June 2014

School leaders, staff, students step out in support of AIDS Walk San Francisco

Thu Jun 19, 2014

The entire UCSF enterprise—including the School of Pharmacy—is gearing up for AIDS Walk San Francisco. This year’s walk will take place on Sunday, July 20 in Golden Gate Park.

Michael Nordberg, associate dean of finance and administration, is the leader of the 2014 School of Pharmacy Team. Nordberg encourages everyone in the School to join in—administrators, leaders, faculty, staff, and students.

School establishes education and research program with leading Chinese university

Mon Jun 16, 2014

The UCSF School of Pharmacy has entered into a five-year collaborative education and research agreement with Tsinghua University School of Medicine in Beijing, China.

The agreement will establish a joint Tsinghua School of Medicine-UCSF School of Pharmacy program for pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences education and research at Tsinghua University, which is one of China’s top science and engineering schools.

Burlingame and Gross labs shed light on braking mechanisms in cellular signaling

Wed Jun 11, 2014

How do cells that must respond rapidly and robustly to changes in the environment subsequently modulate that response so such elevated activity doesn’t prove harmful? Put another way: How do cells put the brakes on their response to external signaling in order to re-stabilize themselves?

Research

Research in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry focuses on understanding fundamental biochemical mechanisms underlying health and disease, which are key to developing new and more effective diagnostics and medications. The department’s basic research not only identifies new drug targets for small molecule drugs, it also develops the tools and methods to discover such targets and therapies and to more rapidly determine their efficacy and safety at the molecular level, thus improving the efficiency of the drug discovery process and potentially leading to improved therapeutics.

Computational Chemistry and Biology

Modeling reality to understand, predict miniscule complexity Suppose you want to predict how high a ball dropped from a height will bounce. It depends on the type of ball and the surface it lands on. What if it is dropped into a puddle? What if the ball is magnetic and the surface partly iron? What if the surface changes shape at the ball’s approach? You might write mathematical formulas to represent the effects of all those factors, combining laws of physics (gravity, magnetism, etc.) and experimentally measured bounce heights.