David Sears, MD
Professor Clinical Medicine
David Sears is a Professor of Medicine and a specialist in infectious diseases. He provides primary care to people with HIV in UCSF’s 360: Positive Care Center and attends on the infectious diseases inpatient consult service at UCSF Health and the internal medicine wards at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. As a clinician educator, David has a particular passion for capacity building to strengthen the HIV primary care workforce locally and abroad. He is the Site Director of the HIV Continuity Clinic for the Infectious Diseases Fellowship at UCSF Health where he leads the 360 Clinic’s educational programs. He currently collaborates with the Vietnam Administration of Disease Prevention to strengthen HIV treatment and educational programs, and he recently served as the Senior Medical Education Lead for the Strengthening Interprofessional Education to Improve HIV Care Across Africa (STRIPE) program. Through STRIPE, he worked with interprofessional teams from health professions schools across sub-Saharan Africa to implement and evaluate HIV training programs that reached over 20,000 learners.
David is a member of the Academy of Medical Educators (AME) and a prior recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award from the AME and the Vince Pons Award in Clinical Teaching from the Division of Infectious Diseases. He serves as the Director of the Department of Medicine Medical Student Electives and the Director of the Infectious Diseases electives for medical students and residents at UCSF Health. He was previously the Associate Program Director for the Infectious Diseases Fellowship at Harbor UCLA Medical Center.
Outside of medical education, David’s work focuses on improving the health of people who live and work in prisons and jails through improved health care delivery, reforming conditions of confinement, and advocating for an end to mass incarceration policies. He is the Director of Healthcare Quality for Amend at UCSF where he studies healthcare oversight and quality evaluation in carceral settings with an aim to inform policy and effect meaningful change. Previously, he co-directed a cross-university research collaboration (CalPROTECT) examining how California prisons could better respond to the threat of COVID-19 and he has evaluated the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) patient safety and quality assessment programs. He has provided expert testimony to the California State Senate Committee on Public Safety, consulted on draft legislation for the U.S. Senate, prepared independent reports for California’s Federal Receiver for Inmate Services, and presented on carceral health to the National Governor’s Association.
David completed medical school at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University, internal medicine residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital – Columbia, and infectious diseases fellowship at UCSF.