Town Hall: leadership spotlight

[Kathy Giacomini]
Hello, everyone, and welcome. [I am] leading my first town hall today. So today, what we’re going to do is, in this brief one hour, we’re going to talk about recent accomplishments and changes in the School. We’re going to talk about our new leadership team and I will be introducing them. And then we’re going to have a panel discussion with Q&A on some of the leadership team, focused on educational opportunities. But before I begin, I’d like to introduce Alesia, who will... give us a brief announcement. Alesia.

[Alesia Woods]
Thank you, greeting School of Pharmacy, faculty and staff. As we approach the holidays, I’m pleased to share with you a new School-wide guideline, approved by the dean, to help us enjoy and make the most of the holidays while being consistent with our sustainability goals. Under most circumstances, offices will close and staff can leave or stop work at 1pm on the day before the following six holidays: Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. The dean recognizes there are units and circumstances where this may not be feasible. So please check with your supervisor if you are not sure. We encourage supervisors and managers to send reminders ahead of each designated holiday. And please contact me if you have questions, concerns, or just need further advice regarding the holiday schedules. The specific dates for the next 12 months are as follows: Thanksgiving, which is next Wednesday, early release day at one o’clock on 11/23; Christmas, December 22; New Year’s will be December 29; Memorial Day, May 26; Independence Day, July 3; and Labor Day September 1. Thank you.

[Kathy Giacomini]
Thanks, Alesia. That was great. I’m glad to see those policies introduced because I think it’s family friendly and also work friendly. I’m going to now share my screen and start with our town hall agenda. As I said, I’m going to describe some recent accomplishments and then I’m going to introduce our new leadership team. And then we’ll have a nice quote unquote leadership spotlight in which we’ll have question and answer and I’ll focus on educational programs.

So recent accomplishments. You see a list of them here, I’ll read through them, but then I’m going to go into each one of them and why they’ve been interesting, fun and also interactive with our School. We’ve hosted some receptions at two places, the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, and the California Society for Health-System Pharmacists. And those have happened in the last couple of months. We’ve created new scholarships for students and for incoming students. And we think that will help give us a competitive advantage in recruiting the best of the best students that we have. We’ve also established new interactions with Genentech, we’ve improved our PharmD website, I’ll show you some examples of that. We’ve initiated a strategic planning process which all of you will be involved with. I’ll tell you a little bit about where we are and what’s coming there. And then we’ve appointed a new leadership team, and I will be introducing some of those team members.

Let me start with the American College of Clinical Pharmacy. They had their annual meeting this year in San Francisco. So Lisa Kroon and I hosted an event, it was reception, and we had a lot of attendance. One of my goals as a dean is to increase the visibility of our school, faculty, students, staff, especially in these national societies. This is a big national society. ACCP is one of the largest American societies for research in particular. And you can see we had nine poster presentations, we had an award recipient, Betty Dong, we had an invited presentation, we really had a fun time at the reception connecting to alumni, you see Sharon and others there.

I also hosted another one at CSHP. And that happened a few days ago, actually in Anaheim. And that was also very well attended by so many alumni. It was a great event and really fun to be at. And I feel like we were highly visible in both places. And it was something to be proud of. And we’re going to increase our visibility with time.

Kathy Giacomini
One of the things I think everyone is aware of is, the challenge is right now that pharmacy is undergoing in recruiting students. And as you know, in the state of California, we now have 14 or 15 schools of pharmacy. And we’re really recruiting among a lot of the same students, who are applying to different schools of pharmacy. And many of those schools of pharmacy are private. And private schools, as you know, often have scholarships that they have raised for fundraising, and they award the students. on admission, those scholarships. So one of the things I’ve been able to do with a donation, and anonymous donation, is to create for $5,000 scholarships, which will start in 2023 for incoming students, so when they get there, you’ve been admitted to UCSF School of Pharmacy, they get "you’ve been admitted, and you have a scholarship." And this is the kind of thing I want to do for most if not all of our students and I think that will give us a nice competitive edge to get the best and the brightest students.

