Elizabeth M. Ozer, PhD

Professor of Pediatrics
Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine
Research Advisor, National Adolescent and Young Adult Health Information Center

Elizabeth Ozer, PhD serves as Principal Investigator of the Adolescent and Young Adult Health Research Network and Research Advisor for the Adolescent and Young Adult Health National Resource Center. Dr. Ozer is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Director of Research Training in Adolescent & Young Adult Medicine, and Director of Research & Evaluation for UCSF’s Office of Diversity and Outreach.

Dr. Ozer is a psychologist whose research has focused primarily on the health of adolescents, young adults, and women. She has served as either PI or Co-Investigator of multiple grants focused on decreasing adolescent risky behavior, through testing models to increase provider screening and counseling of adolescents in primary care and evaluated the effect of provider screening and counseling on behavior across multiple health risk areas.  Recent Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and National Science Foundation funded research has explored incorporating technology into prevention. A collaboration with computer scientists aims to design and investigate a self-adaptive personalized behavior change system for adolescent preventive health. Dr. Ozer and colleagues have examined ethnic/racial disparities in the delivery of preventive services, rates of depression screening in primary care, and trends in depression, nutrition, and physical activity screening. Recent work has emphasized young adult preventive health care. She has published over 40 articles in the peer-review literature.

At UCSF, Dr. Ozer is Faculty Co-Chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Women and a member of the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion. She is the UCSF faculty representative on the UC System-Wide Committee on the Status of Women. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at Stanford University, and completed a Clinical Psychology Internship in the Dept. of Child Psychiatry at Stanford, and a National Institute of Mental Health post-doctoral fellowship with a traineeship in Adolescent Medicine at UCSF.  In 2007, she served as a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne.