education, welcomed attendees, acknowledged the planning committee for their significant work behind the event and provided an overview of the agenda.
“This is a wonderful event to highlight the pillar of education and champion research by our trainees as their academic efforts translate into innovations in clinic care that can meaningfully impact our patients,” said Braunstein.
“Resident research day showcases the culture of inquiry and productivity within our training program. Our residents shared a spectrum of research efforts covering topics in basic and translational science, clinical trials, and medical education, reflecting the wealth of mentors and diversity of research of UCSF at large.”
Julian Hong, MD, MS, associate professor in the department, planning committee member as well as BCHSI affiliated faculty added, “We were very fortunate to have some excellent guest speakers from the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute join us to discuss AI and data science to help seed new ideas, ranging from Agentic AI to facilitate predictive modeling, clinical decision making, and how physicians use the electronic health record.”
“As AI continues to become more important in how we deliver care, these speakers brought to us new insights and potential for future collaborations – some of the residents have already gotten connected with them!” stated Hong.
Resident Research Day Planning Committee: Steve Braunstein, MD, Ph.D., Sue Yom, MD, PhD, Julian Hong, MD, MS, Harish Vasudevan, MD, PhD, Lauren Boreta, MD, Katelyn Hasse, PhD, Dante Capaldi, PhD, and Miriam Gray.
See highlights below:
Steve Braunstein, MD, PhD, vice chair of Education, welcomes guests and touches upon the day’s theme – Data Science.
Resident Zachary Chalmers, MD, PhD presents on “Investigating Single-cell Biomarkers of Response to Pluvicto”
Resident Michael Gribble, MD presents on “Residents as Teachers”
Resident Brooke Braman, MD presents on “A Phase 2 Trial of Short Interval Postoperative SBRT After Surgery for Spine Metastases”
Resident Di (Flute) Xu, PhD presents on “Seeing What We’ve Been Missing: Real-Time Volumetric MRI Reveals True Organ Motion for Online Adaptive Radiotherapy”
Resident Alexander Real, MD, PhD presents on “Towards CAR-T Targeting of Drug-labeled Cancer Cells: Developing KRAS G12C Drug-specific Cell Therapies in the Sotorasib Resistant Setting”
Resident Alex Qian, MD presents on “Big Data Isn’t One Dataset: Scale, Signal, and Tradeoffs in Radiation Oncology Research”
Resident Krystal Straessler, MD, PhD presents on “From Noise to Signal: Big Data–Driven Pattern Discovery in Cancer Genomics”
Resident Naoki Kondo, PhD presents on “Ionization Detail: Quantifying Clinically Relevant Biological Effect”
Resident Jiayi Du, PhD presents on “Physics-Driven Tumor Model to Bridge Macroscopic Feature Formation with Key Underlying Biology”
Guest Lecture by Franklin Huang, MD, PhD, presents on “Investigating Genomics of Genitourinary Cancers” after an Introduction by Harish Vasudevan, MD, PhD
Date Science Research Presentations from affiliated faculty from the UCSF Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (BCHSI):
Jean Feng, PhD, kicks off Data Science research presentations by Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (BCHSI) affiliated faculty: “AI Agents for Learning Clinical Prediction Models”
Julian Hong, MD, MS, at podium (Radiation Oncology and Bakar affiliated faculty) introduces Travis Zack, MD, PhD for a virtual presentation on “Exploring Clinical Knowledge Requirements Through 100 Million Real World Clinical Questions”
A Jay Holmgren, PhD presents on “Building Smarter Care from Digital Footprints: Using EHR Metadata to Improve Cancer Care”
Alon Witztum, PhD, associate professor in the Division of Physics, presents “Overview of Data Resources within UCSF Radiation Oncology, Current and Future State”
Round Table Discussion of Resident Proposed Data Science Projects