The other thing I’ve done is, I’ve been very interested and I’m just starting on really connecting UCSF School of Pharmacy to the biotech and the tech industry here in the Bay Area. So I started with Genentech and hopefully there is much more to come even with Genentech. But I will announce right now that we’ve got guaranteed three APPE rotation slots for UCSF PharmD students, and that will start in 2023. So we’re very excited about that. And then we also were able to procure a Genentech UCSF School of Pharmacy PhD Student Diversity Fellowship, where Genentech will fund two underrepresented minority students, PhD students per year. And they can be in any one of our graduate programs that our faculty are very involved in. And those students will also have an opportunity to go to Genentech, rotate there, and learn about what it’s like to work in industry. And that’s for the next five years. So I’m very excited about these two nascent and early interactions with Genentech. And we’re going to build more interactions with time.

The other thing again, back to recruitment, it’s very important to us that we have a very attractive website where we can recruit students, that the students are attracted to our website. So we’ve redone it this is with Eric and Levi, Eric Davila, and Levi Gadye, they both and others on their team created this, Frank Farm, created this website. And it’s a really nice website for our potential PharmD applicants. And we highlight here, some of our strengths, which is nice, number one in research funding, unparalleled ecosystem. And then we also have interviews with class members, so pharmacy students, that they can attract one another to the school. So we’ve got one from each class, 2023 through 2025. And we highlight other things there. So that’s been a new happening, and hopefully that will result in increased numbers. And I’m showing you here some early numbers where we have, as you can see in 2022, in orange, we have more pageviews than we did last year in 2021. So hopefully that will translate, too, jury’s still out, but hopefully that will translate to more applications for our school. So we’ll see about that.

So the strategic plan, it went for five years, and then it went for plus two years. So it’s a seven year strategic plan. Sorry, that’s my new puppy. Very sorry, don’t bark. So we have seven theme areas that you can see and we’ve been working on this in at the leadership group level. And we’ve been working with Stephanie Metz and her department in strategic planning at UCSF. So we’re going to have all of these theme areas, including, new in our strategic plan, diversity, equity, inclusion, that wasn’t called out before, and transformative partnerships, where we’ll talk about partnering, for example, with industry or global partnerships, and what we want to be doing as a School for the next five years. So I’m very excited about that. And that process has begun.

And now I want to introduce some of our new leaders in the school. So first of all in education, we have our two stellar faculty members and stellar teachers, which are Igor Mitrovic and Conan MacDougall. I’m so sorry, didn’t know this puppy would start barking. So, and they are going to be the co-vice deans, or are the co-vice deans now for PharmD education, transitioning from Sharon, who is now the Executive Vice Dean. I cannot do anything without Sharon. She’s spectacular. And she’s helping the transition plan as she transitions Igor and Conan into that role. And then we have Leslie Florin, who’s going to help bring our fellowship programs together under one roof. So as you may know, there are multiple fellowship programs, or multiple fellowships, around our School of Pharmacy, yet they’re not together. So we have one, we have several in our CERSI, our Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science, and Clinical Pharmacy has some. So lastly, it’s going to bring that together and we’ll then have a very highly visible fellowship program, where we’ve got all these fellowship programs, and then we’ll be able to build on that.

And then Rada and Brian Shoichet are going to be leading some efforts in graduate pharmacy education with our three year program, we can now capitalize and build other educational programs, in, for example, regulatory science, master’s programs, as well as reinvigorate our PharmD, PhD and so Brian and Rada will be involved in creating those new opportunities for our students.

We also have transformative partnerships. So we decided to recognize entrepreneurship, Adam Renslo is taking on that vice dean role in recognizing entrepreneurship and rewarding it. So we’re going to make that highly visible in the School of Pharmacy. I don’t think most people know how entrepreneurial we are. And similarly, Jen Cocohoba and Kathy Yang are going to be focused on clinical innovations and entrepreneurship in the clinical practice. So that’s great. And of course, we have Desi, I’m just beginning to work with Desi at UCSF Health, and she’s going to be our vice dean of clinical affairs, or is our vice dean of clinical affairs. And then Andrej stepped down, Andrej Sali has been our vice dean for research for many years. And I’m very happy and pleased that Jaime Fraser agreed to join us in that new capacity. So we’re looking for great things there.

