UCSF: My Visit

The Program:

Similarly to TPCB, UCSF's Chemistry and Chemical Biology is a chem program started by biologists. CCB isn't even really a department to speak of, but a program that draws from all of UCSF's medically delineated institutes. There are about 50 faculty formally affiliated with the program (and about 50 CCB students), but, again similar to TPCB, more seem to be getting dragged in every year by rotation students interested in their work. The quality of chemical biology at UCSF is extraordinary, and it's essentially the home of a bunch of very impressive techniques (high-resolution EM, cysteine tethering, kinase modulation, hyperpolarized MRI, etc.). The labs are pretty much all problem-oriented, which means exposure to a broad range of techniques and, when coupled with a lack of undergrads and some very tight-knit relationships with industry, a reputation as a post-doc factory. So the grad program is only right for a certain set of people (more on that later), but the things it does well, it does really, really well. The structure is similar to other chemical biology programs I've visited -- three quarter-long rotations required, one semester of TAing, a relatively flexible course-load for the first year, etc. But UCSF does have a few added benefits, e.g. the ability to teach (not TA, but teach) lab classes at USF and access to the Entrepeneurship Center for students interested in starting their own companies. Like many chemical biology programs (the first "C" in the name is a bit misleading), UCSF's is on the small side -- they usually take about 15 students per year, and the current first-year class is only comprised of four (!) students. This means that grad students are in high demand, which is a situation I seem to be leaning toward so far.

The Environment:

UCSF has a bunch of campuses scattered around town, but the most famous site is the Parnassus campus, which houses the medical school and hospital and has an outrageous view of the city. The research, on the other hand, happens across town in Mission Bay, which is a campus that's about as new as Scripps Florida's. There's a 20-year-plan to build up more UCSF and biotech around the area, but for now it's surrounded by a lot of undeveloped land. On the plus side, the campus is pristine and walking distance from AT&T Park (the Giants's stadium) and the main San Francisco Caltrain station. There's a very nice complex of subsidized (~$950/month) student housing across the street from campus, but there seems to be a bit of a housing crunch at UCSF: in order to allow all of the students to take advantage of the subsidized housing, the school has put a hard two-year cap on leases for those apartments. The students don't seem to mind too much (in fact, they seemed to be happy to move into more exciting areas of San Francisco), and Charlie Craik gave a whole pep talk about the housing situation not being so bad, but I can't help but be a little concerned about having to pay exorbitant rent on a not-so-nice apartment. Of course, as Charlie said, it would be nice to live in a city where everyone wants to live. UCSF runs a free shuttle service on weekdays that basically goes all over town, and there are also BART and Muni stations a short walk away. San Francisco may very well be as fun as New York City, and the added benefits of pleasant weather and accessible outdoor activities make it a very appealing place to be. 

The Visit:

With Mission Bay lacking in the hotel department, UCSF put us up at the Sir Francis Drake in Union Square. I had my own room (good luck so far this trip), and while we had a charter bus taking us around during the visit, I made the walk to campus from Union Square on Tuesday, and it only took about 45 minutes to get there from downtown. The visit itself was relatively brief, with planned events only on Sunday and Monday. Unlike at other programs I had visited, the first day was a bit more organized -- we had four faculty talks, followed by dinner at a nice little Italian restaurant with the faculty that had spoken. The interview day was packed as usual. I had one-on-one interviews with six people, but UCSF did well to break things up by giving us a tour of the campus housing and gym immediately after lunch, which allowed me to recover my energy a bit -- the immediate post-lunch faculty meeting has been a consistent struggle for me at other visits. The format for the meals was also a bit different: students took small groups to different places in town for lunch (I went to Ramp) and dinner (Grub, in North Beach). The visit felt shorter this time around, as we pretty much condensed all of the grad student bonding into a single day. To be fair, we had a decent amount of time during breakfast and happy hour to chat with students, and there was plenty of revelry at the rooftop bar on Monday night. I would have liked the ability to explore San Francisco more, but I ended up doing that on my own time on Tuesday, so it worked out okay.

