Town Hall: Strategic Plan Process

[Kathy Giacomini]

Okay Hello, everyone. Can everybody hear me? Yes. Okay, great. So welcome to our winter town hall meeting and just reminding everyone that it's women's history month, this month. So let's celebrate everybody celebrate women, faculty, staff and students. Today, I'll be talking about—I'll give you some brief updates. And then we're going to announce our Clinical Pharmacogenomics Program. We'll talk in detail about the school strategic planning process and where we're at. And we have invited a lot of different people to be speaking today on those goals.

[Kathy Giacomini]
So first of all, I want to begin by welcoming our new faculty and staff. I did this at the retreat for those of you who attended just reminding us that we've got new faculty and staff in each of our departments. And if you happen to see any of these people in the hallways or something like that, make them feel welcome. School of Pharmacy really is a great home for all different people.

[Kathy Giacomini]
So let me give you some updates. So one of my goals as Dean has been to—and is to—develop and support our faculty, students, and staff. So we are sponsoring happy hours for faculty, staff ,and postdocs in the wake of the strike. And we're doing that as a way to promote healing that may have—the fractured relationships that may have occurred during the strike. So those will be going on in the next few months. And that is being led by Jaime Fraser. I also want to—in support of developing faculty, students, and staff, I want to say that our Genentech-UCSF School of Pharmacy PhD Student Diversity Fellowship is beginning. We will have the announcement for that next town hall. Ryan Hernandez is leading that program. So that's quite exciting.

[Kathy Giacomini]
Another goal for me is creating new opportunities for pharmacy students. So we are finalizing an agreement for new APPE slots at Pfizer, San Diego. This will allow students who are assigned to that region of the state an opportunity to work in industry setting. Here if they’re assigned to the San Francisco Bay Area, they can work at Genentech. So this, this opens up another industry rotation for our students.

[Kathy Giacomini]
I also want to say that one of the things I promised when I was sort of running for dean or I was the dean candidate was that I would try to develop new opportunities in the form of master's degree programs. So we are in the midst of developing a computational drug discovery and drug development master's program. And in the next town hall, we'll be rolling out what that looks like to all of you, it's very exciting. It will be for our PharmD students who can do one more year, a little over a year, and they will have a master's degree to complement their PharmD in computational aspects of drug discovery and development.

[Kathy Giacomini]
Another thing we're doing is to address some of our faculty workload problems, as well as to foster teaching in the basic science department, we are hiring new faculty—teaching faculty—in those departments. And that's a very exciting new development. They have similar kinds of people in the adjunct series in [the] School of Medicine basic science department. So we decided let's opt for that model and see how that works. And I feel like that will help immensely with the faculty workload and also integrate our basic sciences more into our curriculum. And these are admissions statistics shown down here. So this is just to date, I think they have until March 15 or something to declare whether they've accepted our offer. So we've got about a third of the people we accepted have accepted our offer. So looking forward to having more acceptances with time.

[Kathy Giacomini]
So another thing that we're very interested in doing is fostering transformative partnerships. That's part of our strategic plan. And I just want to talk about a couple of them. We'll say a word about the QBI Mini Symposium on Emerging Infectious Diseases, which was held together with the Pasteur Institute, and I'll talk about that for a second. We're launching that new Clinical Pharmacogenomics Program—very excited for Bani and Lisa. We'll be talking about that.

[Kathy Giacomini]
And one of the things that I'm very proud of is that last year I went to my first American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy meeting in years. I did go, you know, maybe in 2010, or something like that, but I hadn't been for years. But I went as a dean, and we had almost no representation in symposiums, in any of the sessions, or anything like that. So this year, our faculty just rolled up their sleeves, submitted a whole lot of proposals, some of them were rejected. But look, we've got six of them that are on the agenda for the upcoming meeting, which will be, I think, in Denver in July. So we're looking forward to that. And you can see that what's really also nice is there's a variety of different topics here. So that's great, that we'll have a presence there—a big presence there.

