UCLA assistant professor of nursing heads program to increase physical activity among Los Angeles youth.

Kynna Wright-Volel, UCLA

Funded by a $1.2 million grant, Kynna Wright-Volel, Ph.D., R.N., F.A.A.N., assistant professor and Robert Wood Johnson Nurse Faculty Scholar at the UCLA School of Nursing, and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are launching Project SHAPE LA, a coordinated school-health program to increase physical activity among youth in Los Angeles County schools.

Project SHAPE LA targets 24 middle schools in underserved areas of Los Angeles and will touch nearly 12,000 students.

“As a pediatric nurse practitioner, I see the health consequences when children are overweight or obese; however, the clinic visit is but one part of the solution,” said Wright-Volel. “Research shows that school-based programs that are supported by collaborations among universities, schools, businesses and parents can decrease obesity and obesity-related behavior. We believe that Project SHAPE LA will do just that!”

According to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, one in five children in the LAUSD are considered obese. Obesity during childhood has immediate consequences, including hypertension, high cholesterol and the development of metabolic syndrome, as well as psychosocial problems such as low self-esteem and poor body image. Childhood obesity, if left unchecked into adulthood, can lead to a variety of chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain types of cancer, including breast and colon.

“This is an important component of an overall strategy for improving the health and well-being of our community, which includes physical activity, improved nutrition and nutrition education, and health education,” said Rene Gonzalez, assistant superintendent of student health and human services for the LAUSD.

Engaging in regular physical activity is widely accepted as an effective preventative measure. Project SHAPE LA (Shaping Health for Adolescents through Physical/Nutrition Education Los Angeles) uses three components: SPARK PE, an evidence-based physical education program; educational training of PE teachers in the areas of nutrition, physical education, curriculum development and professional development; and up to $2,000 per year of PE equipment per school.

Anticipated outcomes from this program include:

• Increased moderate to vigorous physical activity.
• Increased scores on the California State Board of Education’s FitnessGram Test in the areas of aerobic fitness, body composition and muscular strength/endurance.
• Increased academic achievement, as evidenced by higher scores on California standardized tests.

“Support for our PE teachers is imperative at this crucial time in our state’s budgetary crisis,” said Chad Fenwick, LAUSD physical activity adviser.

The five-year grant will give approximately 85 PE teachers a monetary stipend and intense, evidence-based training in physical activity, nutrition and physical education curriculum.

The grant is jointly funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Nursing Research and Office of Behavioral Social Science Research, both of which are committed to preventing disease and promoting the health of individuals, families and communities.

Another component of the grant supports the recruitment of 100 minority high school students a year. These students will be provided education and mentoring in the areas of obesity prevention, leadership and careers in health and allied health professions. This leadership program will be piloted at Belmont High School.

According to Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti (District 13), “This partnership with Belmont High School shows a strong commitment by Dr. Wright-Volel and the UCLA School of Nursing to the investment in our youth as they learn to be the next leaders of our city.”

“With this grant, we want PE teachers to ignite a passion for physical activity — to teach kids that by being active they can be healthy and achieve their dreams,” added Wright-Volel.

The UCLA School of Nursing is redefining nursing through the pursuit of uncompromised excellence in research, education, practice, policy and patient advocacy. Rated among the nation’s top nursing schools by U.S. News & World Report, the school also is ranked No. 4 in nursing research funded by the National Institutes of Health and No. 1 in NIH stimulus funding. In 2009-10, the school received $18 million in total research grant funding and was awarded 26 faculty research grants. The school offers programs for undergraduate (B.S.), postgraduate (M.S.N. and M.E.C.N.) and doctoral (Ph.D.) students.

UC Davis’ WeCare! Peer Navigator Program helps address disparities.

(From left, front row) Kirollos "Cookie" Gendi, Sarah Wenstrand, Geoffrey Krieger, Liz Salmi; (back row) Azadeh Afkhami, Cheryl Johnson with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Adolescence and young adulthood generally is a time when young people step out on their own, start romances, attend college, launch careers and begin to build a life independent of their families.

It is a time for hubris, adventure, maybe even rebellion. So how does a cancer diagnosis fit into this period of life? Not well, according to researchers, patients and the health-care professionals who treat young adult cancer patients.

UC Riverside’s Howard Friedman, known for pioneering work in health psychology, honored by Beckman Trust.

Howard Friedman, UC Riverside

Howard Friedman, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, has won a $25,000 award from the Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award Trust for inspiring students to make a difference in the community.

