Leslie Suen, MD, MAS

Leslie W. Suen, MD, MAS is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the San Francisco General Hospital Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is a primary care and addiction medicine physician–researcher whose work focuses on developing, implementing, and evaluating low-barrier, patient-centered models of care for people who use drugs, particularly those who face structural barriers such as homelessness, criminalization, and stigma.

Dr. Suen was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Cornell University for her undergraduate degree in Biological & Environmental Engineering and completed medical school, UC Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency, and research training through the National Clinician Scholars Program at UCSF. She leads a diverse portfolio of NIH-funded research, including a K23 career development award and multiple projects that examine innovative approaches to treating opioid use disorder. Her policy and implementation work includes collaborations with local and state agencies, expanding access to low-barrier treatment, and strengthening addiction treatment capacity across safety-net systems.

Clinically, she practices in adult primary care and in both inpatient and outpatient addiction treatment at San Francisco General Hospital and in the San Francisco Department of Public Health. She is also an affiliate faculty member within the UCSF Pain and Addiction Research Center (PARC), UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI), UCSF Action for Research Center for Health (ARC), the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (IHPS), and the UCSF Partnerships for Research in Implementation Science for Equity (PRISE) Center.