[Kathy Giacomini]
This is just reminding us or telling you about the Mini Symposium on Emerging Infectious Disease. This is something that Nevan and QBI have been working on, and they started working on it before the pandemic and emerged in the pandemic doing a lot of scientific collaborations with the Institut Pasteur. The Institut Pasteur is a world-renowned institute in microbiology and infectious diseases. I mean, these people really know infectious diseases. And so Nevan and the QBI Institute partnered with them and did some very breakthrough—we all saw it in the New York Times—breakthrough research on SARS-CoV-2 virus, etc. So this symposium is sort of their inaugural symposium kicking off a new partnership—I think it's a Center of Excellence—called the Institut Pasteur – Quantitative Biosciences Institute. Now, it'll be exciting for all of us, because we're going to get people from Paris coming here routinely working in QBI, and vice versa, we can all go there. So I'm very excited about this strategic partnership.

[Kathy Giacomini]
Okay, I'm gonna turn it over after I congratulate you again, Bani and Lisa, for launching this new and exciting pharmacogenomics testing program. Should I stop sharing? Okay.

[Lisa Kroon]
Great. Thank you so much, Dean Giacomini, and we are thrilled to share a little bit more about the Clinical Pharmacogenomics Program that UCSF Health is about to launch. This has been just an incredible effort—very interprofessional, high-level from Russ Cucina, Aleks Rajkovic, that Bani will talk about, the dean and our chief pharmacy executive Desi Kotis. And just really finally taking the discovery science from the bench now to the bedside, or I should say, to the clinic, because this is really the place that we see the primary role for clinical pharmacogenomics to apply is really more in the ambulatory care setting, clinical setting. Bani has been our main lead and his dream to get this launched. But we've had a whole team of pharmacists involved from our health center pharmacist faculty like Jaekyu Shin and Janel Long-Boyle. So Bani, I'm going to turn it over to you to tell everyone a little bit more in detail. Thank you.

[Bani Tamraz]
Thank you, Kathy and Lisa, for that introduction and for your support and getting this off to the point where it is right now. So hopefully everyone can see my slide. I was just going to start with just a brief introduction, what pharmacogenomics is, is basically the science of applying genetics to determine the impact of relevant genetic variation and drug behavior response. Basically, we're looking at genes to try to determine which medication would be most appropriate for a patient. For this particular program at UCSF, we've been looking at somatic mutations, these are variations that occur after conception, whereas for this particular program, where our focus is on germline variation, so these are genes that—these are variations that actually occur at conception. So that was just an intro—a two-second introduction for our audience about what pharmacogenetics is.

[Bani Tamraz]
And as Lisa mentioned, this has been a multidisciplinary pharmacogenetic effort that started in September of 2021. Under the leadership of Russ Cucina, who is the Chief Health Informatics Officer and VP of Genetics and Genomic Services, Aleks Rajkovic, and who is the Chief Genomic Officer and, of course, our own Lisa Kroon and, and so, this team—so the team of individuals that we have assembled, we've been working diligently trying to identify the list of drugs that we should be focusing on building up our lab processes, harmonizing various different data sources in order to, again deliver that report—that pharmacogenetic report—and building our electronic health record system and also clinical decision tool. There's been a lot of energy into that and obviously engaging clinicians and developing educational content. This is our data-automated pipeline that will deliver information. [It] starts from Epic; it kind of ends in Epic. We've spent a lot of effort into getting this sorted out, and I know I've been talking about we were supposed to go live in April—February 14—that has changed because we have some minor issues that we need to sort out in this complicated pipeline in order to make this go live. So we're almost there.

[Bani Tamraz]
You know, since this is a pharmacy event, I wanted to touch on the fact that the resources that we've used for putting our drug list together are FDA and CPIC. FDA since 2007 has been integrating pharmacogenetic biomarker information into the package insert of drugs, and then we can have CPIC, which stands for Clinical Pharmacogenetic Implementation Consortium. It's an international consortium of experts in pharmacogenetics and medicine, who review literature and put together guidelines. And we've relied on FDA and CPIC to put together our list of medications. We have a target of 62 medications. And this table I'm sharing with you is to bring to your attention the fact that since FDA started putting PGx information in the package insert from 2007 til now, there are at least 335 drugs that have this kind of information in the package insert, and they fall across many, many therapeutic areas. And in the parentheses, you see the 62 medications that we've targeted, and they fall into various therapeutic areas. They don't cover all, but they cover a lot. And the number that I want to bring to your attention is that in 2020 118,000 unique patients were prescribed one of these 62 medications. So there's a lot of use in here.

