Dr. Alison Huang is an internal medicine physician, Director of Research for General Internal Medicine at UCSF Health, Director of the UCSF Women's Health Clinical Research Center, and a clinical epidemiologist and clinical trialist dedicated to advancing scientific understanding and improving management of the impact of aging on women’s health…
more
Dr. Alison Huang is an internal medicine physician, Director of Research for General Internal Medicine at UCSF Health, Director of the UCSF Women's Health Clinical Research Center, and a clinical epidemiologist and clinical trialist dedicated to advancing scientific understanding and improving management of the impact of aging on women’s health and genitourinary health. She leads a multidisciplinary team of patient-oriented researchers in investigating shared factors underlying the overlap between common genitourinary health conditions and other aging/geriatric syndromes such as physical and cognitive function decline, sleep disruption, and anxiety and depression, as well as developing and testing novel treatment strategies to address these conditions in representative populations of midlife and older women. With funding from multiple NIH institutes, she has designed and led multiple randomized trials of pharmacologic, behavioral, and integrative treatment strategies for common but understudied syndromes such as urinary incontinence, menopausal vasomotor symptoms, and chronic pelvic pain in women of diverse backgrounds. Her scientific work has provided the evidence for position statements and guidelines from national organizations about weight loss to address menopause and genitourinary symptoms in women, influenced consensus recommendations about paced respiration as a behavioral treatment strategy for hot flashes, and critically evaluated the unique effects of community-based and complementary interventions such as yoga on multidimensional health in older women in the community. She has also developed and validated patient-reported measures of genitourinary health and function in women that have been adopted by investigators in the U.S. and internationally. She directs multiple NIH-funded research training programs, educates other scientists and clinicians about clinical trial methods through graduate courses and peer-reviewed journals, and has authored a textbook on clinical research methods. Her work has received national recognition from the Society of General Internal Medicine and the American Geriatrics Society.
less