Professor and Division Chief of Obstetric Anesthesia at UCSF, and Director of the UCSF Birth Center. I lead clinical care where obstetrics, anesthesiology, and patient safety meet — and I run the population research that tells the field what actually reduces maternal harm.
I’m a physician–scientist who works two jobs most people keep separate. As Division Chief of Obstetric Anesthesia at UCSF and Director of the UCSF Birth Center, I’m responsible for how anesthesia care runs across a busy labor and delivery service — the protocols, the staffing, the standards that decide what happens on an ordinary Tuesday and on the worst night of the year. As an epidemiologist, I use large registries and population data to test whether those decisions are the right ones.
My subspecialty is obstetric hemorrhage: preventing it, responding to it, and knowing when to transfuse and when to hold. Across two decades — first as Professor at Stanford, now at UCSF — that focus has shaped how the field measures maternal risk and writes its safety guidelines, from the SOAP anticoagulation consensus to the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative Hemorrhage Toolkit. It’s the through-line of everything below.
“Safety isn’t a poster on the wall. It’s a set of defaults — who gets monitored, when blood is given, what the team does before anyone panics — built so the right thing happens even on the worst night.”
My research locates preventable harm where it actually lives — in the system, not the individual patient. Each study below asks a decision-level question about childbirth safety and answers it at the scale of populations.
How common is severe surgical morbidity when a mother delivers by cesarean — and what actually drives it?
Reframes cesarean safety as a measurable, population-level outcome — work the field recognized with its top patient-safety award.
Across a large international cohort, how does gestational age shape a woman’s risk of hemorrhage after birth?
Ties hemorrhage risk to a factor clinicians can see coming — selected by the editors as one of the year’s ten most important clinical papers.
Why does a laboring patient’s access to neuraxial analgesia depend so heavily on which US state she lives in?
Turned an invisible access gap into a national conversation, covered by the New York Times and Reuters.
Can we predict who will develop anemia or need transfusion after cesarean — and make the safe call the default, not a reflex?
My current work applies prediction to postpartum anemia and transfusion decisions, building on an NIH-funded foundation in hemorrhage epidemiology.
I’ve lectured on obstetric hemorrhage and maternal safety across North America, Europe, and Australia — from society keynotes to grand rounds and hands-on team training. Talks are tailored to the room: anesthesiology, obstetrics, quality and safety, or interdisciplinary care teams.
A rigorous tour of the evidence reshaping how we prevent and manage hemorrhage — in the tradition of the Ostheimer lecture I was chosen to give.
The talk I’ve delivered as the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ refresher-course lecturer on hemorrhage, year after year.
Why the highest-leverage safety work happens before the bleeding starts — in defaults, protocols, and team design.
How registries and big data expose disparities in obstetric care — and what a health system can do about them.
Tell me the audience, the date, and the format you have in mind — and I’ll tell you the talk that fits.