[Bani Tamraz]
So what's going live? Well, tentatively now, April 11 is our go-live date. We have 56 drugs and 15 genes that we are starting with. And this here is our list of genes and drugs. What's missing on this is the HLA A and B testing will be rolled out slightly after we go live. Again, that's a pipeline issue. It's not laboratory issues, we're all done with that. It's just building, integrating that, and making sure it's working the way we want to in the pipeline. It just needs a little bit of time.

[Bani Tamraz]
In terms of testing, testing is available for both inpatient and outpatient. The sample that we're using right now is blood. But obviously we can expand to saliva later and buccal swab. And the lab that we have is the UCSF Genomic Medicine Lab. The lab is located at Mount Zion. We're using an array-based platform, it's called PharmacoScan array from Thermo Fisher. The turnaround time for this task is two weeks from the time of receipt of the sample. When we do just the processing of the assay it takes about five business days to—actually once you have the DNA till you get the results, it just takes five days on the instrument.

[Bani Tamraz]
So there's a process in terms of genotyping that takes time to do. And the results will be available in APeX patient profile under Genomic Filters. Reports will also be created for patients in MyChart. We will have organized educational material that will be sent to our clinicians and pharmacists with the announcement that will go up from the leadership. And in that you'll find all kinds of information that'll be helpful, including videos that CPIC has had. These are 5- to 10-minute videos they have right now for 46 medications that are on our list that you can watch and learn about the particular guidelines.

[Bani Tamraz]
We also have a PGx console service that can be reached on Walt. You can search for it by looking at from a genetic consult that's available from Monday to Friday 8 to 5. A response will be provided within one business day.

[Bani Tamraz]
Some of the advantages of this testing is that the UCSF team has developed this in-house test with a strong emphasis on developing an extensive customized robust pipeline for analysis. This is a one-time test. Once completed the data can be used for future encounters. The gene of interest can be interrogated further. If you want to look deeper on this particular gene, we have a lot of data for these pharmaco genes that you can go back to. All billing will be handled through APeX.

[Bani Tamraz]
Pharmacogenomics obviously has benefits. It can make care safer, more effective, and affordable by telling medications, and obviously there are all these research benefits, too. One of the gaps and delay in implementation of pharmacogenetics has been establishing clinical utility, and we have a huge opportunity for all of these drugs to go back and look into clinical utility within our care system.

[Bani Tamraz]
And lastly, as Lisa mentioned, this is an effort by many, many people, over at least the last year and a half. So I'm very, very grateful for everyone that has contributed. Thank you for your time, and we're very excited. 2023 is the year of pharmacogenetics here at UCSF. So I'll stop here. Thank you.

[Kathy Giacomini]
Bani, that was a fabulous presentation. I am so excited about this new clinical initiative. It's like a dream come true. Many of us have spent our careers working on pharmacogenomic research and to actually see it implemented to patient care here in our hometown. That is—that's amazing. So really, really, thank you. That's just fabulous. We will bring you back for a Q&A in another town hall after you've had the service going so you can tell us how it's going, things like that. I think that'll be really fun.

[Bani Tamraz]
I'm happy to come back. Thank you, Kathy.

[Kathy Giacomini]
Oh, my goodness. So all right, let's talk about this strategic planning process. So first of all, I want to start with the retreat. We had a retreat on February 6. And I think it was really fun. It was an exciting retreat. People actually accomplished things during the retreat, as well as having fun. So these are some photos that came out we had over 110 attendees—faculty, staff, students, alumni, UCSF leaders. Here's some other nice pictures of people at the retreat. And some nice ones there. I love the little stickers that people stuck on the whiteboards, etc. That was just great.

