Two School members earn UCSF Chancellor’s Awards for Diversity

This fall, two members of the UCSF School of Pharmacy community earned UCSF Chancellor’s Awards for Diversity, a strong reflection of the School’s commitment to UCSF Pride Values. Jacqueline Fabius was given the Chancellor’s Award for Advancement of Women in the staff category, and Kwadwo (Kojo) Opoku-Nsiah was given the Chancellor’s Award for Martin Luther King, Jr., Leadership in the student/resident/postdoctoral scholar category.

Fabius is the chief operating officer of the UCSF Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI), which reports through the School of Pharmacy. She has spearheaded QBI’s efforts to elevate women scientists, selecting early-career women scientists to organize QBI’s various symposia and ensuring that these events feature at least 50 percent women speakers. She also single-handedly established the QBI Scholarship for Women From Developing Nations in Biosciences, which granted its first scholarship, to HIV researcher Jacqueline Kyosimiire-Lugemwa, PhD, of Uganda, last year.

Opoku-Nsiah is a PhD candidate in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology PhD degree program administered by the School. He works in the lab of Jason Gestwicki, PhD, a faculty member in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Opoku-Nsiah is the founder and president of Students 4 Diversity (S4D) at UCSF, an organization that connects individual mentors to incoming students from backgrounds that are traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. S4D also “provides outreach and promotes discussion on topics that impact an increasingly diverse cohort of current and aspiring scientists.”