Danielle Williamson, MD, PhD Named 2025-2027 Severinghaus Assistant Professor

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August 11, 2025
By Kate Alfieri

We are pleased to announce that the department has named Danielle Williamson, MD, PhD, as a Severinghaus Assistant Professor for academic years 2025-2027. Named for the late John Severinghaus, MD, this title honors Assistant Professors in the department whose research shows exciting promise and relevance to problems in human medicine.

Our newest Severinghaus Assistant Professor, Dr. Danielle Williamson, joined the department as a Critical Care Scholar resident in 2018. She pursued post-residency research training as an NIH T32 research fellow under the mentorship of Drs. Jeffrey Sall and Roland Bainton. Danielle joined the faculty in 2024 and continues her research as a member of the department’s Pathway to Scientific Independence (PSI). Her research focuses on developing ways to better study and understand rapid physiologic changes that occur in response to acute stressors, such as those encountered during critical illness and in the perioperative period. She is currently exploring the role of platelets as sentinels of homeostasis, with a particular focus on organ crosstalk in critical illness.

John Severinghaus, Pioneer of Anesthesia and Medicine

As one of our first recruits and longest standing faculty members, Dr. John W. Severinghaus had an enormous impact on the UCSF Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care. Originally a physicist, the man his friend Ted Eger called a “master tinkerer” was behind some of the most significant advances in anesthesiology and medicine, including the invention of the first 3-function blood gas analysis machine, a system for mass spectrometry in the OR, and critical discoveries about the mysteries of acclimatization. His lab was a virtual petri dish for leading researchers and important research, where Robert Mitchell and Hans Loeschke made their discovery of the medullary area that regulates blood PCO2, keeping spinal fluid pH constant, and where, at Dr. Severinghaus’ behest, Ted Eger developed the concept for minimum alveolar concentration, or “MAC.”

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