[Kathy Giacomini]
All right, so let's go to the actual strategic plan. Where are we at? So this shows what we did before we got to the retreat. So we had a number of different versions. We began drafting the retreat in August. And then it went to the Faculty Advisory Committee, and we went to the Leadership Group a number of times, Faculty Council a number of times, and finally, somewhere in January and a little before we nominated strategic priority workgroups. And their goals were to set the strategic priorities and look at the action—and develop action items as well.

[Kathy Giacomini]
And then we went to the strategic plan retreat. And that brought in the broad input. That's very important that you bring it out to the alumni, to all sorts of other people, campus leadership, etc. So that they were there and got input there. And now we're in the strategic priority workgroups, which are developing action plans and metrics for each of the sub goals. So that's the stage we're at.

[Kathy Giacomini]
After that, it will go back to the leadership group. We'll all have one more look at it. And then we're going to communicate it out to a broad group across the campus to different schools of pharmacy across the nation, etc.

[Kathy Giacomini]
And then another thing about this strategic plan, and something I really like to emphasize, is that it will be a living document. It really will guide us, and every quarter the leadership group will have a look at it and say, "where are we at?" and "what have we accomplished?" and "what are we going to accomplish in the coming years?"

[Kathy Giacomini]
So we have new vision and mission statements: to be the global leader—our vision—in innovating pharmacy, education, biomedical research, and health care. And our new mission is: the UCSF School of Pharmacy leads in research education, clinical care, and entrepreneurship to expand knowledge and improve the health of people everywhere.

[Kathy Giacomini]
And now I am showing you the different strategic priorities, the big categories: research; education; patient care; people; diversity, equity and inclusion; strategic support; and transformative partnerships. And these are the individuals who led those workgroups. And I'm now going to stop sharing, and I'll turn it over to Levi, and one of these individuals from each of these work groups is going to present where they're at and what they're doing.

[Levi Gadye]
All right, thank you, Kathy. So I'm pleased to now welcome our panelists who, as Kathy said, are going to introduce each theme and its goals from this upcoming strategic plan. And I'm just checking… I think we will actually start with Conan with education. So Conan take it off.

[Conan MacDougall]
Great. Thank you. On behalf of myself and my co-lead, Brian Shoichet. The members of our workgroup listed there—not listed, we had some student help, so Julia Jones from the P3 class also assisted and as well as Val Clinard from our experiential program. Next slide. So these were the major strategic goals that we came up with for education domain.

[Conan MacDougall]
So first, we wanted to make sure that we educated UCSF PharmD graduates and prepared them to provide and transform pharmacotherapy both at the patient level but also at a health care system level. We wanted to develop all sorts of UCSF trainees, not just our professional students, but our graduate students also thinking about our postgraduate trainees and fellows as leaders and innovators in the health sciences.

[Conan MacDougall]
We wanted to help bridge UCSF trainees into the careers of the future. So we're not talking about some of the sub goals today or ways we're going to implement this, but we have think we have exciting ways to get our trainees into those paths. And some of them were things that Kathy mentioned earlier with regards to new master's programs, etc.

[Conan MacDougall]
Make UCSF the desired destination to build a career in biomedical and pharmacotherapeutic science and practice. We want our trainees to be able to come here. And we really want to attract folks across a broad spectrum of prior training to come here because they think this is the place to be to launch a career in health science

[Conan MacDougall]
And to expand our education footprint on the entire career arc. And this means everything from both the time that they're training here, into their postgraduate education, and into their roles as alumni and graduates. Obviously, we want to be able to connect well to our alumni, not only for our typical solicitation of financial assistance, but also because they play a huge role in the teaching and education of our graduates.

[Conan MacDougall]
We also want to keep in mind how UCSF can provide education, to those graduates into a broad spectrum of folks who are already out in practice through some of our continuing education programs and workshops.

