Chancellor Mike Bishop, MD, on Thursday will present the UCSF Medal to four leaders whose work has advanced public health and education.
The University's most prestigious award, the medal is given annually to individuals who have made outstanding personal contributions in areas associated with UCSF's health sciences mission, goals and values. Initiated in 1975, the award replaces the granting of honorary degrees.
The 2007 UCSF Medal recipients are:
* Brook Byers, a visionary venture capitalist, San Francisco Bay Area philanthropist
and community leader;
* Robert Derzon, a champion for health care for uninsured and low-income
people and a member of the UCSF Foundation
* Wendy Kopp, founder and president of Teach for America, the national corps
of outstanding recent college graduates who teach in the nation's neediest
urban and rural public schools; and
* Mamphela Ramphele, MD, PhD, a doctor, civil rights leader, community development
worker and anti-Apartheid activist.
Chancellor Bishop will present the UCSF Medals at the UCSF Founders Day Banquet at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco on May 3.
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Brook Byers
Brook Byers has played a vital leadership role in UCSF's development efforts that contributed to the birth of the 43-acre life sciences campus at Mission Bay. Active with the UCSF Foundation since 1987, Byers served as co-chair of the Campaign for UCSF from 1998 to 2005, which raised $1.4 billion. He also served as chairman of That Man May See Inc., the official support foundation for the Department of Ophthalmology at UCSF.
"Byers and his wife have been significant supporters of the UCSF Mission Bay campus. In 1995, they established the Byers Award in Basic Science. They have also supported the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center, the library and the Chancellor's Discretionary Fund."
A leader in the venture capital industry, Byers is a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). Since its founding in 1972, KPCB has backed entrepreneurs in hundreds of ventures, including Amazon.com, Genentech and Google. A venture capital investor since 1972, Byers has been closely involved with more than 60 new technology-based ventures that have pioneered the fields of monoclonal antibodies, protein therapeutics, DNA sequencing and other fields, producing more than 100 products approved by the Food and Drug Administration to improve patient care.
He formed the first life sciences practice group in the venture capital profession in 1984 and led KPCB to become a premier venture capital firm in the medical, health care and biotechnology sectors. KPCB has invested in and helped build more than 110 life sciences companies, which are developing hundreds of products to treat major underserved medical needs representing huge markets in the nearly $2 trillion health care sector.
Byers served as the founding president, and then chairman, of four biotechnology companies. He is currently on the board of directors of eight companies, most recently joining CardioDx,
Genomic Health Incorporated,
FivePrime Therapeutics, OptiMedica, Pacific Biosciences, Spinal Modulation and XDx, Inc.
He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and received an MBA degree from Stanford University.
Robert Derzon
Robert Derzon has been a longtime and loyal member of the UCSF campus community. He served as chief executive officer and director of UCSF hospitals and clinics from 1970 to 1977. Derzon is a member of the UCSF Foundation, the Chancellor's Associates and the Heritage Circle, a group of deferred-gift donors. His contributions to UCSF also include establishing a scholarship fund for underrepresented minority students and giving to the endowed chair in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Derzon gained national attention when he was chosen by President Jimmy Carter to be the first director of the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), which would for the first time integrate the administration of Medicare and Medicaid into a single federal agency, now known as the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
After several years in that position, Derzon returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to consult for Lewin and Associates, now called Lewin Group, where he helped health care facilities cope with challenges in the health care environment. He is now a senior vice president emeritus at Lewin Group.
Prior to arriving at UCSF, he served as the first deputy commissioner of New York City Department of Hospitals and as associate director of the New York University Medical Center.
Derzon has authored numerous articles comparing the performance of the nonprofit and for-profit hospital industries and other related health topics. He has been a lecturer in UC Berkeley School of Public Health's program in health care administration. Derzon also has been a senior scholar of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences.
Since retiring, Derzon remains active as a consultant on health policy issues, raising funds for several organizations. He has helped raise money for the Marin Center for Independent Living, which assists people with a wide range of disabilities, and supports the Marin Community Clinic, which provides comprehensive primary health care to the uninsured. A member of the clinic's board since 1994, Derzon was named board member of the year in 2003.
Derzon has been a major donor to Dartmouth College, his alma mater, where he received a BA degree in 1953 and an MBA degree from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration in 1954. He also holds an MA degree in public health from the University of Minnesota.
