2025 UCSF Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award

Judith Hellman, the William L Young Endowed Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the UCSF Department of Anesthesia, is a physician-scientist whose work focuses on the basic and translational immunology of sepsis. She earned her MD from Columbia University, followed by residency training in internal medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University and in anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She also completed a clinical ICU fellowship and a T32-funded research fellowship at MGH.

Dr. Hellman’s research explores critical areas such as innate immune signaling in sepsis, endothelial dysfunction, and neuroimmune modulation via the endovanilloid and endocannabinoid systems in sepsis and injury.

A passionate advocate for the development of physician-scientists and biomedical researchers, Dr. Hellman has mentored numerous students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty throughout her career. She leads the Department of Anesthesia’s Pathway to Scientific Independence program and has served as Program Director for the department’s T32 postdoctoral training grant since 2013. Her mentorship has guided many trainees to successful careers as independent investigators.

Dr. Hellman’s contributions to science and mentoring have been recognized with the International Anesthesia Research Society’s Frontiers in Anesthesia Research Award in 2015 and the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Excellence in Research Award in 2019.

Torsten B. Neilands, Professor at the UCSF Division of Prevention Science in the Department of Medicine at UCSF. Originally trained as a social and quantitative psychologist, he spent eight years as a statistical consultant at the University of Texas academic computing center before coming to UCSF in 2001. Since arriving at UCSF, he has participated as a statistical co-investigator or consultant on over 100 NIH, CDC, and state projects in the areas of HIV prevention, reproductive health, aging research, and tobacco use prevention. His methodological areas of interest are multivariate statistical models with a special interest in latent variable models for survey scale development and validation as well as mixed effects (i.e., multilevel; HLM) models for clustered and longitudinal data, including dyadic data.

‌His substantive interests include training the next generation of prevention researchers working in U.S. communities disproportionately affected by chronic diseases, including HIV and aging-related conditions. He is currently PI of two NIH-sponsored R25 research education grants to foster grant-writing and related research capacity-building for early-career faculty working in U.S. communities disproportionately impacted by HIV and STIs to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and STIs and to improve the lives of those living with HIV/AIDS. He also actively collaborates as a senior statistician and quantitative methods co-investigator on multiple prevention research projects. He is a co-author of Primer of Applied Regression & Analysis of Variance with Drs. Stanton Glantz and Bryan Slinker (McGraw-Hill, 2016).