Friedman is one of 15 professors from U.S. universities recognized by the trust for inspiring students to action that benefits society. He is the first University of California scholar honored since the awards began two years ago. The recipients will be honored in a ceremony on Saturday (Jan. 7) at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

“It’s very rewarding to see students getting inspired and putting ideas into practice in medicine, public health and health psychology. What’s better for a scholar than to change a field or help get a movement going?” said the researcher who is a pioneer in the field of health psychology. “As a professor, my greatest satisfaction has always come from my students.”

Friedman, who has won four awards for teaching excellence while at UC Riverside, spent more than 20 years identifying predictors of health and long life among 1,500 individuals who were part of a study started by Stanford University psychologist Louis Terman in 1921. The study began when the participants were 10 years old and followed them throughout their lives.

More than two decades ago, Friedman and co-researcher Leslie Martin (then a UC Riverside graduate student), as well as many other UC Riverside graduate and undergraduate students on his research teams, began examining and supplementing the data. They determined that personality characteristics and social relations from childhood can predict one’s risk of dying decades later. It was the most prudent and persistent individuals who stayed healthier and lived longer. Their overall conclusions are reported in the book “The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study” (Hudson Street Press).

Friedman’s research has profoundly affected two generations of students who have since become physicians, public health workers, psychologists and health psychology researchers. “I work with a lot of students in UCR’s biomedical and pre-medical programs,” he said. “They use the findings of health psychology research in the practice of medicine. And my wonderful graduate students have gone on to teach and spread the word to countless other students.”

“These outstanding faculty members have inspired their former students to change the world. The trust recognizes the benefits of what an extraordinary professor can produce,” said Carol Goodheart, Beckman Trust Committee member and past president of the American Psychological Association. “We learn how remarkably professors have motivated their students, and see how students have created a real-world success because of this inspiration.”

The trust, which is administered by the Wells Fargo Philanthropic Services group, was founded in 2008 under the will of Gail McKnight Beckman in honor of her mother, Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman, an educator, renowned author and pioneer in the field of psychology. She was one of the first female psychology professors at Columbia University and later taught at the University of Pennsylvania.

The other recipients this year are from Harvard University, the University of Miami, the Graduate Center at City University of New York, University of Arizona, Boston College, University of Washington, Towson University, University of Rochester, Georgia State University, Columbia University, Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Palo Alto University and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

UC San Diego program has shown success in training health care, law enforcement.

Linda Hill, UC San Diego

The University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine TREDS (Training, Research and Education for Driving Safety) program has been awarded a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety to continue its work on driving safety in older adults. This team of experts, part of UC San Diego’s Injury Epidemiology, Prevention and Research Center, has been working to keep San Diego County’s highways and senior drivers safe since 2007.

“Both health care and law enforcement can play an important role in the identification and referral of drivers who may be at risk for a collision,” said Linda Hill, M.D., M.P.H., clinical professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “Physicians have knowledge of a patient’s medical history and the medications that can impact driving, while law enforcement witnesses and responds to unsafe driving first hand.”

Family members of older drivers often seek guidance from these professionals in an effort to keep their loved ones safe behind the wheel. TREDS educates health care providers on the American Medical Association’s screening guidelines that assess for vision, strength and cognitive impairment in adults over age 70. The focus of the law enforcement training is to increase recognition of medical conditions that can impact driving and referral resources.

“We have trained more than 1,000 health professionals and more than 700 law enforcement officers in Southern California counties. Now, these successful programs will benefit the most traffic-congested areas in the state, Los Angeles and Orange counties,” said Hill. “And soon health professionals throughout California will have the opportunity to receive the training online.”

Early identification of conditions is paramount to the continuation of safe driving. Treatment may be as simple as a new pair of glasses, some adaptive equipment for the car or physical therapy to improve range of motion. Training health care practitioners and law enforcement officials will better equip them to help older drivers maintain mobility for as long as safely possible.

“Older adults have positive driving attributes like experience, being more likely to follow laws and less likely to take risks; however, as a group, their rates of death per distance driven and per population is as high as that of teenage boys,” Raul Coimbra, M.D., Ph.D., FACS, chief of the Division of Trauma at UC San Diego Health System and founder of the UC San Diego Injury Epidemiology, Prevention and Research Center. “In addition, elderly drivers and their passengers are four times more likely to die than their 20-year-old counterparts in crashes of similar intensity.”

“The California Highway Patrol appreciates the training provided by the University of California, San Diego. This training has enabled our officers to better serve our older drivers by recognizing driving impairment and make referrals to community resources. We are grateful for the contributions senior drivers have made to our communities over the past decades and want to best serve them while they continue to enjoy their driving experiences,” said Chief Jim Abele of the California Highway Patrol.

