Dr. Alison Rustagi

Assistant Professor at UCSF Department of Medicine

Dr. Rustagi is a primary care physician 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. Her current focus is on lung cancer screening. 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 quickly become a national thought leader, as recognized in the Annals of Internal Medicine (PMID: 36877963). She is now testing her ideas in the first study of real-world effectiveness of lung cancer screening using advanced causal inference methods. Her research program is funded by a VA Career Development Award and grants from VA’s Lung Precision Oncology Program, the National Institutes of Health, and others. She 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. Dr. Rustagi’s research group aims to provide high-quality evidence to predict who will benefit most from a preventive intervention to inform national practice guidelines, and most importantly, enable patients to make individualized health decisions.