In celebration of Founders Day, Chancellor Mike Bishop, MD, will award the UCSF Medal to four individuals for outstanding leadership.
The medals will be awarded at the 2008 Founders Day Banquet on Wednesday, April 23, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco.
Initiated in 1975, the medal is the University's most prestigious award and replaces the granting of honorary degrees. The medal is given annually to individuals who have made outstanding personal contributions in areas associated with UCSF's fourfold mission of teaching, research, patient care and public service.
The 2008 UCSF Medal recipients are:
- • Willie L. Brown Jr., former speaker of the California State Assembly and former mayor of San Francisco
- • F. Warren Hellman, philanthropist and dedicated supporter of UCSF, San Francisco and the greater community
- • Janet Davison Rowley, MD, Blum-Riese Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine, Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, and Human Genetics, University of Chicago, pioneering geneticist and cancer researcher
- • Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, researcher and activist in the creationism-evolution debate
In addition, the UCSF Faculty Research Lecturer Award, Distinguished Clinical Research Lecturer Award and Distinction in Teaching Award recipients will be recognized during the event. This year's awardees include Gail R. Martin, PhD, professor, Department of Anatomy, School of Medicine; Leslie Z. Benet, PhD, professor, departments of biopharmaceutical sciences and pharmaceutical chemistry, and co-director of the Drug Studies Unit, School of Pharmacy; Bradley A. Sharpe, MD, assistant clinical professor, Division of Hospital Medicine, School of Medicine; and Brian Lee Schmidt, DDS, MD, PhD, associate professor, Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, School of Dentistry.
The cost for this black-tie-optional event is $100 per person. For more information about the banquet or to request an invitation, please contact Debi Ham at 415/502-4337.
Willie Brown
Widely regarded as an immensely influential politician, Willie L. Brown Jr., who served two terms as mayor of San Francisco and 15 years as speaker of the California State Assembly, has been at the center of California politics, government and civic life for four decades.
As mayor of San Francisco, Brown paved the way for UCSF's Mission Bay campus, which was jumpstarted by the donation of 30 acres from Catellus Development Corp. and 13 acres from the City and County of San Francisco.
In a landmark deal between Nelson Rising, CEO of Catellus, then Mayor Willie Brown and Bruce Spaulding, senior vice chancellor of University Advancement and Planning, UCSF acquired 43 acres of San Francisco real estate at no cost. Helping negotiate this transaction was UCSF volunteer Robert Burke, who also received the UCSF Medal for his assistance. The donation of land - a gift valued at well over $170 million back then - helped keep UCSF from expanding outside the city and jump-started the development of the new campus.
As mayor, Brown also refurbished and rebuilt one of the nation's busiest transit systems, pioneered the use of bond measures to build affordable housing and improved the juvenile justice system. Today, he heads the Willie L. Brown Jr. Institute on Politics and Public Service.
F. Warren Hellman
F. Warren Hellman is the founder and chairman of Hellman & Friedman LLC, one of the country's top 100 private equity firms, which is based in San Francisco. Over the years, the firm has raised more than $8 billion in capital and invested in approximately 50 job-creating companies. Hellman has been a pioneer in the area of venture capital and private equity, lending his expertise to numerous capital management firms.
His civic and philanthropic activities include serving as past chairman and present trustee of the San Francisco Foundation; co-chair of the California Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth and member of the Governor's Council of Economic Advisers; member of the advisory board of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley; trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation and trustee emeritus of the Brookings Institution; board member of the Committee on Jobs and of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and Bay Area Council; chairman, Voice of Dance; and board member of Salesforce.com Foundation.
In 2005, Hellman was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hellman is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School. He is well known in the San Francisco music scene for starting the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.
Janet Rowley
An internationally recognized expert on leukemias and lymphomas, Janet Rowley, MD, in the 1970s went against the established view of the cause of cancer when she revealed that specific chromosomal translocations caused specific leukemias. Since then, more than 400 recurring translocations have been identified in different cancers, and the cloning of translocation breakpoints has led to very effective therapy that targets the involved genes.
Rowley earned her MD degree at the University of Chicago. In 1962, after a year at University of Oxford studying normal human chromosomes, she returned to the University of Chicago as a research associate in the Section of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine, and became a professor of medicine in 1977.
She has received many awards, including those of the American societies of hematology, clinical oncology and human genetics. Rowley received the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1996 and the Benjamin Franklin Award from the American Philosophical Society in 2003. In 1998, she shared the prestigious Lasker Award for work on genetic changes in cancer and received the National Medal of Science. In 2005, she received the Landon Prize for Translational Cancer Research. She also holds nine honorary degrees from universities in the United States and Europe.
Eugenie C. Scott
Eugenie C. Scott is an advocate of science education and, for more than two decades, has been the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a pro-evolution, nonprofit science education organization with members in every state.
She has served as chair of the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association and as president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and has chaired both the anthropology and education sections of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Her research has been in medical anthropology and skeletal biology. She is the author of
Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction and co-editor (with Glenn Branch) of
Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.
Scott is nationally recognized as a proponent of church-state separation, and serves on the national advisory councils of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and of the American Civil Liberties Union. She served on the advisory council of the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion program and on the board of directors of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study. An internationally recognized expert on the creationism-evolution controversy, she has consulted with the National Academy of Sciences, several state departments of education, and legal staffs in both the United States and Australia.
Scott has worked nationwide to communicate the scientific method to the general public and to improve how science as a way of knowing is taught in school. She holds a PhD degree in biological anthropology from the University of Missouri and several honorary DSc degrees.
She has been honored by scientists, educators and advocates of church-state separation. From her fellow scientists, she has received the AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, the National Science Board's Public Service Award, the American Society for Cell Biology's Bruce Alberts Award, the American Institute of Biological Sciences Outstanding Service Award, the Geological Society of America's Public Service Award and the American Anthropological Association's Anthropology in the Media Award.
