Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH
Monica Gandhi MD, MPH is Professor of Medicine and Associate Division Chief (Clinical Operations/ Education) of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at UCSF/ San Francisco General Hospital. She also serves as the Director of the UCSF Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) and the Medical director of the HIV Clinic at SFGH ("Ward 86"). Dr. Gandhi completed her M.D. at Harvard Medical School and then came to UCSF in 1996 for residency training in Internal Medicine. After her residency, Dr. Gandhi completed a fellowship in Infectious Diseases and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, both at UCSF. She also obtained a Masters in Public Health from Berkeley in 2001 with a focus on Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
Dr. Gandhi's current research program is on identifying low-cost solutions to measuring antiretroviral levels in resource-poor settings, such as determining drug levels in hair and urine samples. Dr. Gandhi also works on pre-exposure prophylaxis and treatment strategies for HIV infection in women. .
Dr. Gandhi also has an interest at UCSF in HIV education and mentorship. She also served as the principal investigator of an R24 mentoring grant from the NIH focused on nurturing early career investigators of diversity in HIV research, from which launched the annual "Mentoring the Mentors" workshop for HIV researchers held annually by the UCSF CFAR to train mentors in specialized tools and techniques of effective mentoring. She won the Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award from UCSF in 2024. She sees patients at Ward 86 as an HIV care provider, serves on the inpatient Infectious Diseases consultation service at San Francisco General Hospital as an attending, and serves as the Associate Director of the UCSF ID fellowship for Clinical Research.
During COVID-19, Dr. Gandhi wrote multiple layman's articles first on ways to mitigate the pandemic through non-pharmaceutical interventions such as face masks and then on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines once available, including the need for global vaccine equity. She wrote on COVID antivirals (Paxlovid, molnupiravir) and monoclonal antibodies. She co-wrote the chapter on COVID-19 epidemiology for the Cecil Goldman Medicine textbook; co-authored the chapter on COVID-19 global epidemiology for Mandell’s Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases; and wrote a book for Mayo Clinic Press on the COVID-19 pandemic called “Endemic: A Post-Pandemic Playbook" (2023)