[Conan MacDougall]
And then finally, we want to think about how we can leverage and develop educational technologies, and also develop our faculty and staff expertise, to be able to do the things that we want to do in education. We need to have the tools to be able to deliver our curriculum efficiently and effectively. And we need the expertise and so developing those in our personnel we thought was important enough that we wanted to include it called out as a specific goal in education, even though as with many of these, there's a lot of overlap with some of the other domains you'll hear about.

[Levi Gadye]
All right, thanks, Conan. Next up we have Kathy Yang with patient care.

[Kathy Yang]
I thank you. So here's the list of our patient care work group with Lisa Kroon as the co-lead. We had representation from both within UCSF, UCSF Health, and our external associate deans. So that includes Donna Dare from VA, Matt Jacobson, of course within the school, Desi [Kotis] from UCSF Health, and Rita Shane from Cedars-Sinai. So we got a really good mix of internal and external feedback in terms of our patient care goals. Next slide.

[Kathy Yang]
And so we landed really on two main goals within patient care. One is mainly clinical focused, and the other one is a little bit translational. So the first one is really looking at the role of the pharmacist and medication management. And so we decided on pharmacists take ownership of medication management for basically all patients, but with specific emphasis on vulnerable or high-risk patients with a goal of optimizing outcomes. And we define vulnerable and high-risk as basically anyone who is vulnerable due to either socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, etc, and high risk for, for risk factors for high-risk conditions. And so under this particular goal, we're going to encompass a lot of different things, including addressing access and barriers to care, as well as looking at ways for us to develop and implement new models of care, and more importantly, ways for us to develop policies to have those new models of care paid for and to have independent prescribing.

[Kathy Yang]
So then the second one is to translate health data to define to design precise, safe, and cost effective medication therapies for individual patients and populations. So this is sort of a translational bidirectional goal, meaning that we need to have data for us to be able to deliver care in the best way possible. But we also have to take that data and feed it back to our basic scientists to our quality people to figure out how we can use that to best deliver care. And so those are the two main goals that we will focus on. If anybody has any comments or any other feedback, please send an email to myself or Lisa. So we can think about that as we develop our sub goals.

[Levi Gadye]
Alright, next up we have Sharon with people.

[Sharon Youmans]
Thank you, Levi, and good afternoon, everyone. I was one of the co-leads for the People group and along with me was Michelle Arkin, who is chair of the Department of Pharm Chem. We had a very large group, but we had great representation from all of our people and our pharmacy community, and I want to give a shout-out to them and thank them for their input, and to call them out by name: Su Guo, who's faculty in BTS, Karen Hamblett, who's the CAO for Clin Pharm, we had two managing directors from our Poison Control Center, which is part of our school and lives in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy, so Ray Ho is the manager at our San Francisco site, and Justin Lewis is a manager at our Sacramento site. We had Ashish Manglik, who is faculty in Pharm Chem, Keya Patel who was a first-year pharmacy student, Caleb Rux who is a bioengineering graduate student, and to round us out we had Zi Yao, who was a postdoc in Pharm Chem. Next slide, please.

[Sharon Youmans]
So our goals were pretty straightforward. But as you've already heard, there is a lot of overlap since the people are doing all the work in those other strategic goals. So our first one is to enhance faculty, trainees, and staff well-being, and recognize excellence and service while supporting work-life balance. And as we are emerging out of the pandemic, that's becoming even more important. And when we talk about trainees, I wanted to explain that we're talking about PharmD students, graduate students, our residents, fellows, postdocs, so it's all inclusive in that group.

[Sharon Youmans]
Our second goal is to recruit and retain exceptional and diverse faculty, trainees, and staff. So that's really looking at our policies and procedures on how we hire, how we admit students, and where we go to actually recruit folks.

[Sharon Youmans]
The third goal was to increase collaboration between clinical, translational, and discovery science faculty in teaching and research. So this one sort of overlaps a little bit with the education goal, and the priority and the research priority. And really, we want to continue to break down the silos and bring faculty together more on these various projects to be more intentional with that.

