Marlene Martin, MD, is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at UCSF, Director of Addiction Initiatives for the Latinx Center of Excellence, a hospitalist at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH), and Director of the Addiction Care Team (ACT) at SFGH. Drawn to medicine to address health inequities and social injustices, her interests lie in systems improvement and innovation with a focus on addiction, community partnerships, Latine health, and care transitions. Marlene's bilingual and bicultural Mexican immigrant background drew her to work in the safety net. She was born and raised in Los Angeles and is a first-generation college graduate. Marlene attended college and medical school at Stanford, was a NIH Fogarty Scholar in Peru, and completed internal medicine residency at UCSF.
She worked at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center for two years where she led inpatient addiction quality improvement efforts before joining SFGH hospitalist division. She is a former member of the SFGH Health Equity Council and co-chair of the Care Transitions Task Force where she addressed readmissions. She was a coach for students between 2019-2023 in the UCSF San Joaquin Valley Program in Medical Education (PRIME) and is dedicated to diversifying the healthcare workforce.
Marlene is board certified in internal medicine and addiction medicine and is Founding Director of the nationally recognized Addiction Care Team (ACT) since 2019. ACT is an interprofessional consult service that provides compassionate evidence-based treatment, harm reduction, and linkage to care for patients with substance use disorders. She collaborates with community and hospital partners to reduce stigma through campus substance use policies, harm reduction, clinician and nurse education (ACT Nurse Liaison Program), and Every ACT Matters, a hospital wide anti-stigma campaign. More broadly, she has advised healthcare systems on starting addiction consult teams and developed implementation guides to assist hospitalists treating addiction.
Through the UCSF Latinx Center of Excellence (LCOE), Marlene led the implementation of a Latine COVID-19 Enhanced Case Investigation and Contact Tracing in partnership with Latine promotores between 2020-2021 and served as a technical assistant in the community health worker academy from 2021-2022. In her role as the Director of Addiction Initiatives for the UCSF LCOE she aims to improve the health of Latine individuals in San Francisco with unhealthy substance use and develop novel care models. With California Health Care Foundation funding, she is co-leading the Program for Education in Drugs and Alcohol for Latine (PEDAL), a Spanish-language curriculum. In partnership with UCSF, the National Harm Reduction Coalition, and 4 Latine CBOs in San Francisco, she co-developed, implemented, and evaluated PEDAL which trained 20 promotores (community health workers) to communicate about substance use, recognize unhealthy use, and link community members to services to both prevent and treat addiction.
Marlene is committed to transforming systems of care to improve health outcomes for marginalized communities and ensuring that addiction care is compassionate, accessible, and equitable.