“The goal of these programs is to improve driving safety in older adults by increasing awareness, education and management of the health-related impairments which result from the aging process,” explained Richard Kohr, senior driver ombudsman for the California Department of Motor Vehicles – Southern Region.

Funding for this program is provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS), through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The DMV Senior Ombudsman Program and the San Diego Driver Safety Office collaborated with and support UC San Diego’s efforts to engage health professionals and law enforcement in this endeavor.

The grant team, led by Hill, includes Coimbra; Jill Rybar, M.P.H, project manager; and Tara Styer, M.P.H., training coordinator. For additional information or to schedule trainings, email TREDS@ucsd.edu or call (858) 534-9330.

Background
The AARP states that beginning in 2011, 8,000 baby boomers will be turning 65 each day and these projections are expected to continue for the next 18 years. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that by the year 2020, there will be more than 40 million licensed drivers over the age of 65, and 6 million drivers over 65 in California by the year 2030.

Older adults often experience a decline in cognition, vision and motor skills required to complete many tasks associated with driving. AAA reports that nearly 70 percent of older adults surveyed were using one or more prescription medications that could impair driving ability.

According to San Diego County, 1,408 individuals over 65 were involved in traffic crashes, accounting for 10 percent of all people injured and 16 percent of all traffic fatalities in 2008.

The Injury Epidemiology, Prevention and Research Center
The UC San Diego Injury Epidemiology, Prevention and Research Center is a combined effort of the Division of Trauma, Surgical Critical Care, and Burns with its Level-1 Trauma Center and the Regional Burn Center and the UC San Diego Department of Preventive Medicine to make our communities safer and to decrease the burden of injuries to our society.

Partnership will cover telehealth, scientific and technical development, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, UC Davis

UC Davis Health System has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, to partner to improve the health and well-being of its residents through the exchange of ideas, data and research on telehealth, scientific and technical development, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Sinaloa has partnered with UC Davis because of the health system’s internationally recognized leadership in telehealth technology and neurodevelopmental research, said Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, who directs the UC Davis Center for Reducing Health Disparities and community engagement for the UC Davis Clinical and Translational Science Center.

Approximately 27 percent of Sinaloa’s population lives in rural settings. The government and secretariat of health of Sinaloa have pledged to strengthen the state’s health infrastructure and to increase access to quality health care using telehealth technology, particularly for populations residing in remote rural areas.

“The government of Sinaloa is interested in creating the infrastructure to support telemedicine and telehealth services to significantly improve access to primary-care services for its nearly 3 million residents,” said Aguilar-Gaxiola, a professor of clinical internal medicine.

“They also would like UC Davis to share its expertise in autism and fragile X syndrome with Mexican health professionals and families to improve early identification, diagnosis and treatment,” Aguilar-Gaxiola said. “A third goal is to foster scientific and technical development to support health education primarily aimed at primary-care settings.”

UC Davis is a national leader in extending access to health-care services to rural and underserved areas through telehealth. The UC Davis Center for Health and Technology uses high-speed data lines linked to video units to connect large, urban medical centers with community hospitals and clinics. The technology allows specialists and subspecialists to consult with community physicians and their patients via live, interactive videoconferencing.

Similarly, the UC Davis MIND Institute is internationally known for its leading-edge research into neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders and fragile X syndrome. The institute’s world renowned scientists engage in research to find improved treatments, as well as  causes and cures, for autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), fragile X syndrome, Tourette syndrome and other neurodevelopmental conditions.

The MOU with Sinaloa is the most recent affiliation between UC Davis Health System and a Mexican entity.

Earlier this year, health system leaders traveled to Mexico City to forge a similar MOU with the Instituto Carlos Slim de la Salud (the Carlos Slim Health Institute), A.C. That agreement is focused on raising awareness of mental-health issues and sharing useful and innovative information to enable the early identification of autism and fragile X syndrome. Founded in 2007, the institute promotes research, develops initiatives and funds projects to address health challenges that affect Mexico and the broader Latin American region.

And in 2010, UC Davis Health System partnered with Shriners Hospital for Children — Northern California and the Mexican Health Ministry to establish a burn fellowship program for physicians from Mexico. The 12-month fellowship program trains two physicians each year in resuscitation and burn-care management, reconstructive surgery and clinical research.