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Wendy Kopp
Frustrated with the poor quality of America's public school system, Wendy Kopp started the successful program Teach for America (TFA), which sends top college graduates to spend two or more years teaching children in the most deprived public schools.
Originating as an idea in her senior thesis at Princeton University in 1989, TFA works to build the movement to eliminate educational inequities by enlisting the country's most promising college graduates to teach. In the 2006-2007 school year, TFA's 4,400 teachers worked with about 375,000 students in more than 1,000 schools across the country.
Notably, most of the more than 12,000 alumni of this program continue to teach and serve in low-income communities. Many TFA alumni have already become leaders in education, serving as principals, school board members, school district leaders, professors and founders of nongovernmental organizations. Two alumni started the KIPP Academies, charter schools that have among the best results of any in the United States. And in school districts, such as those as Washington DC and Houston, hundreds of TFA teachers have collaborated to transform poorly performing schools.
From the outset, Kopp has run a summer institute to prepare the young students to teach in difficult schools. To answer critics who questioned the logic of sending naïve teachers into classrooms, Kopp commissioned independent researchers, who have shown that TFA teachers produce higher test scores than others, including veterans and certified teachers.
Kopp has spent the last 17 years building TFA, even making acceptance into the program more competitive and difficult, thereby raising the prestige of acceptance. Today, TFA draws more than 17,000 applicants, of whom about 10 percent are seniors in Ivy League colleges seeking positions.
Kopp has received numerous awards, including being named one of America's best leaders by
US News and World Repot in 2006. She was the youngest person and the first woman to receive Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award in 1993, the highest honor the school confers on its undergraduate alumni. In 2003, she was appointed to the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation and to the Advisory Board of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
In her book,
One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for America and What I Learned Along the Way, published in 2001, Kopp describes how she created TFA and shares her vision of making an excellent education available to all children. Kopp will talk about her work at a noontime event on Thursday, May 3, in Toland Hall on the UCSF Parnassus campus.
Kopp chairs the board of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit consulting group that helps school districts and states recruit and develop new teachers more effectively. She also serves on the boards of the Learning Project, Public Allies and the KIPP Academy in the Bronx.
Mamphela Ramphele
A native of South Africa, Mamphela Ramphele overcame many obstacles to become a medical doctor in 1972 and a leader in community health programs. While attending the University of Natal Medical School, she became an activist in the movement opposing the injustices of the South African government's Apartheid policies.
During this period, the government prosecuted her under the Suppression of Communism Act in 1974 for possessing banned literature, and she was detained in 1976 under the Terrorism Act. In 1977, she was exiled to remote rural areas in the Northern Province for seven years. Ramphele used this time to further her work with poor people and founded the Ithusheng Community Association.
With the end of apartheid, Ramphele became a leader in the new South Africa, first serving as deputy vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town from 1991 to 1995 and then as vice chancellor from 1996 to 2000 - becoming the first black person and woman to be appointed to hold such a position in a South African academic institution.
In 2000, Ramphele moved to Washington, DC, to become one of the four managing directors and the first South African to join the World Bank. At the bank, she was responsible for education and human resources, and played a major role in economic development, emphasizing the important role of capacity building in science and technology for every nation.
During this time, Ramphele served as a member of the international study panel that produced the InterAcademy Council report, "Inventing a Better Future: A Strategy for Building Worldwide Capacities in Science and Technology." She then worked to integrate this report's powerful recommendations on building merit-based institutions for science and technology into bank policy.
Since leaving the World Bank in the summer of 2004, Ramphele has co-chaired the Global Commission on International Migration, working from her home base of Cape Town.
Ramphele continues to promote progressive social change in Africa and elsewhere. She has been widely recognized with awards, including the Outstanding International Leadership and Commitment Award for Health, Education and Social Development (2002) from the Society for International Development's Washington, DC, Chapter and the Woman of Distinction Award (2001) from the South African Women for Women organization. Ramphele also has been recognized with more than 20 honorary doctoratal degrees, including those from the prestigious universities Harvard, Princeton and Michigan.
She earned her doctor in medicine degree at the University of Natal in 1972, which at the time was the only university that welcomed black students who did not have prior permission from the government to enroll. She received a PhD degree in social anthropology at the University of Cape Town in 1991.
Ramphele has written several books, including
Mamphela Ramphele: A Life, published in 1995.
Related Links:
Teach for America Founder to Discuss Educational Equity
Chancellor Awards UCSF Medals to Four Leaders
