AAAS Elects UCSF Chancellor, Three Faculty Members

UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann and three UCSF faculty members are among the 229 leaders in the sciences, humanities and arts, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector who have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS).

The new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members announced on April 19 join one of the world’s most prestigious honorary societies. A center for independent policy research, the AAAS celebrates the 230th anniversary of its founding this year. The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 9, at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Those from UCSF included in this year’s class are:

• Samuel Herbert Barondes, MD, Jeanne and Sanford Robertson Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry and director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry;


• Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, chancellor and the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Distinguished Professor;


• Howard L. Fields, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry; Endowed Chair in Pharmacology of Addictions, Principal Investigator, Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center; and


• Deepak Srivastava, MD, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease and professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Wilma and Adeline Pirag Distinguished Professor in Pediatric Developmental Cardiology at UCSF.

A complete list of the 2010 class of new members is located here [PDF].

Established in 1780 by John Adams and other founders of the nation, the academy undertakes studies of complex and emerging problems. Its membership of scholars and practitioners from many disciplines and professions gives it a unique capacity to conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary, long-term policy research. Current projects focus on science and technology; global security; social policy and American institutions; the humanities and culture; and education.

“The men and women we elect today are true pathbreakers who have made unique contributions to their fields, and to the world,” said Louis W. Cabot, academy chair. “The Academy honors them and their work, and they, in turn, honor us.”

Samuel Barondes

Barondes earned his AB and MD degrees from Columbia University. He was trained in clinical medicine and psychiatry at several Harvard teaching hospitals (Peter Bent Brigham, McLean, and Massachusetts General). Barondes learned to conduct research in molecular biology at the National Institutes of Health. Thereafter, he devoted himself to applying the new sciences of molecular biology and molecular genetics to psychiatry.

Barondes has been a professor at the University of California since 1970, first at its San Diego campus and, since 1986, at UCSF, where he was, for seven years, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and director of Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. Barondes is author of more than 200 original research articles.

Barondes is a member or fellow of several societies, including the Institute of Medicine. From 1989 to 1998, he was president of the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. He recently served as chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Susan Desmond-Hellmann

Desmond-Hellmann became chancellor at UCSF in August 2009. She previously served as president of product development at Genentech, where she was responsible for pre-clinical and clinical development, process research and development, business development and product portfolio management. She also served as a member of Genentech’s executive committee, beginning in 1996. During her time at Genentech, several of the company’s patient therapeutics (Lucentis, Avastin, Herceptin, Tarceva, Rituxan and Xolair) were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the company became the nation’s No. 1 producer of anti-cancer drug treatments.

In November 2009, Forbes magazine named Desmond-Hellmann as one of the world’s seven most “powerful innovators,” calling her “a hero to legions of cancer patients.”  The seven were lauded for their curiosity, empathy and leadership.

Desmond-Hellmann completed her clinical training at UCSF and is board-certified in internal medicine and medical oncology. She holds a BS degree in pre-medicine and an MD degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, and a master’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley.

Desmond-Hellmann also has served as associate adjunct professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF. During her tenure at UCSF, she spent two years as visiting faculty at the Uganda Cancer Institute, studying HIV/AIDS and cancer. She also spent two years in private practice as a medical oncologist before returning to clinical research.

Howard Fields

Fields received his MD and PhD degrees in neuroscience at Stanford University. After internal medicine training at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he spent three years as a research neurologist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Following clinical training in neurology at the Boston

City Hospital Service of Harvard Medical School in 1972, he joined the faculty at UCSF, where he is currently professor of neurology, director of the Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction and principal investigator at the Ernest Gallo Clinic & Research Center.

Fields’ major interests are in nervous system mechanisms of pain and substance abuse with a focus on how endogenous opioids contribute to these mechanisms. He was a founder of the UCSF Pain Management Center and has made major contributions to understanding and treating neuropathic pain.

Fields has received numerous research awards and has given many named lectureships including a Merit Award from National Institutes of Health, the Kerr Award of the American Pain Society, the Cotzias Award of the American Academy of Neurology and the R.D. Adams lecture of the American Neurological Association. He also gave the Beecher Lecture (in anesthesiology) and the Adams Lecture (in neurology) at Harvard. In 1997, he was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine.

Deepak Srivastava

Srivastava was named director of the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in 2005. He is recognized for his work in discovering the intricate networks that regulate normal and abnormal cardiogenesis, along with his contributions in understanding the genetic causes of human cardiac malformations.

Srivastava’s research focuses on understanding the causes of heart disease and on using knowledge of cardiac developmental pathways to devise novel therapeutics for human cardiac disorders. Specifically, he studies the molecular events regulating early and late developmental decisions that instruct progenitor cells to adopt a cardiac cell fate and subsequently fashion a functioning heart.

Srivastava served his residency in pediatrics at UCSF from 1990 to 1992. He began his research in Boston, where he was a pediatric cardiology fellow at the Harvard Medical School in 1994, and continued at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 1996 prior to joining the Children’s Medical Center.