Jay Zussman (they/them) is a third-year MD-PhD student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. They graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 2020 with double majors in Biophysics and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, earning high distinction for senior research theses in both departments.
At UCSF, Jay serves as a Steering Committee member and Curriculum Working Group Co-lead for the UCSF REPAIR Project, a strategic scholar-activist initiative working toward reparations, medical abolition, and decolonization in the health sciences by uplifting and bringing together Black and BIPOC voices in biomedicine and Bay Area community organizations. Jay is actively engaged in curricular activism at the UCSF School of Medicine to improve and center gender and sex inclusivity. They are a lead author on two forthcoming studies on transgender, non-binary, gender-expansive, and intersex (TGEI)-inclusive approaches in medical education and clinical practice.
Jay’s clinical interests involve reproductive health and justice for BIPOC, queer, transgender, and intersex communities. Their research interests span stem cell, reproductive harms of environmental exposures. Jay began their PhD in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology at UCSF in fall 2022; their thesis work seeks to identify developmental determinants of robust oogenesis using genetic barcode-based lineage tracing approaches and transcriptomic and epigenetic profiling in the mammalian germline.