Allison Merz-Herrala, MD is a first-year Complex Family Planning Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, where she also completed OB/GYN residency training. She received her MD at Harvard Medical School, where she earned magna cum laude honors for her thesis investigating large-scale attitudes toward contraceptive methods over time on Twitter. Her research interests include clinical innovations that improve abortion and contraception care quality, increasing access to high-quality family planning care for marginalized and vulnerable populations, the portrayal of contraception on social media, and medical education surrounding abortion and contraception.

Her fellowship thesis aims to investigate the feasibility of trending human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) within hours of uterine aspiration to risk-stratify for ectopic pregnancy among patients with a pregnancy of unknown location (PUL). While the current standard of care for patients with an undesired or abnormal PUL opting for uterine aspiration includes comparing hCG pre- and 24 hours post-aspiration, with a 50% decrease providing reassurance against ectopic pregnancy, prior data suggest that hCG decreases significantly within hours of aspiration. However, the rapidity of this decline is not known. Dr. Merz-Herrala plans to compare pre-aspiration hCG levels to those 2, 3, 4, and 24 hours post-aspiration in patients undergoing uterine aspiration in early pregnancy to understand the predictability of same-day hCG testing. If found to be reliable, same-day testing could expedite ectopic pregnancy diagnosis while making care more accessible and safer, particularly for those traveling from states with restrictive abortion laws.