Then as I said, we’ve added diversity, equity, and inclusion to our strategic plan. And we’ve added two new leaders in diversity, equity, and inclusion, Ryan Hernandez and Stephanie Hsia. And I love it because we have someone in the basic science world and someone in the clinical world, and Sharon will stay very involved in DEI efforts. And they’re going to think about DEI across our School from faculty, students, and staff, and all sorts of activities that I’m looking forward to seeing that group develop. And then continuing on [to] faculty and staff engagement. So Robin Corelli, I was fortunate to inherit Robin, she had been appointed, I think, by Tom [Kearney], but maybe by Joe [Guglielmo], as our vice dean of academic affairs. And so she’s spectacular. It’s been wonderful working with her. And Lawrence Lin is my chief of staff, and anyone who knows Lawrence will know that he is highly competent, and really does keep the trains running and keep me sort of halfway focused. And then Frank Szoka agreed to be the director of faculty engagement and awards. So many times our faculty members are very accomplished. But if you’re not nominated for an award, you’re not going to get it. So Frank is going to take the opportunity to nominate our faculty members for various awards, and I think we’ll see a lot more awards and recognition of our highly accomplished and deserving faculty. And then I couldn’t do anything, Alesia is another one that I inherited. And I can’t say enough about how nice it is to work with Alesia. She has really educated me, and I love working with her and we are partners together. And she’s the dean of administration and finance.

So here’s our new org chart. Anything in pink is new. So these are all the new positions in the Dean’s Office. So the Dean’s Office is trying to send a message to everyone that we are embracing all of what we do, all the way from our educational programs, our entrepreneurial activities, our diversity, etc. So I’m very pleased with this. And of course, we have new chairs, they’re not so new anymore. I guess they’re older than I am in terms of their roles. Deanna and Michelle and Lisa, they’re fabulous. And we’ve gotten Nevan with QBI. And we, I could spend this whole talk telling you all about QBI accomplishments, but we’ll see more on that later. And then everyone else who’s working. So now I’m going to turn it over to Levi, who’s going to now run a Q and A session on educational opportunities with some of our new leaders. And then I think there will be opportunities for all of you to answer questions Levi.

[Levi Gadye]
Thanks Kathy. So today, we have four of our School leaders joining us to discuss our plans for strengthening and expanding educational opportunities available to our students. Several of these were already, all of them were introduced. But just to reiterate, we have Igor and Conan, who are at the helm of the PharmD program with advisory assistance from Sharon Youmans. And we also have Brian Shoichet, who is one of our co-vice deans for graduate pharmacy education programs. So I’d like to start just from the top. So this question, Kathy and Sharon, if you could each answer it. What is your shared vision for the future of the UCSF PharmD program?

Kathy Giacomini
Sharon, since I’ve been talking, I’ll let you go first.

[Sharon Youmans]
All right, thank you, Levi, and good afternoon, everyone. You know, I think our shared vision is to continually to improve what we’re doing. But not just about the curriculum itself. It’s sort of setting an example and being a leader on the local level, state level, national level, and even globally, what can UCSF do to help continue to transform pharmacy education for the world, at least that’s how I see it. The profession is continually to evolve. So I see even future, stronger partnerships with our health systems, because usually the profession drives the curriculum. So I think there’s a lot that we can do, I want to see UCSF, our School to place our footprint, a light footprint, not a heavy footprint. But what is our footprint and our focus going to be as we move forward? We’re coming out of this pandemic. And I think that we have a lot to offer, and a lot of people are interested in partnering with us. So I think Kathy would agree that we have lots of ideas and things that we want to explore and hopefully make some significant change in the world and in the world of pharmacy education.

