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Catherine Lau is an Associate Clinical Professor at UCSF and a member of the Division of Hospital Medicine since 2009. She currently serves as the Director for Quality and Safety in the Division of Hospital Medicine and is also the Director of Caring Wisely at UCSF Health. In both of these roles, Catherine focuses her efforts in redesigning and innovating systems of care at UCSF Health to improve quality, safety, value, and the patient experience. During her clinical time, Catherine attends on the medicine teaching service, Hospitalist Procedures Service, and Neurosurgery Comanagement Service. Catherine is also one of the inaugural UCSF School of Medicine Bridges curriculum coaches, where she closely works with 12 medical students in teaching them systems improvement skills, clinical reasoning, the patient interview, and the hypothesis-driven physical exam, while assisting them with career exploration advice.

Catherine obtained her undergraduate degree with departmental honors from Stanford University in 2002 and received her M.D. at New York University in 2006, where she was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha and was awarded the AMWA Glagow-Rubin Award for Excellence in Academics and Professionalism. She completed her medical residency training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA before joining the Division of Hospital Medicine at UCSF in August 2009.

Catherine is the former medical director of the Nighttime Hospitalist Service and former Director for Patient Safety and Quality in the Department of Neurological Surgery.