Alison Rustagi, MD, PhD

Assistant Adjunct Professor

Dr. Rustagi is a primary care physician at the San Francisco VA with a PhD in Epidemiology. Her overarching goal is to advance precision prevention; that is, to apply the lens of precision medicine to preventive interventions and ensure that patients most likely to benefit are most likely to be screened. She aims to provide high-quality evidence to predict who will benefit most from a preventive intervention to inform national practice guidelines and enable patients to make individualized health decisions

Her current focus is on screening for lung cancer, a disease which disproportionately affects Veterans. Dr. Rustagi seeks to identify those most likely to benefit from lung cancer screening using a variety of health metrics. Since joining the UCSF faculty in 2021, she has become a national thought leader in lung cancer screening, as recognized in the Annals of Internal Medicine (PMID: 36877963). She is now conducting one of the first real-world studies of the effectiveness of lung cancer screening using advanced causal inference methods. Her research program is funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

Dr. Rustagi also seeks to train future leaders in medicine and population health, and has been recognized for her mentorship with a 2025 Long-Term Mentoring Award by the UCSF’s School of Medicine.