Kathy Giacomini
Thank you, Sharon, I couldn’t have said it better. I just want to give you some previews, that we’re having talks with people globally. Sharon and I are very interested in having a global footprint of the UCSF School of Pharmacy, we are the leaders, and we really need to step into our big shoes, and really lead that and just like that partnership with industry, that we need to really develop that. And so for the PharmD education, I think we will build on the outstanding curriculum that a lot of people spent a lot of time working on that three year curriculum. And so we’re going to build on that and have more opportunities for our students. So yeah, being the world leader, I think lever.

[Levi Gadye]
Thanks, Kathy. That leads me well into my question for Igor and Kannan. So now we have nearly five years, I think of delivering this transformed integrated curriculum to cohorts of PharmD students graduated, what are the next steps for the evolution of the PharmD program in general, and specifically the curriculum.

[Igor Mitrovic]
So perhaps I should start and leave it to Conan to conclude. So generally, when thinking about pharmacy education, what we are seeing is, not only with our curriculum, which we finally have remarkable results, that... we always knew that we have a great education, but with the curricular review of our new curriculum, and with the fantastic assessment team, we also know that we have the data to confirm that. So that’s one of the things that was truly fantastic that transpired, beautifully in our curricular review where Les Benet, said we always knew that, literally said that, we always knew that we are teaching great, when we always knew that we had the great research and we had the data for research. But we never had quite, data for curriculum. It’s fantastic that we have now data for the curriculum that is showing that it is great.

When I’m thinking actually about PharmD education, one can’t. And I think Kathy alluded a little bit to that. We can’t not think of the environment in which in which our curriculum is existing, and that is that we have continuous decrease of applicants to pharmacy schools across the country. And this is actually not only because there are a lot of pharmacy schools, it’s actually the actual number of applicants is decreasing. And then on the graduation, and we actually see that approximately one quarter of the graduates at the graduation, is saying that they would choose different profession if they were to do it again. So when one looks at that, one can see that we have actually a profession that is somewhat facing a crisis.

So we as a leader, and this is what our great new dean and Sharon are really working on, is to take in that the role of the leader and try to see what we can do to affirm the pharmacy profession. So this is a major thing that, you know, we have physician assistants that actually can independently practice right and charge for their services. The hope is that with our clinical leaders, with Lisa and Desi, we can really do, and with strategic partnerships with other pharmacy schools and professional organizations, within the pharmacy and beyond pharmacy physicians and nurses who have actually done the same thing previously, do something about it. So this is our big thing that goes way beyond the curriculum.

But there’s also other things that we can do on the working before the School of Pharmacy, which means actually creating the pipelines, for the students, undergraduate students to come to School of Pharmacy, we’re going to have, Kathy is helping us organize meeting with the dean of biology at UC Merced who are quite excited about the proposal to create that pipeline. Kathy also has some other things that are gonna come up with, with state schools as well. So if we can create this model, where we could actually harness this really great, great pool of college students in California and beyond, and hopefully also from some from traditional black colleges, we can actually increase the pool, while at the same time working on, where do our students go in when they graduate. So Conan, can say more about curriculum and few other things.

[Conan MacDougall]
Yeah, I think Igor painted you the big picture. And perhaps I’ll discuss a little bit about sort of the details. You know, I think one thing is that the didactic curriculum tends to get the most attention. And it’s been sort of the main focus of a lot of the work we’ve done in the last few years. And I think we’re still going to work on improving it. But I think one of the areas of emphasis will be working on the integration between the didactic curriculum, and our experiential curriculum, our APPE. And APPEs as well as many of the opportunities for postgraduate education, residents, fellowships, and some of the exciting things are on graduate programs that you’ve heard a little bit about already. And we’ll hear I think a little bit more about, we also need to make sure our curriculum is sustainable. Speeding up the curriculum was a really huge lift. I mean, obviously graduating two cohorts at once, creating a new curriculum more or less from scratch is made even more so by the pandemic. So, you know, we can make sure that faculty and staff, you know, have a chance to breathe, that we get a chance to bring more faculty into the curriculum and participate in ways that they are able to give their expertise and fill the needs that we have. And you know, make sure that we have, you know, surge capacity for when challenges hit us and we’re not always just working to 99%. And then the last thing I’d say is, you know, looking ahead one thing, you know, I’d like to focus on is developing our scholarship of teaching and learning so that we can work on integrating evidence into our teaching the same way that we all bring it into our practice and reason.