[Sharon Youmans]
The fourth goal was to increase alumni involvement in the life of the school. Our alumni are always looking for ways to give back whether it's in teaching, mentoring, advising, and our alumni are folks who either graduated from our degree programs or have graduated from our training programs. So we have a really large host of people that we can call upon and be more intentional about getting them involved. They're a very important group.

[Sharon Youmans]
And then our last goal is to provide faculty staff and trainees mentoring and professional development. And so this was important that people come and they're not just doing their job, but they also have opportunities and protected time to attend different workshops or to take up a program, whatever it is that they might be interested in that will enhance their professional skills and knowledge.

[Sharon Youmans]
So we're very excited about this work. And we will be reaching out to get everyone's input and look forward to talking to you in the future. So thank you for your attention.

[Levi Gadye]
Thanks, Sharon. Next up, we have Ryan with DEI.

[Ryan Hernandez]
Hi there, great to be with you and tell you about some of the work we're planning on doing. This was a huge effort. And I am very thankful to my co-lead Stephanie Shia, who's also the co-vice dean for DEI in the School of Pharmacy, who's not able to be here today. This was a pretty decent-sized group that represented faculty, staff, students, as well as alumni. And it was great because we have representatives both from the basic sciences as well as the more clinical sciences. And so it was a really fantastic group to be working with. And this slide doesn't even mention the large number of people who came by during the retreat to provide a ton of feedback, ask lots of good questions and help us sustain quite an intense discussion about DEI at UCSF more broadly, and within the School of Pharmacy specifically, during the retreat. Next slide please.

[Ryan Hernandez]
So, DEI underlies pretty much everything that I strive to do at UCSF and what many of us are trying to at UCSF and is a component of every one of the large buckets of activities that you're going to hear about today. Specifically, what we're aiming to do is five broad topics within DEI.

[Ryan Hernandez]
One is to cultivate the culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion among trainees, faculty, and staff in the school. Establish infrastructure program. names and events that will support DEI efforts. Ensure all communications of the school including web pages, posters, and newsletters are culturally sensitive and adequately represent DEI efforts that we are all undertaking—many of us are undertaking. That we will increase recruitment and retention of diverse trainees, faculty, and staff, and develop inclusive, equity-minded professionals through anti-oppressive curricula.

[Ryan Hernandez]
And so as you can see these underlie many of the different activities that we're talking about today, and each of these we have many sub-goals that are affiliated with them, some of which we are actively working on already, and some of them we wish to push forward. Another effort that we're not talking about here is just the general outreach that we're going to require for DEI at UCSF, and in the School of Pharmacy specifically, because this requires an all-of-us kind of an approach. It is not something that can be led by single individuals or even a small committee. It is really a thing that needs to be handled by all of us. And so we'll certainly be interacting with many of you as we go forward. Thanks.

[Levi Gadye]
All right. Thank you, Ryan. Now Eric is up.

[Eric Davila]
All right. Hello, everyone, I am representing the strategic support workgroup, Alesia Woods and I were the co-leads. And this was an interesting area. Strategic support encompasses all of the scaffolding and other supporting functions that underlie the health of the school and the ability to achieve the strategic plan in the long run. We had an excellent work group, a great mix of faculty contributors, staff administrators, and even some colleagues from other parts of the university.

[Eric Davila]
For the goals for strategic support, we landed on four. The first one is to expand and diversify the ways in which the school generates revenue, as well as other ways that we support our faculty and learners, really just meaning like, bolstering that financial health.

[Eric Davila]
The second is supporting the strategic plan with the necessary infrastructure. Meaning that we have the processes and whatnot to plan, check, and adjust and achieve our strategic plan.

[Eric Davila]
6.3: enable school success by addressing internal barriers that hamper faculty and staff productivity. And this is really about addressing red tape and inefficiency and trying to figure out where we can help people get their jobs done.

[Eric Davila]
And 6.4: enhance the school's reputation, visibility, and audience engagement through strategic communications, externally and internally. And that is taking all of the work that we're doing, and making sure that people know about it.

