Dr. Washington is currently Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is also professor of gynecology, epidemiology, and health policy in the School of Medicine. He co-founded UCSF's Medical Effectiveness Research Center for Diverse Populations in 1993 and served as the director through July 2005. He was chair of the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences from 1996 to 2004. He also co-founded the UCSF-Stanford Evidence-Based Practice Center and served as its first director from 1997 to 2002. Before joining the faculty at UCSF 18 years ago, Dr. Washington worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.

Dr. Washington is a leader in shaping national health and healthcare policy and programs. He serves on the Council of the Institute of Medicine, on the Board of Trustees of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on the Advisory Panel on Health Care Delivery of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and on the Board of Directors of the California HealthCare Foundation.

A 1976 graduate of the UCSF School of Medicine, Dr. Washington also received a bachelor's degree from Howard University and master's degrees from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed residencies in preventive medicine at Harvard University and in gynecology and obstetrics at Stanford University and was a health policy scholar at UCSF's Institute for Health Policy Studies.