University of California, San Francisco

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University of California, San Francisco
UCSF Logo (Trademark of UC Regents)
Motto Fiat lux (Let There Be Light)
Established 1873
Type Public
Endowment 343.6 million (FY 2005) NACUBO
Chancellor J. Michael Bishop
Faculty 1,686
Postgraduates 2,863 (Fall 2005) UC Office of the President
Location San Francisco, California
Campus Urban, 135 acres (0.6 km²), plus 43 acres at Mission Bay campus
Website www.ucsf.edu
UCSF in 1908, with the streetcar that used to run on Parnassus Avenue
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UCSF in 1908, with the streetcar that used to run on Parnassus Avenue

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is one of the world's leading centers of health sciences research, patient care, and education. UCSF's medical, pharmacy, dental, nursing, and graduate schools are among the top health science professional schools in the world. The UCSF Medical Center is consistently ranked among the top 10 hospitals in the United States. Patients from around the world with rare and difficult diseases are referred to UCSF for treatment. Some of UCSF's most renowned treatment centers include kidney and liver transplant, neurosurgery, neurology, oncology, gene therapy, women's health, fetal surgery, and internal medicine. UCSF also has the nation's leading HIV/AIDS treatment and research centers. Collaborations with African Universities such as the University of Zimbabwe to deal with HIV have been established.

Founded in 1873, the mission of UCSF is to serve as a "public university dedicated to saving lives and improving health." Though one of the ten campuses of the University of California, it is unique for being the only University of California campus dedicated solely to graduate education, and this in health and biomedical sciences. UCSF has developed a reputation for unique interdisciplinary collaboration between the health science disciplines which has led to some of the most important discoveries in the biosciences. The graduate-focused environment of UCSF, its relatively small size, and its culture of collaboration allows for a flexibility to translate new discoveries into new treatments hard to find even at many of the world's other top medical centers.

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[edit] Academics

University of California, San Francisco is unique in that it does biomedical and patient-centered research in its Schools of Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing and Dentistry and their hundreds of associated laboratories. The university is known for innovation in medical research, public service, and patient care. UCSF's faculty includes three Nobel Prize winners, 31 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 69 members of the Institute of Medicine, and 30 members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

[edit] Degrees conferred

[edit] School of Nursing

[edit] School of Pharmacy

[edit] School of Medicine

  • MD
  • MD/PhD Medical Scientist Training Program
  • MD/MS with UC Berkeley
  • MD/MPH with UC Berkeley

[edit] School of Dentistry

  • DDS
  • DDS/PhD (with Graduate Division)

[edit] Graduate Division

[edit] Rankings

In 1995, the National Research Council ranked UCSF in the top ten for biochemistry and molecular biology (1st), genetics (2nd), cell and developmental biology (3rd), neurosciences (4th), physiology (5th), and biomedical engineering (7th).

Overall, the campus is fourth[1] in the nation in annual NIH funding with $452.2 million received in 2005.

The professional schools of the University of California, San Francisco are among the top in the nation, according to current (2006) US News and World Report graduate school and other rankings. The schools also rank at or near the top in research funding from the National Institutes of Health. In addition, the UCSF Medical Center in 2006 was ranked by US News and World Report the 9th-best hospital in the nation, making it the highest-ranked medical center in northern California.

[edit] School of Medicine

In 2006, ranked fourth overall among research-based medical schools by US News and World Report; the top in western United States. In rankings of medical schools for the quality of their primary care training, UCSF ranked 10th. In addition, the magazine ranked UCSF in the top 10 in seven of the eight medical school specialty programs assessed, including first in AIDS medical care, second in women's health, and second in internal medicine. The UCSF drug and alcohol abuse specialty ranks fifth nationally in the 2006 survey, while family medicine ranks 10th, pediatrics ninth, and geriatrics ninth.[2]

In 2005, the School of Medicine was the third largest recipient of National Institutes of Health research funds among all US medical schools, receiving awards totaling $398.2 million.

[edit] Biological Sciences, PhD Programs

US News and World Report in 2006, the last time it surveyed doctoral programs in the biological sciences, ranked UCSF ninth best overall. In that survey, UCSF ranked second in cell biology, third in molecular biology, fifth in biochemistry/biophysics/structural biology, genetics/genomics/bioinformatics, and immunology/infectious disease, and sixth in neuroscience.[3]

[edit] School of Nursing

In 2003, US News and World Report ranked the UCSF graduate programs in nursing as second in the nation. UCSF ranked in the top 10 in seven of the rated eight nursing specialties, including first for its family nurse practitioner program and second for training adult/medical-surgical nurses. The adult nurse practitioner and psychiatric/mental health programs ranked third nationally, pediatric nurse practitioner fourth, gerontological/geriatric fifth, and community/public health ninth.[4]

The School of Nursing in 2005 ranked first nationally in total NIH research funds with $12.5 million.

[edit] School of Pharmacy

The UCSF School of Pharmacy ranked as the top in the US, according to a 2002 survey published in The Annals of Pharmacotherapy, which weighed key criteria, including funding for research and the frequency of scientific publications by faculty, that are not considered in other rankings.

In 2005, US News and World Report ranked the UCSF School of Pharmacy number one in its "America's Best Graduate Schools" edition.

In 2005, the School of Pharmacy ranked first in NIH research funding among all US pharmacy schools, receiving awards totaling $22.2 million.

[edit] School of Dentistry

The School of Dentistry in 2005 ranked first among all dental schools in NIH research funding. It received awards totaling $18.8 million from the NIH.

