Hall of Fame
1984-89
Dr. Burchard enrolled at San Francisco State University in 1984. He was a member of the San Francisco State wrestling team from 1984 to 1989 and was twice awarded NCAA Academic All-American honors. Dr. Burchard met his wife, Melanie, in the SFSU library. Dr. Burchard obtained his bachelor's degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from SFSU in 1990 and continued on to study medicine. He received his M.D. degree from Stanford University School of Medicine in 1995 and married Melanie, and together they have two daughters, Milena Xochitl and Maya Guadalupe. Dr. Burchard completed clinical training in Internal Medicine at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. While at Harvard, he identified a gene, that is associated with asthma severity and helps to explain racial/ethnic differences in asthma prevalence, morbidity and mortality. This discovery linking genetics and racial/ethnic differences in asthma spurred the birth of the nation's largest study of minority children and asthma, which was started and continues to be directed by Dr. Burchard.
Currently, Dr. Burchard is the Director of the UCSF Asthma Collaboratory, a large interdisciplinary research program focusing on minority children and gene-environment interactions for asthma. He directs the largest study of asthma in minority children in the United States. Dr. Burchard served as an advisor to the Director for the National Institutes of Health as part of President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative now called the All of Us initiative.
Dr. Burchard was recently appointed to serve on the National Advisory Council for the Robert Wood Johnson-sponsored Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program and the Stanford Medicine Alumni Association Board of Governors. In August 2018 Dr. Burchard received the Lifetime Achievement award from the National Medical Foundation, the nation's largest and oldest Black Medical Association.
In September 2018, Dr. Burchard was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to start the nation's largest birth cohort of minority children to illuminate the early-life origins of asthma and other respiratory conditions.
Dr. Burchard was inducted into the San Francisco State University Alumni Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2018.