The Faculty:

From a biochemistry perspective, UCSF is about as world-class as it gets. Kevan Shokat and Jim Wells have played a large part in the move to use protein engineering as a component of drug discovery just as vital as small molecule development. Wells's cysteine tethering approach gives UCSF's high throughput screening platform a nice advantage, and talking with Michelle Arkin (one of the heads of the Small Molecule Discovery Center) was pretty exciting. UCSF also just brought in Jason Gestwicki from Michigan last year, which not only rounds out a very strong roster of small molecule probe labs (in addition to Wells, Shokat, Jack Taunton, and Adam Renslo in the SMDC), but also gives UCSF an unusually student-heavy lab in a generally post-doc oriented environment. As far as my conversations with faculty went, Gestwicki and the rest were a pleasure to talk to. Bo Huang is basically the Wei Min of UCSF -- lots of very cool ideas for moving imaging forward, and a definitively infectious enthusiasm for his work -- and Martin McMahon was probably the perfect person for me to meet. At this point my biggest concern for research is trying to figure out the balance of biochemistry and synthesis, and McMahon was able to have a very earnest conversation with me about UCSF's comparative strengths and weaknesses for the PhD. My one regret is that I got sidetracked in conversations with grad students during the reception and was only able to speak to Shokat for a minute or so. Still, I came away with a good impression of the faculty at UCSF -- once again, there's a strongly collaborative and supportive environment in place, and I think UCSF is definitely on the walk-the-walk side of the interdisciplinary biosciences trend. I think the most interesting thing I heard this weekend came from Gestwicki, who was really impressed at how strongly the MDs at UCSF valued basic science. He's been able to get some neuroscience collaborations off the ground thanks to that open-mindedness of the medical community, and I think that's a major plus for the research at UCSF. Gestwicki also mentioned that the approach to collaboration in the Bay never bracketed out industry either, which means that a lot of labs are working closely and sharing IP with Genentech and other companies -- something that I don't really associate with the Boston academic community (although I may very well be wrong about that).

The Students:

UCSF has a bit of an odd setup in that they have both a small student cohort and a lack of housing in the immediate campus vicinity. I was expecting that to lead to a pretty disjointed group of students (something akin to Scripps La Jolla), but in point of fact, there seemed to be a genuine community there. It may help that they at least get two years living in the campus apartments before being forced to disperse into the city, and it may also be that the labs there are designed explicitly to foster interaction between colleagues, but I got the impression that students were very comfortable floating around campus asking their colleagues about their work (this, I should mention, seems to extend to the faculty as well). Perhaps the most unique aspect of UCSF's student programming is their "boot camp" at the beginning of the first year, which has students go over a range of chemical and biochemical techniques, but also provides some group dinners and organized bonding time. But all rationale aside, I got a very good vibe from the students at UCSF. They kept the same balance of scientific enthusiasm and interest in the outside world that I should probably now expect from these schools. They all seemed to be close with each other but also able (thanks to being dispersed in the city) to have their own social circles outside of the chemistry world. I think that's going to be important for me going forward, and even if rent is a little high, I can't say I'd have any qualms about getting to live in San Francisco.

The Cohort:

The more time I spend on chemical biology visits, the more I realize that this is the community I really want to surround myself with. I think the focus on applied research may just attract a group of students with a greater ability to (and interest in) put their research in a wider context, which can then lead to a better perspective in general. But that's just me spitballing and generalizing. In any case, there weren't too many people on this visit that I had seen before, but I did get to meet a few of the people who had been on the other Harvard Chem Bio visit weekend, and that was a really nice group. Everyone had their own interests (mostly outdoorsy) outside the lab, and I could definitely see myself getting along with pretty much everyone I talked to. I will say that the people I seemed to gel with the most may not end up putting UCSF at the top of their lists, but I can get into that in the next section.

The Impression:

In a lot of ways, UCSF was one of my favorite visits. They have an amazing amount of applied research going on, they have a few resources (the boot camp and teaching at USF) that are genuinely unique, their community is small and tight-knit, and they're actually located in a city that I really want to live in. The drawbacks are pretty much all on the "training" front, and this is the first place I've been to where I've really had to make that a consideration. The strength of UCSF's approach is that it employs a "whatever-technique-works" strategy, which means a tremendous amount of breadth at the expense of depth. For someone like me, who wants a strong foundation in synthesis to accompany his biochemical training, this makes me a little nervous, as I'm not sure there are any labs at UCSF that value synthetic methodology highly enough for me. Of course, as the field changes, having that intuition may be less important than having the ability problem solve using a range of techniques, and certainly if I'm interested in working in a biotech startup, UCSF has the requisite training. But I think I need to have a conversation with Jacob about the consequences of a UCSF education when it comes to academia, which is not a door I'm willing to close at this point. In any case, if I can get past that reservation, there are quite a few labs at UCSF I can see myself working at, and there's no question that the environment there is pretty fantastic.