- About
- Research
- Research Overview
- Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry
- Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry Overview
- Discovering Enzyme Substrates and Functions
- Discovering Protein Ligands to Probe and Alter Function
- Discovering Enzyme Activators
- Analyzing Mechanisms of Drug Resistance via Chemical Biology
- Analyzing Enzyme Conformational Dynamics, Substrate Binding, and Catalysis
- Effective Drug Targeting of Pathogens via Medicinal Chemistry
- Computational Chemistry and Biology
- Computational Chemistry and Biology Overview
- Modeling protein regulation via allostery and post-translational modifications
- Visualizing and integrating bioinformatics and biomolecular data
- Modeling membrane permeation to optimize pharmacokinetics
- Determining enzyme function by predicting substrate specificity
- Physical Biology
- Protein and Cellular Engineering
- Protein and Cellular Engineering Overview
- Monitoring enzyme activity and disease biomarkers
- Generating human proteome antibodies via phage display and directed evolution
- Globally analyzing and dissecting apoptosis
- Proximity tagging of protein-protein interactions
- Investigating cellular interactions in tissues
- Creating fluorescent probes targeting the genome and key bio-pathways
- De novo design of catalytic and membrane proteins
- Probing and modulating membrane proteins
- Education
- People
- News
- Events
About
In the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, we explore fundamental biological mechanisms and molecules of therapeutic relevance for better health, empowered by novel technologies at the interface of chemistry, physics, and computational sciences.
Our research seeks to understand the biological principles of small molecules, proteins, and cellular design, and to apply these principles for the therapeutic benefit of patients. To this end we investigate new molecular treatment targets, new and more precise ways to therapeutically alter their activity, and new biomarkers to track disease and treatment efficacy.
We also create and continually refine both the chemical biology tools and the core enabling technologies used by our own labs and others worldwide to probe and analyze structural and systems biology at the molecular level.
We educate science students in many PhD programs at UC San Francisco. We are closely involved with the five PhD programs administered by the School of Pharmacy:
- PhD in Bioengineering (BioE)
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PhD in Biological and Medical Informatics (Bioinformatics (BI) pathway)
- PhD in Biophysics (BP)
- PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CCB)
- PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics (PSPG)
We provide our Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) professional student pharmacists with the strong basic science foundation required to deliver optimal patient care.
Accomplished postdoctoral scholars are welcomed into our labs where they receive the advanced research experience they need to become leaders in their fields.
We are committed to sharing advances in our fields of study with all the students we teach.
Our vision? A time when powerful technologies that fuel breakthroughs in mechanistic biology accelerate success in drug discovery and the diagnostic sciences and reveal the complex biological signaling processes that underpin human health and go awry in disease.