[Levi Gadye]
Thanks so much Conan and Igor. So yeah, let’s move on to Brian Shoichet who’s one of our two new vice deans for ongoing graduate programs for our pharmacy students. Brian, can you talk a little bit about this vision for these new programs? And how we can prepare our pharmacy students for almost any type of career?

[Brian Shoichet]
Well, I don’t know if I can answer the last part. But what we’re working on is ideas to reinvest in a PharmD-PhD program. I think initially, that’ll be a loss leader, because there will take some financial investment, as well on how to do that and what model we should use, we have a good model. We have a model in the MD-PhD program. And that’s actually the most expensive training grant that the NIH runs by far, interestingly enough, and the results are actually a little bit mixed. So how are we going to do that? It’s an open question. And Rada is very interested, so I’m speaking a lot for Rada here, in developing a master’s program, in regulatory sciences, and computational pharmacology, working with strategic partners, along those lines, coordinating existing fellowships and establishing new fellowships, often in partnership with industry. So these are all ideas around giving our student, making it exciting and giving more opportunities for our students to really continue to develop as investigators. And I’m working with Igor and Conan to prepare our graduates for postgraduate pharmacy opportunities, including fellowships. So I think those are the ideas where we’re working on.

[Levi Gadye]
Great. I was thinking of asking one of our audience questions that is specifically about these new programs. So maybe this question can be either for Brian, or for you, Kathy, as we build out these master’s programs, how are we going to staff them? Are we working on fundraising or reallocation of finances, just to ensure that we have enough people to deliver all these new exciting things?

[Kathy Giacomini]
I’ll start, I don’t know if Brian wants to add something to that. But so first of all, yes, staffing is very important for master’s degree programs. I will spend some of the funds that... were given to me by the Chancellor, on investing in all of these educational programs, which include staffing them, and that will happen for the first few years. Master’s programs often become sustainable, because tuition is charged. So this tuition then goes into the sustainability. And that tends to fund core faculty as well as staff, especially administrative staff that run the program. So at first I’ll invest and then they should be sustainable. For fundraising, my goal, my big goal is to fundraise. So I have to get through a strategic plan. So that’s first, we’ll have a nice strategic plan. And within it, we will embed very interesting ideas that are fundable, and those, then probably sometime in the winter, spring, I plan to get on the tour and just become a fundraiser, and spend a lot of my effort raising funds for this School. This School to me is so outstanding, and we deserve a lot of funds for all the programs and the staff and people like that. So yeah, I’m going to focus on fundraising.

[Levi Gadye]
Great, thanks, Kathy. And kind of this leads into my next question, which is the other side of this coin for making sure these programs all work. What are your priorities when it comes to things like burnout, both with staff and faculty, particularly in the PharmD program?

[Kathy Giacomini]
Shall I punt that over to Igor and Conan, who I know are thinking about burnout for our faculty for sure. And just know before I punt, that I’m not punting on purpose, I am very concerned with burnout and have been from the day I walked in the door. So let me have them comment on, on burnout in what we’re going to be doing.

[Igor Mitrovic]
Do you want to start or should I?

[Conan MacDougall]
Oh, sure. I’ll take the punt to the punt. Yeah. All right, I guess I’m the only one open. Yeah, no, I think it’s, you know, it’s a substantial issue. You know, the nature of the redesign of our curriculum was such that, you know, it sort of made sense to concentrate a lot of the especially administrative, educational, administrative responsibilities and a relatively small cadre of faculty to begin with. But as we now have a more or less stable, for at least didactic curriculum, I think it makes sense to try and get more faculty involved in the sort of educational administration components to sort of create a system where people can come in as sort of the sub, perhaps the sub director of the course, learn how the course operates over, you know, a couple of years, and then maybe sort of take on that role. You know, a lot of the faculty running, the courses are, you know, really been through a lot between, you know, between the new curriculum and COVID. And so we hope to create a sort of a more sustainable pipeline around that. I mean, we also have to look at the things we’re doing and decide what are the things that we need to stop doing or that are not as high value, you know, not a new one, all of our ideas are end up as brilliant as we think they are. And it’s always easier to add than subtract. But I think we need to take a look and see, are there things that we’re teaching or ways that were things that we are doing for the students, for example, that don’t add as much value as we thought they would, and we allocating our time to do things differently.

