Dr. Patterson is a rheumatology physician scientist in the UCSF Department of Medicine and part of the research faculty at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health (OCIH). She pursued her undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned her MD from UCSF. She then completed Internal Medicine residency, Rheumatology fellowship, and a postdoctoral research fellowship in Integrative Health at UCSF. She joined the Rheumatology Division at UCSF as faculty in 2019 and became a UCSF Osher Center core research faculty member in 2022.

Dr. Patterson’s research aims to advance the understanding and management of rheumatic diseases by determining the impact of psychosocial stress and lifestyle factors—including physical activity, nutrition, and sleep—on disease course. Though people living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) consistently express interest in measures that can be taken to complement pharmacologic therapies, there is limited data regarding the effects of lifestyle interventions on inflammatory pathways and disease outcomes in these conditions. Dr. Patterson is working to address this gap by examining stress and stress resilience effects on inflammatory pathways and clinical outcomes in RA and SLE. She is currently the PI for a pilot randomized controlled trial testing a mindfulness-based intervention to improve symptoms and disease activity in RA. She is also committed to translating her research into improvements in patient-centered rheumatology care, and to that end she examines the application of integrative health approaches to address unmet needs among people living with rheumatic conditions.

In her clinical work, Dr. Patterson specializes in SLE and combining evidence-based integrative health approaches with standard of care disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs). She established one of the first university-based integrative rheumatology clinics, which is based at the UCSF Osher Center. She provides direct patient care in the UCSF Lupus Clinic, the UCSF Osher Center Clinic, and in the UCSF hospital when she is attending on the inpatient rheumatology consult service.