[edit] UCSF Medical Center

In 2006, US News and World Report named the UCSF Medical Center the 9th-best hospital in the nation, making it the highest-ranked medical center in Northern California. Among pediatric care centers, UCSF Children's Hospital ranked no. 19 — the highest-rated children's medical service in California.

In the magazine's "America's Best Hospitals" survey, the UCSF Medical Center ranked best in Northern California — as well as among the best in the nation — in the following specialties: endocrinology, neurology/neurosurgery; gynecology; cancer; kidney disease; ophthalmology; respiratory disorders; rheumatology; urology; digestive disorders; ear, nose, and throat; psychiatry; heart and heart surgery; and pediatrics. UCSF also ranked among the top 25 in the nation in orthopedics.[5]

In San Francisco Magazine's 2003 survey of the "Best Doctors" in the Bay Area, 55 percent of those honored were UCSF faculty.

[edit] Campus

UCSF operates four major campus sites within the city of San Francisco, as well as numerous other minor sites scattered through San Francisco and the Bay Area.

  • UCSF's Parnassus Campus facilities serve as the main campus and include the 600 bed UCSF Medical Center, Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute (one of the state's largest outpatient clinics), the Children's Hospital (located inside the center) and hundreds of research labs.
  • The Mount Zion Campus contains UCSF's Comprehensive Cancer Center, Women's Health Center, and outpatient resources.
  • The San Francisco General Hospital campus cares for the indigent population of San Francisco and contains San Francisco's only Level I trauma center. The hospital itself is owned and operated by the city of San Francisco, but many of its doctors carry UCSF affiliation and maintain research laboratories at the hospital campus. The earliest cases of HIV/AIDS were discovered at SF General Hospital in the 1980s. To this day SF General Hospital has the world's leading HIV/AIDS treatment and research center.
  • UCSF's Mission Bay Campus is the largest ongoing biomedical construction project in the world. The 43-acre Mission Bay campus, recently opened in 2003 with construction still ongoing, contains additional research space and facilities to foster biotechnology and life sciences companies. It will double the size of UCSF's already mammoth research enterprise over the next 10 years. The Mission Bay campus currently contains the following facilities:
    • UCSF Genentech Hall: Opened in January 2003, the first research building contains space for approximately 900 faculty, staff, students, and postdoctoral fellows working in the fields of structural and chemical biology and molecular cell and developmental biology.
    • Rock Hall: Opened in February 2004, the second research building contains space for approximately 400 researchers in the fields of neuroscience, developmental biology, and genetics.
    • Byers Hall: Serving as the headquarters for the California Institute for Biomedical Research (QB3), a cooperative effort between the UC campuses at San Francisco, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz, this building opened in February 2005. It contains space devoted to both computational and experimental research and houses a 7 tesla superconducting magnet, the first on the West Coast of the United States, for use in magnetic resonance imaging.
    • Several other facilities opened at Mission Bay in the fall of 2005: a campus community center (designed by famed architect Ricardo Legoretta) containing fitness, conference and student services, a housing complex for 750 students and postdoctoral fellows, and two parking garages totaling 1400 spaces. A fourth research building, the Helen Diller Family Cancer Research Building, is currently under construction and expected to open in fall 2008. Two additional research buildings designated for neuroscience and cardiovascular research are currently in the planning and design phase. UCSF is also in the early stages of planning for a new specialty hospital focused on women, children, and cancer to be built at the Mission Bay campus.

UCSF is also affiliated with the San Francisco VA Hospital and the J. David Gladstone Institutes, a private biomedical research entity that has recently moved to a new building adjacent to UCSF's Mission Bay campus. The headquarters of the new California Institute for Regenerative Medicine are also located nearby in the Mission Bay neighborhood.

[edit] Distinctions

  • First to discover that normal cellular genes can be converted to cancer genes (Nobel Prize in Medicine, J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus, 1989)
  • First to discover (together with Stanford) the techniques of recombinant DNA, the seminal step in the creation of the biotechnology industry
  • First to discover the precise recombinant DNA techniques that led to the creation of a hepatitis B vaccine
  • First to perform a successful in-utero fetal surgery (Michael R. Harrison, MD)
  • First to clone an insulin gene into bacteria, leading to the mass production of recombinant human insulin to treat diabetes
  • First to synthesize human growth hormone and clone into bacteria, setting the stage for genetically engineered human growth hormone
  • First to develop prenatal tests for sickle cell anemia and thalassemia
  • First to train pharmacists as drug therapy specialists
  • First to establish special care units for AIDS patients and among the first to identify HIV as the causative agent of the disease
  • First to discover and name prions (PREE-ons), an infectious agent that is responsible for a variety of neurodegenerative diseases (Nobel Prize in Medicine, Stanley Prusiner, 1997)
  • First to develop catheter ablation therapy for tachycardia, which cures "racing" hearts without surgery
  • First university west of the Mississippi to offer a doctoral degree in nursing
  • First to discover that missing pulmonary surfactants are the culprit in the death of newborns with respiratory distress syndrome; first to develop a synthetic substitute for it, reducing infant death rates significantly
  • With a work force of 18,600 people and annual economic impact of $2 billion, UCSF is San Francisco's second largest employer

[edit] Noted alumni/faculty

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://pub.ucsf.edu/newsservices/releases/200609255/
  2. ^ US News medical school rankings
  3. ^ US News rankings
  4. ^ US News nursing school rankings
  5. ^ US News and World Report rankings of best hospitals

[edit] External links


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