[Igor Mitrovic]
And just to add to this, everything that Conan said, which is exactly what I share with him, we have a great partnership with Robin, Robin Corelli, who is our academic vice dean. And we have and Robin has started doing very effectively, accounting for what we do, and how much but also looking at our WOS faculty, which are a fantastic resource that we are using very effectively in our experiential education. But we have still quite a few of them on our books who are primarily engaged in didactic education, but not to the degree that university expects the engagement. And then looking also on our recent graduates, who are remarkable pool of great people, great pharmacists who are ready to jump in and help us and perhaps be developed as our WOS faculty, which would significantly decrease the load teaching load on our faculty. And we’ve already started doing some other things, as Conan shared, looking into decrease some workload, we’ve done a lot of these OSCE type of assessments that we have actually decreased now, because that was one of the pain points where we had issues. But everything’s on the table, we’re looking and making sure that we are not going to affect the quality of the curriculum, while we are going to increase efficiency. And the same goes for our staff, we cannot take we cannot do anything in our curriculum without the fantastic support borne by the staff, by our OEIS team, by our OSACA team, the leadership from these two units as well as our assessment team. So we are very carefully looking at their effort and making sure that we don’t overtax them as well. And I know that, that both Kathy and Sharon are also very much concerned about that as well.

[Levi Gadye]
Thank you. Before we move on to the general Q&A, there’s one more question specifically about PharmD education. Maybe Conan, could you expand a little more on the goals for this focus on experiential education?

[Conan MacDougall]
Yeah, sure. I mean, again, I think our didactic curriculum gets a lot of attention partly because it’s so centralized versus our experiential, you know, system [which] is divided across different sites. But we’d like to call a lot of attention to what we do in the experiential world, which I think honestly is where a huge amount of the value that the UCSF curriculum affords comes from, you know, the experiences that are provided by largely our WOS faculty. So I think A, calling attention to it, and B, improving the integration so that learners see the connections between the didactic curriculum and the experiential curriculum, not necessarily so that we are making this an additional burden on our preceptors. But that these can be things that for example, we ask the students to reflect on things that they’ve seen in their experiential curriculum that connects to the didactic curriculum. And to some extent, helping to educate our, our experiential preceptors, who, again, are mostly WOS faculty, a little bit more about what our students are learning in their didactic curriculum. Most of them went through, you know, our prior version of the curriculum, which had a much different structure. And I think they have a lot of questions about what are the things that students are, are learning? Are they’re actually gaps between, you know, in terms of things that are no longer covered? Or is it just sort of a matter of our preceptors always going to be able to find the things that our learners don’t know. So, you know, I think I don’t think that certainly the experiential program doesn’t need any sort of overhaul, they’ve done a remarkable job. And I think highlighting that is really one of the things that I hope to do going forward.

[Levi Gadye]
Great, thanks, Conan. Just a reminder, as we move into the general Q&A, feel free to drop any questions into the Q&A box, and we’ll do our best to get to them in this session. So now moving on to the general Q&A. Going back to you, Kathy, can you please speak to how the new dean roles will be supported administratively? How are you supporting them? With the admin support? Are you expecting them to fund themselves or their department?

[Kathy Giacomini]
Yeah, so it will depend. Thank you. That’s a good question. It’s an important question. So it will depend on the vice dean’s role and what their needs will be. So for example, I’ve already received requests for staff, from our vice deans for diversity. And Sharon and I discussed it, I think, this morning, but we discussed it. So we will provide the staff to support our DEI so it will go. It’ll go vice dean by vice dean, but I will support them as needed. So yes.

