Global Health Sciences Honors Latest Graduating Class and Retiring Director
Global Health Sciences master's degree students honor retiring director John Ziegler at the Aug. 2 graduation ceremony in the Genentech Hall auditorium on the UCSF Mission Bay campus. Photo by Cindy Chew
The UCSF Global Health Sciences program celebrated its fifth Masters of Science graduating class earlier this month in a ceremony that also was a sendoff for the degree program’s founder.
John Ziegler, MD, MSc, who launched the masters program in 2008 and has been its director ever since, is retiring after a 32-year career at UCSF. Two awards were established in his honor and given during the Aug. 2 ceremony for the 38 graduates: the John L. Ziegler Outstanding Capstone Award and the John L. Ziegler Outstanding Mentor Award.
John Ziegler poses for a photo with Nicole Santos, left, winner of the John L. Zieg-
ler Outstanding Capstone Award, and Monica Gandhi, winner of the John L. Ziegler
Outstanding Mentor Award. Photo by Cindy Chew
The student award went to Nicole Santos, PhD, MS, based on the quality of her writing, scientific rigor and methodology, clarity of results and discussion, long-term contribution to the field, as well as her ability to work well with a mentor and capstone team. The title of her research project was “Implementation and Evaluation of the TESA-blot, a Serological Tool to Detect Congenital Chagas Disease among Bolivian Newborns.”
The mentor award was given to Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, a professor of medicine in the Divisions of HIV/AIDS and Infectious Diseases at UCSF, and the director of the AIDS Consult Service at San Francisco General Hospital. Gandhi has co-led the course on Communicable Diseases in the masters program for the last five years. As one of the students who nominated her said: “I am still in awe of how she manages a demanding career in academic medicine, a family life, and mentoring students (which seems to be an around-the-clock job)! Monica is an inspiring role model and is unequivocally a fantastic mentor.”
Read more on the Global Health Sciences website.
The Global Health Sciences graduating class in the Masters of Science degree program pose for a photo outside Genentech Hall. Photo by Amy Pradhan