Sujatha Sankaran is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hospital Medicine. She received her medical degree from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and subsequently completed her training in Internal Medicine at the Georgetown Universty/Washington Hospital Center program in June 2005. She then worked as an Academic Hospitalist at Columbia University before joining an outpatient medical practice for five years and then joining the Division of Hospital Medicine as an Assistant Clinical Professor in 2011. Sujatha has worked extensively in global health, starting a non-governmental organization aimed at training health workers in the developing world to prevent chronic cardiovascular disease in 2008, and in 2015 was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study mechanisms for cardiovascular disease management in under-resourced areas of Southern India.

Sujatha has also worked on tobacco policy research in India and was formerly the medical director for Smoking Cessation at Moffitt-Long Hospital and until July 2023 was the medical director for inpatient substance use at UCSF Health. In this role, she spearheaded efforts to build an inpatient substance use management program and chairs the Substance Use Committee.

From 2017 to 2021, Sujatha was the director of the quality and safety program for the Department of Neurosurgery. In this role, she led a number of quality improvement projects for the department, delivered a quality improvement curriculum to the neurosurgery residents, led efforts to improve patient safety through the incident reporting and M&M systems, sat on the Neuro unit based leadership team, and acted as a representative of the neurosurgery department in institution-wide efforts to improve quality of neurosurgical care.

Sujatha has a career interest on the intersection between health equity, health care leadership, and high-quality care, and in 2021, she was accepted into the California Health Care Foundation leadership fellowship. In 2023, she graduated from the UCSF Health Learning Health System Coach Program. In November 2022, she became the Chief Medical Officer of one the UCSF-affiliated hospitals, Sonoma Valley Hospital, in Sonoma County. At Sonoma Valley Hospital, Sujatha is focused on improving access to subspecialty care, building a geriatric program, supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion work, and bolstering the linkages between UCSF Health and Sonoma Valley Hospital.