[Levi Gadye]
Great. The next question, which we actually received several variants of is what is the School’s vision for combating and minimizing burnout among staff, the holiday early release is a good step. Are there similar plans in the works to allow staff to recharge, and Kathy, as always, feel free to punt this to any...

[Kathy Giacomini]
So let me just say, just again, I’m very concerned with burnout. So burnout is high on my radar. And so thinking deeply about burnout, and what we can do, is important to me, I will point anything specific right here to Alesia, we have been talking about it. We’ve been meeting with different staff groups, Alesia and Lawrence, my chief of staff, have also met with individual staff members, etc. And burnout is one of the topics that we’re discussing. But Alesia, do you want to add anything more?

[Alesia Woods]
Yes, thank you, Kathy. I’m also meeting with the CAOs. And we do have a list of vacation leave. And we have found that there’s a lot of staff that is beyond the max of their vacation. So we are encouraging managers to allow staff to take time off and to plan accordingly. So this is some of the ways we’re addressing burnouts by encouraging everyone that can take their vacation. And we’re also doing, you know, wellness checks, checking in to make sure that staffs doing well, if they need a stress day. So we are definitely keeping a pulse on you know, making sure that staff is okay, and that they’re not getting burned out.

[Levi Gadye]
Great. And related to the topic of staff, someone asked, What are the advancement opportunities for the School’s very competent staff given that most of the new leadership opportunities have been for faculty?

[Kathy Giacomini]
So let me comment also that, that is one of the purposes of the strategic plan. So in the strategic plan, one of the big buckets is people, and in that bucket of people, I want some deep dives into recommendations for staff, what makes their, what will make their life better? Where are their opportunities for growth? How can I support that so staff will be a big bucket in the people in our school because how can we run a school without very happy and competent staff? So yes, that will be very important. And I guess I’m not punting at this point. I’m simply saying that let’s get that into a strategic plan. So we can implement programs that really help our staff and make them happier and as Alesia was saying increase their wellness.

[Igor Mitrovic]
Sorry, can I just add tiny little bit thinking? I’ve worked with Alesia in Department of Physiology. And as a leader, I have seen and observe her actually support staff, and promote staff and help them actually go some of the staff positions, do not have anything where you can go any further. But there are other places at the university where there’s advancement, and there’s going to be some turnover. But that’s natural. And we’re going to actually support everyone, particularly as Conan and I are responsible for staff on PharmD side. It is our goal to actually make sure that environment is friendly, supportive, and that staff has an opportunity for advancement, whether it is within the School or if it is impossible, then outside of school within the university.

[Levi Gadye]
Thank you. I wanted to mention that we have several questions about DEI that are obviously very important. But we will be having a DEI schoolwide event in the coming weeks that was postponed. So I hope the audience can forgive me for focusing on education for this particular town hall the remaining time. So anyone on the panel can address this question. Do we have a sense of how we compare to peer schools of pharmacy in terms of our dependence on without salary faculty, and learners, to run the curriculum?

Kathy Giacomini
I’d ask Conan and Igor to tell us about that? I do.

[Conan MacDougall]
Well, yeah. So no, no, go ahead. No, I’m gonna punt to Robin, since she’s actually raising her hand. I was actually just PubMed-ing the answer to the question, because I have a general idea, but not a specific sense. And I think Robin could probably give a better answer.

[Robin Corelli]
I don’t know if I have a better answer, because it’s really anecdotal. In fact, I was when I saw that question, which I think is an excellent one. I thought, Wow, what a great, what a great study, we might want to think about how we would assess that. But it’s fraught with challenges. Because how adjunct faculty are defined at other schools, how they how they draw, but I will say that the bulk of the volunteer faculty efforts come in experiential education. And I would venture to gather, just because of the numbers that are necessary to run the curriculum and experiential education, we’ve probably fare very well against the other, comparable. Now, to the extent that we incorporate in the didactic, we are not maximizing that as far as I’m concerned, and we couldn’t do better. But that’s I don’t know if Valerie Clinard is on, if she is available, she could not maybe speak to some of the experiential, that is a, you know, over a third of the curriculum, and that is, all schools rely heavily on volunteer preceptors for their education.