[Levi Gadye]
All right, thanks, Eric. Next up is Jen with Transformative Partnerships.

[Jennifer Cocohoba]
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm happy to be co-leading the Transformative Partnership work group alongside Nevan Krogan. You can see the representation from our workgroup members here, which also include some very generous retired faculty members who have donated some of their time to contribute to these efforts.

[Jennifer Cocohoba]
Before we get into the goals, which we landed on three for Transformative Partnerships, it might be helpful to give a little bit of background of what we consider a transformative partnership. I think that our school and every school depends on all the departments and ORUs depend on partnerships in order to get their work achieved. And the idea behind a transformative partnership is a partnership which helps any individual departments, an ORU, and the School of Pharmacy in general, not only meet its mission and vision, but maybe even maximize its mission and vision, or a partnership that helps any one of these entities take their mission and vision and move it in a new direction. So this is the context in which we're thinking about transformative partnerships.

[Jennifer Cocohoba]
You heard some examples of some of the exciting transformative partnerships that are happening now. And so with the Clinical Pharmacogenomics Initiative as well as the Pasteur Institute partnership with QBI, so these are some examples that might help you scaffold what a transformative partnership represents.

[Jennifer Cocohoba]
So in this goal, we, like the Strategic Support group, Transformative Partnerships crosses many of the other opportunities that we've been talking about today. Our goals in the Transformative Partnerships workgroup that we landed on were to advance our education, research, and clinical missions—to do that to establish transformative partnerships with national and international organizations, which included a wide variety of other academic and health institutions, nonprofit entities, professional orgs, and for-profit companies. So again, that goal really focusing on the diversity of transformative partnerships that can aid our school in its mission and vision.

[Jennifer Cocohoba]
Our goal number two was to support that by facilitating the creation of these transformative partnerships with these external organizations, by looking at our internal processes and procedures, and policies and trying to streamline these, including the processes that are required for contracts, material data, transfer, IP, and student-faculty exchange, to name some examples of these policies, processes, and procedures that need to be in place before we can really operate these transformative partnerships.

[Jennifer Cocohoba]
And then lastly, with goal number three, there is an opportunity, a huge one to showcase and really celebrate these transformative partnerships through robust communication both internally—to make sure we as a school are aware of the transformative partnerships that we're engaging in—and externally to let everybody know the creative partnership that we are engaging in.

[Levi Gadye]
Thanks, Jen. And last but not least, we have Robin with Research.

[Robin Corelli]
Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. The Research work group and this is really—it's kind of nice, we just got the latest data that Dean Giacomini released that for the 43rd year in a row, the UCSF School of Pharmacy was the recipient of the top NIH grants. So we got to keep that going. And so our strategic plan for this has been vetted with Tanja Kortemme, who was my co-lead on this and a critical element of this. We have Steve Altschuler, Bill DeGrado, [and] Bo Huang from Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Deanna Kroetz [and] Catera Wilder from BTS and then Akin Oni-Orisam, Kathryn Phillips from Clinical Pharmacy. So a third—each department was well represented on the initial workgroup, and we received outstanding feedback from a huge number of people before the retreat and at the retreat.

[Robin Corelli]
So our group originally had five goals. But based on the feedback that we received, we coalesced, and you'll see the first goal is really, I would say, it's an audacious goal, which is great, that we want to develop the—basically at the atomic level, the cellular levels—the mechanisms of understanding biology, developing technology to actually conduct our research, and then translational strategies, which obviously that—we have everything spanning all three departments with this. And our goal is to find treatments for all human diseases, and there was a specific word to use treatments versus drugs, because some of these may not involve drugs.

[Robin Corelli]
Our second goal as similar to some of the other groups, there's a tremendous amount of synergy with our goals across other strategic workgroups and this one—number 2—optimize health and health care delivery. This is our health services research efforts that will very much work very in tandem with some of the goals from the patient care group, and how clinical services are [unclear]—the types of care that we're developing, and any kind of research that it affects, both medication usage, but all diagnostic test and devices and any type of other delivery. So and that's another huge area that we're looking for.

