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[EXIT, PURSIED BY SCIENCE] IN THIS ISSUE
Professional development office taps its Career Alumni Network to support those in search of non-academic employment. » PAGE 4
Beloved ‘science guy’ opposes genetically modified crops, but Harvard and Yale scientists may have containment solution. » PAGE 7
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Nye says ‘nay’
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Synapse Newspaper The UCSF Student
synapse.ucsf.edu | Thursday, February 5, 2015 | Volume 59, Number 8
Moving day arrives for new medical center
Hanna Starobinets/Synapse
Mission Ready: A fleet of ambulances moves 131 patients from the Parnassus campus to the newly opened UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay on Sunday, Feb. 1. According to a statement from UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood and medical center CEO Mark Laret, hundreds of physicians, nurses and staff were involved in the move from around 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. “A village of determined people came together to create something extraordinary,” said the statement. The new medical center, constructed both to meet growing needs and address seismic structural concerns at existing facilities, includes the Benioff Children’s Hospital, Betty Irene Moore Women’s Hospital, Bakar Cancer Hospital and Ron Conway Family Gateway Medical Building. Its first baby was born at 12:11 p.m. on Sunday.
Atul Butte to head new UCSF institute Lauren Shields Staff Writer
UCSF recently appointed Atul Butte director of the new Institute of Computational Health Sciences. Butte will move from his current position as chief of the Division of Butte Systems Medicine at Stanford University. His formal training in computer science as an undergraduate at Brown University—combined with an M.D., Ph.D.— make Butte a unique candidate for the job. His credentials are further bolstered by roles as an investigator at Stanford, a former software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, and a founder of multiple biotech startups. The Institute of Computational Health Sciences began just four years ago. “The institute got started out of a initiative to try to expand bioinformatics and clinical informatics at UCSF,” said Katherine Pollard, a UCSF professor in biostatistics who became involved early on in the efforts to establish the nascent institute. The institute’s recruitment subcommittee, chaired by Pollard, has already begun to partner with other departments to bring new computational faculty to UCSF. Eight new investigators have been recruited thus
BUTTE » PAGE 10
Housing advisory committee proposes short-term changes By Bryne Ulmschneider and Taylor LaFlam Staff Writers
Editor’s note: This is the second part in a series of articles the Synapse is writing covering the housing challenges faced by UCSF students. The last issue of Synapse explored the history of campus housing at UCSF and the new housing projected in the recent UCSF Long Range Development Plan.
San Francisco is an expensive city, and the UCSF students and administration know it. Soon the senior leadership will decide what actions to take to respond to concerns over how affordable it is to live in San Francisco while being supported by a meager graduate student stipend or student loan package. The UCSF administration seeks to address these concerns by tasking the housing advisory committee with finding immediately implementable housing solutions. In the next two weeks, senior
leadership will hear the housing advisory committee’s recommendations and decide which, if any, to implement. “People are actively considering not coming to San Francisco because of housing,” said Leslie Santos, a committee member and the director of campus housing. To increase access to below-market-rate housing necessary for recruiting top students, faculty and postdocs to UCSF, the housing advisory committee was tasked with the challenge of making more housing available to incoming students without actually having any additional inventory until 2019 at the earliest. “None of the options were attractive,” said committee member Jason Cyster, a UCSF professor and former director of the BMS graduate program. The need for more UCSF housing was recognized by all, he said, but the committee’s purpose was to “give specific recommendations to the chancellor on how to use the housing that we actually have.”
Added Santos: “The priority was to help new people to San Francisco get settled.” The housing advisory committee included faculty from across all departments at UCSF, staff from the Office of Student Life and the Housing Susan Merrell/UCSF News While many look to the Mission Bay campus for long-term residential solutions, Office, and students—including current options mainly involve setting limits on existing student housing. one of the reporters enrolled students in order to aid in the of this story. The housing advisory comtransition to San Francisco. mittee is going to strongly recommend to One challenge to ensuring incoming the senior leadership that securing addistudents have access to housing is that tional funds to subsidize housing is critical about 25 percent of the current housing to the mission of recruiting and retaining inventory is being occupied by students top talent here at UCSF. who have been in housing since 2013. Other recommendations included prioritizing incoming students over currently HOUSING » PAGE 10