[Sharon Youmans]
Levi, I’ll just jump in just really quickly. We would not be able to do our experiential program without our volunteer faculty, whether they have an appointment or not. And some of our, especially our alums who go and work in other health systems up and down the state are always welcoming to take our students. So it is a big, big piece of the program. And we do compete, friendly competition with the other schools, because one institution doesn’t just take students from just UCSF usually there’s a combination. So they’re an important part of the program. And just to add on to what Robin said about the didactic, that has been a challenge over the years. Because years ago, when we had a big pool, people’s schedules and work schedules were a little bit different, and they had a little bit more control. Now it’s a little bit more restricted in terms of people’s time to come and do coursework between nine and five. But people still want to do it. We just have to come up with some strategies to try to increase that pool, which is greatly needed since we have a lot more interactive and small group learning.

[Levi Gadye]
Thank you all. We only have a couple minutes left. Perhaps with this possible last question. We can touch a little bit on DEI. But again, we will be having events in the coming weeks and months, where we dedicate a lot of time to discussing this in particular with our two new vice deans for DEI. But to kind of wrap up maybe starting with Kathy, what imminent plans does the school have to address historical exclusion and increased representation in both the PharmD and PhD programs with regards to faculty, postdocs, and staff.

[Kathy Giacomini]
Um, yes, thank you for that question. So, I would say that at least I’ve put into place things that will begin to get those balls rolling. So the first thing is I’m pointing to Vice Deans Ryan and Stephanie, who can think and concentrate on DEI at all levels of our school. Secondly, in terms of the PharmD curriculum, Igor alluded to it, but we are going to capture some sister schools that have historically underrepresented minorities at those schools. So we’re going to begin to make partnerships, Igor, Conan, myself, and maybe Sharon, I can’t remember. But all of us are going to be talking to UC Merced, about being one of our partners to increase that pipeline. For the PhD program. I just secured two positions for underrepresented minorities for PhD students from Genentech, for the next five years. I’d like to expand that program, and really make it a program rather than just two. So those are the kinds of things I’m thinking on. I will rely heavily on recommendations from Stephanie and Ryan, as to what we need to be doing next. And I’ll let them talk now.

[Stephanie Hsia]
Yeah, I think, in addition to everything that Kathy highlighted, something that Ryan and I have talked about with Sharon is also making sure that at our school and institution that we have an inclusive environment so that not only are we able to recruit more diverse and underrepresented students, but we’re also able to retain them, as well. And I’ll give Ryan some time to chime in here as well.

[Ryan Hernandez]
Just briefly, I think one of the keys is gaining information, letting all of you know that we are here, we’re ready to talk through the many challenges that we face as an institution, and how we can build programs that will enable increased diversity while sustaining equity and inclusion at the at the forefront, to ensure that we have a place where all of us feel that we belong. And there’s gonna be a lot more that comes about from these conversations. And so if you have ideas, or you have thoughts, or you have challenges that you’ve been facing, by all means, feel free to start reaching out to us and start having that discussion. Thanks.

[Levi Gadye]
Thank you. So it looks like we are just about out of time, I know we do have a number of questions we couldn’t address here. And rest assured we are going to address them either in future events, or use it to inform future communications to the school community. So with that, I’ll hand it to Kathy to close.

[Kathy Giacomini]
Thank you. First of all, I want to thank you, Levi, and also Eric, for making this all happen. And I also want to thank my new team, it’s the first time I’ve really gotten all of you together. Not all of you, but most of you and it’s really nice to hear your thoughts, and I know that we’re all sort of growing in the next few months, years we’ll grow also. So it’s really nice to have you all together. And I, like Levi, I want to just underscore that we’ll try to get to these questions because it’s very important that we have an open environment. So thanks, everyone. Thanks for coming. Thank you.

[Sharon Youmans]
Thanks, Kathy. Thanks