[Robin Corelli]
Specifically called out the idea of the scholarship of teaching and learning. So in this way, had tremendous input from the before the retreat from the research education team—educational research team—who actually provided tremendous feedback, but really looking at that as its own science and something that we are in a right position or prime position by virtue of the groundbreaking and innovative curricular change that we have. So looking for some excellent work out of that group.

[Robin Corelli]
And then finally, very similar to what was mentioned by the People and the Transformative Partnerships, really calling out that we want to not only enable, but we want to reward the entrepreneurship, and we have a tremendous number of faculty who are already engaging and founding companies doing groundbreaking work. And so we want to really further that. How can we actually enhance the work for that, that we actually enable ways to develop medications and the treatments [unclear] in our academic environment, but also to reward the entrepreneurship of our faculty. So that'll be creating that environment as well as strengthening the partnerships to allow that. And those are our goals, and I really look forward to feedback on those as we flesh those out. We've actually already started the first sub-goal for number one already. We're ready to go.

[Levi Gadye]
Wonderful. Thanks, Robin. And thank you to all our presenters. I'm really excited to see all these new ventures unfold. So now we have a few minutes left for question and answer time. If anyone thinks of any questions, feel free to drop them into the Q&A window. And any questions that we can't get to right now? We'll either answer via email, or if they're anonymous in a future town hall.

[Levi Gadye]
So for the first question, I think this one is for you, Ryan. It comes from Rupa [Tuan],who asks: how will we support the diverse students, faculty, and staff that we recruit so that we can retain them?

[Ryan Hernandez]
That's a great question. It underlies so much of what I aim to do, in my new role as the co-vice dean for DEI in School of Pharmacy, and it largely comes I think, initially from the community, how do we get people to feel like they are welcome and an important part of our community. That is one aspect of it. But another aspect is that, to be honest, UCSF is not always an equal playing field for everybody. And some people have access to things that other people don't know they should even be asking for. And that is one thing that has to change. We have to create a more equal access attitude towards everything we do at all levels, from the trainees at the lower levels that are just getting through their undergrads to graduate students, to postdocs, and all the way on to faculty. But it doesn't even stop at junior faculty. Even mid-career faculty still struggle with the same things of not knowing that they should be asking for certain things, in terms of accelerations, and so on, and what they can do with space, and so on. So a lot of it comes down to: how do we build a more equal access to the resources that are here at UCSF, and make sure that everybody has access to all of those.

[Levi Gadye]
Alright, if anyone else has any more questions, feel free to drop them in the Q&A window. I'll give it about a minute before handing it back to Kathy to close us out.

[Eric Davila]
Levi, you've got one in chat also.

[Levi Gadye]
Ah, okay. Ah, Lawrence is asking: I didn't see government listed under Transformative Partnerships. What are the plans for partnerships with organizations like the FDA, The WHO, etc.?

[Jennifer Cocohoba]
Okay, that question would be directed at me. And so thank you for that question. Certainly government partnerships would be potentially transformative for our institution. Just these were some examples that we listed. It wasn't meant to be an exclusion for government partnerships. Our workgroup is not necessarily charged with the formation of specific partnerships. I think our group, as with strategic planning, the goal is to facilitate some of those partnerships. So as of right now, I think we're at the stage where we have a lot of ideas that were presented at the retreat. People had amazing requests, thoughts about what types of partnerships would be transformative for their work. And I think our workgroup will be looking at some of those ideas and trying to figure out how to facilitate those coming to light.

[Levi Gadye]
All right, thank you, Jen. It looks like no more questions have come in. So Kathy, I'll hand it back to you.

[Kathy Giacomini]
Thank you. Thank you, Levi. Thank you, everyone. Yes, I do have some questions. But we are at the end of the time, anyway. So I'd like to first of all, thank everybody, the faculty and staff who presented in the town hall today. I want to again thank Levi Gadye and Eric Davila for really helping us put on the town halls. And I want everyone to have a Happy March and a Happy Women's History Month. Awesome. So I will adjourn the town hall. Thank you for attending.