Michael Lipnick, M.D. is an anesthesiologist and intensivist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. He is a graduate of the UCSF School of Medicine and completed residency programs in Internal Medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Anesthesia at UCSF as well as Critical Care Fellowship at UCSF.

Michael’s interests center around the intersection on critical care, perioperative care, medical education and health equity. Michael co-founded the UCSF Center for Health Equity in Surgery and Anesthesia (CHESA - globalsurgery.org), opencriticalcare.org, oxygencalculator.org, and has helped lead multiple global health programs at UCSF including the Anesthesia Health Equity Fellowship Program, the HEAL Global Health Fellowship Program (healinitiative.org) and the UCSF IGHS Global Health Faculty Program. He is currently co-Director of the UCSF World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Emergency, Critical and Operative Care and is an Honorary Lecturer at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda where he has been part of a longstanding academic collaboration for >15 years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Michael collaborated with USAID and multiple implementing partners to support critical care and oxygen ecosystem strengthening in multiple settings.

Michael continues to pursue interests in physiology research as an investigator in the UCSF Hypoxia Lab and as the Dive Medical Officer at the California Academy of Sciences. He leads active research projects including impacts of skin pigment and perfusion on pulse oximetry performance (The OpenOximetry.org Project), tools for scaling oxygen infrastructure in resource-constrained settings, examining mechanisms of hypoxia tolerance and preconditioning, as well as outcomes in critically-ill patients with ARDS.