Symposium to Address Unsolved Problems in BioMedicine to Honor Chancellor Emeritus

The University community will honor Mike Bishop’s 11-year service as chancellor of UCSF with an all-day symposium addressing vexing biomedical issues at the Mission Bay campus on Monday, June 7.

The event will focus on four of the most important unsolved problems in biology and biomedicine. Members of the campus community are invited to attend.

The symposium will be held Byers Auditorium, Genentech Hall on the UCSF Mission Bay campus. A reception will follow the symposium in the atrium of Genentech Hall.

As chancellor, Bishop, a Nobel laureate, led UCSF through one of its most expansive periods of growth and achievement, which included development from the ground up of a second major campus at Mission Bay, establishment of innovative research programs, including stem cell research, and record philanthropic support.

UCSF Chancellor Sue Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, who took the helm of the University in August 2009, will provide welcoming remarks and introductions at the symposium at 8:50 a.m.
Bishop continues to serve on the UCSF faculty as a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and as director of the G. W. Hooper Foundation, a biomedical research unit at UCSF.

Bishop joined the UCSF faculty in 1968 and in 1981 assumed the additional post of Hooper director. He was named UCSF chancellor in February 1998. While serving as chancellor, Bishop continued to teach medical students and run his distinguished research lab.

Bishop and his colleague Harold Varmus, MD, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for cancer research. Bishop and Varmus will be reunited for the symposium on June 7.
For more information about the event, call Yolanda O’Bannon at 415/514-4622.

Symposium Schedule

Here is the schedule for the symposium on June 7:

8:30-9 a.m. Check-in

9-10:30 a.m. Session 1: Global Health: Can We Eradicate Malaria?

• Moderator: Haile Debas, MD, executive director, UCSF Global Health Sciences
• Speaker: Christopher Plowe, MD, MPH, professor and chief, Malaria Section, Center for Vaccine Development, University of Maryland Medical School
• Panelists: Joe DeRisi, PhD, an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics and Gordon M. Tomkins Chair at UCSF, Richard Feachem, professor of Global Health at both UCSF and UC Berkeley, and director of the Global Health Group at UCSF Global Health Sciences; Phil Rosenthal, MD, professor of medicine at San Francisco General Hospital

10:30-10:45 a.m. Break

10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Session 2: Cell Biology: How Do Cells Make Decisions?

• Moderator: Marc Kirschner, PhD, John Franklin Enders University Professor of Systems Biology, Department of Systems Biology, Harvard University
• Speaker: Richard Losick, PhD, Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University
• Panelists:  Hana El Samad, assistant professor, Biochemistry & Biophysics, UC Berkeley/UCSF Graduate Group in Bioengineering, and Jonathan Weissman, PhD, professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology and of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF

12:15-1:45 Lunch break

1:45-3:15 Session 3:  Cancer: How do we prevent metastasis?

• Moderator: Harold Varmus, MD, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
• Speaker:  Joan Massague, chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program in the Sloan-Kettering Institute
• Panelists:  Zena Werb, PhD, professor and vice chair, Department of Anatomy at UCSF, and Marc Shuman, MD, professor of medicine and of urology, and Cancer Research Institute at UCSF

3:15-3:30 Break

3:30-4:45 Session 4: Neuroscience: How Does the Brain Represent the Outside World?

• Moderator: Michael Stryker, PhD, W.F. Ganong Professor of Physiology at UCSF
• Speaker: Patricia Churchland, professor of philosophy, UC San Diego
• Panelists:  Loren Frank, professor of physiology at UCSF and Michael Brainard, PhD, assistant professor, Departments of Physiology and Psychiatry at UCSF

4:45-5:30 p.m. Reception (Genentech Hall Atrium)

Related Links:

UCSF Chancellor J. Michael Bishop announces plan to step down
News Release, October 24, 2008

Symposium Poster

Bishop Lab

J. Michael Bishop Autobiography