Steering Committee

Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH

Professor
Department of Medicine
University of California, San Francisco

Urmimala Sarkar MD, MPH is a Professor of Medicine at UCSF in the Division of General Internal Medicine and a primary care physician at San Francisco General Hospital’s Richard H. Fine People's Clinic. Dr. Sarkar’s research focuses on (1) patient safety in outpatient settings, including adverse drug events, missed and delayed diagnosis, and failures of treatment monitoring, (2) health information technology and social media to improve the safety and quality of outpatient care, and (3) implementation of evidence-based innovations in real-world, safety-net care settings.

Dr. Sarkar is committed to enhancing health information technology approaches to improve primary care and ameliorate disparities in vulnerable populations, through health-literacy-sensitive, patient-centered approaches such as co-development and usability testing, in partnership with technology development experts. Her current work applies design thinking and interdisciplinary, iterative approaches to characterize and address safety gaps in outpatient settings.

She has conducted studies that explore the impact of health communication (health literacy, English proficiency) and health information technology on patient safety. Her prior studies on internet-based patient portals demonstrate digital disparities by race/ethnicity and health literacy. Her social media studies use mixed-methods approaches to understand patient perspectives about physician quality and cancer screening behaviors. Her ongoing work employs varied health information technologies to detect and ameliorate adverse events among outpatient chronic disease populations. She is currently funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the National Cancer Institute, with prior funding from the California Healthcare Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Jon-Patrick Allem

Associate Professor
Rutgers University

Core Member
Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies (INTS)

Jon-Patrick Allem is an Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Health Behavior, Society and Policy at Rutgers School of Public Health, an Associate Professor of General Internal Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and a Core Member of the Institute for Nicotine & Tobacco Studies (INTS). He obtained a B.A. in political science with a minor in history and a M.A. in political science from San Diego State University and completed a Ph.D. in health behavior research from the Keck School of Medicine of USC. His postdoctoral training was completed in tobacco regulatory science at the USC Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science (TCORS).

In 2019, he founded the Social Media Analytics (SOMA) Lab in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. As the Director of the SOMA Lab, he successfully competed for 4 million dollars in government contracts and grants, served as the directed research advisor for 33 undergraduate students, mentored six master’s students, four doctoral students, one postgraduate, testified in court against corporations, and was regularly quoted in the news media.

Dr. Allem’s research shows the different ways that corporations influence adolescent health, with current projects focused on identifying sources of exposure to tobacco marketing among adolescents and young adults. Beyond the impact of his science on scientific discourse, he is committed to using it to improve public health. In this case, it involves advocating for policies that protect children and adolescents from harmful media exposures and exacting punishments for companies that harm children through their unfair marketing practices. Because companies fight such policies, this type of advocacy necessarily involves the judiciary system, working with attorneys at the state and local level to develop, pass, and enforce restrictions and enact punishments. By working in this way, Dr. Allem aims to apply his research in ways to protect the health of large numbers of children.