February 2018

Crystal Zhou, PharmD

Associate Professor

I am a passionate pharmacy educator and clinician. I currently teach and direct a couple of the first year Applied Patient Care Skills courses and work as a clinical pharmacist for the Division of Cardiology. I am also working on implementing innovative models of pharmacy practice, such as treating hypertension in barbershops in the Bay Area, and hope to include our students in these efforts.

Joel W. Gonzales

Admissions Director

As a member of the Office of Student Affairs (OSA), I oversee PharmD admissions, coordinate the activities of the Admissions Committee, and manage the annual selection of entering pharmacy students. I am involved in all aspects of recruitment and outreach for the UCSF School of Pharmacy and speak with prospective students regularly. Through my blog Reports from the Pharm, I share information about admissions and stories of interest to prospective students.

Nicole Flowers

Biophysics Program Manager

As manager of the Biophysics Graduate Program I administer and oversee all aspects of the program including admissions and recruitment, student advising and funding, training grant and budget management, DEI initiatives, program events, curriculum, and the BBC Seminar Series. Additionally, I am team lead for the Quantitative Biosciences Consortium Graduate Program Unit, which brings together all five graduate programs under the auspices of the School of Pharmacy: Bioengineering, Bioinformatics, Biophysics, Chemistry & Chemical Biology, and Pharmaceutical Sciences & Pharmacogenomics.

Zev Gartner, PhD

Professor

My laboratory is working to understand how cells self-organize into tissues, how the structure of tissues help regulate cell behaviors, and how tissue structure breaks down in diseases like cancer. By understanding these processes we hope to reveal general principles contributing to cancer progression, to speed the development of new drugs, and to develop new strategies for regenerative medicine. To accomplish these goals we build, perturb, and model human tissues in vitro using techniques from the chemical, physical, and biological sciences.

Kathy Giacomini, PhD, BSPharm

Dean-School of Phrmcy/AssocVC

As dean of the UCSF School of Pharmacy, I set the School’s strategic agenda and ensure it has the resources and organizational structure required to succeed in its mission. I bring my scientific expertise and background in pharmacy in support of our groundbreaking research, individualized patient care, and unparalleled education programs.

My leadership is an ongoing collaboration with the School’s department chairs, administrators, students, and faculty. At the campus level, I work with UCSF’s chancellor, deans, and other campus leaders to uphold the university’s excellence in the health sciences.

James Fraser, PhD

Department Chair and Professor

I coordinate the School’s broad research efforts, aiming to catalyze collaborations across labs, departments, the university, and outside institutions. Additionally, I aim to improve the evaluation of research in hiring and promotion and ensure that our research agenda aligns well with staff and learner career goals.

My research is focused on discovering the macromolecular structure and dynamics of proteins—defining conformational states essential for function and understanding transitions between these states.

I also chair the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. Details: Administration.

John Gross, PhD

Professor

I am interested in protein structure and dynamics related to gene expression. We study changes in protein structure that occur on time scales ranging from millions of years to a millionth of a second, with a focus on basic questions of how viruses cross-species and give rise to modern pandemics or how enzyme function is fine-tuned by cellular cues. Research in this area guides development of therapeutics for infectious disease and cancer.

Su Guo, PhD

Professor

I am interested in how genes regulate brain development and behavior and ultimately impact neuropsychiatric disorders.

As director of the Center for Collaborative Innovation, I lead efforts to increase collaboration between clinical, translational, and discovery science in teaching and research.

Danica Galonić Fujimori, PhD

Professor

I am interested in the development of novel chemical tools that allow us to interrogate biological processes on a molecular level with the ultimate goal of developing novel therapeutic strategies for the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases.

Jason Gestwicki, PhD

Professor

My research group studies how molecular chaperones maintain protein homeostasis. This question is important because imbalances in protein homeostasis are linked to a number of incurable diseases, including neurodegenerative disorders. Molecular chaperones regulate all aspects of a protein’s lifecycle, including its expression, folding, trafficking and degradation. However, it isn’t yet clear how we might promote the activity of chaperones to cure diseases. Our approach to this question is to develop chemical probes that reveal how chaperones interact with disease-associated proteins.

February 2018

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