UC Davis Health System is improving lives and transforming health care by providing excellent patient care, conducting groundbreaking research, fostering innovative, interprofessional education, and creating dynamic, productive partnerships with the community. The academic health system includes one of the country’s best medical schools, a 631-bed acute-care teaching hospital, an 800-member physician’s practice group and the new Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. It is home to a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, an international neurodevelopmental institute, a stem cell institute and a comprehensive children’s hospital. Other nationally prominent centers focus on advancing telemedicine, improving vascular care, eliminating health disparities and translating research findings into new treatments for patients. Together, they make UC Davis a hub of innovation that is transforming health for all. For more information, visit healthsystem.ucdavis.edu.

“Working together is more powerful than working alone.”

Estela Garcia delivers keynote at celebration of UCSF University Community Partnerships program

Projects involving UC San Francisco and community partners that encourage children to learn about medical careers, maintain proper dental hygiene and lose weight by learning to swim were recently celebrated for improving the health and well-being of San Franciscans.

“Working together is much more powerful than working alone,” said Estela Garcia, executive director of Instituto Familiar de la Raza. “… I’m certainly one of those people who believes this is the direction to go.”

Garcia delivered the keynote address at the Third Annual Partnerships Celebration of UCSF’s University Community Partnerships (UCP) at Genentech Hall, where other participants at the event echoed her sentiments about the importance of collaborating on projects that strengthen the community.

Garcia was born in the Central Valley and is the daughter of farm workers. She said her grandfather was a community organizer in the 1920s and she was raised with the concept of community empowerment.

She talked about the collision of two very different cultures – the university and nonprofits – and how to develop and sustain healthy and successful working relationships that result in “making a difference out in the street.”

“We can’t be satisfied with where we’re at,” she said. “We have to continue to strive because we’re not at health equity yet.”

University officials agree. John Stobo, M.D., senior vice president in Health Sciences and Services in the University of California Office of the President, said academic health centers are very special institutions that have to put society’s best interests ahead of their own.

“Increasingly, the success of academic health centers will not simply be judged or based on what they do in research, education and clinical care, but by the value they add to their communities,” Stobo said. “And their leaders will also be judged (that way), and not only by where their center sits in U.S. News & World Report or the amount of [National Institutes of Health] money that’s generated.”

He was interrupted by applause from the audience.

Stobo said he recently asked UC’s five medical centers and medical schools to start cataloging their community partnership programs, partly to “raise the flag” in terms of their importance at UC.

For its part, UCSF has historically had a strong but uncoordinated presence of community outreach activities in San Francisco and beyond. UCSF established the University Community Partnerships Office in 2005 in part to coordinate more productive partnerships between philanthropy, local government, community-based nonprofits and UCSF. These activities are overseen by the UCP Council, which includes representatives from both the university and community.

Jeffrey Bluestone, Ph.D., executive vice chancellor and provost at UCSF, said the work being done by the UCP is as innovative as anything being done at the university, if not more so. “We in the leadership of UCSF feel incredibly committed to this program,” he said.

This year, the program included 12 grant recipients and five partnership grants involving UCSF, along with the three major award recipients honored at the UCP celebration.

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SF HIP aims to connect UCSF’s research capital with community partners to improve health.

UCSF's Kevin Grumbach (left) and Laura Schmidt (right) at SF HIP coordinating council meeting

UC San Francisco and an array of community, academic and civic collaborators are wrapping up the first year of an ambitious effort to build partnerships to enhance the well-being of San Francisco residents and eliminate health disparities.

San Francisco Health Improvement Partnerships (SF HIP), a cross-cutting initiative of the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), aims to connect the university’s research capital with the expertise and needs of community partners. The goal is to implement strategies to measurably impact health in San Francisco — and to promote health equity along the way.

“In the past, research has often been seen as unilaterally serving the needs of the researchers rather than the community,” said Kevin Grumbach, M.D., co-director of CTSI’s Community Engagement and Health Policy (CEHP) Program. “SF HIP is an effort to do it differently; to have the outcome not be theoretical, but rather a discrete and sustainable change in community health.”

SF HIP is conducted in a spirit of participatory research with oversight by its Coordinating Council. Community partners include representatives from CTSI, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, San Francisco Unified School District, San Francisco Hospital Council, Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, and health equity coalitions representing the African American, Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander communities. CTSI’s CEHP program serves as the administrative core of the initiative and provides planning funds.

“SF HIP brings UCSF and its resources closer to the community, and all the important stakeholders together to improve community health,” said Amor Santiago, DPM, MPH, executive director of APA Family Support Services, and representative of the Asian/Pacific Islander Health Parity Coalition on the SF HIP Coordinating Council. “This effort has the potential to lead and coordinate public health efforts across the spectrum of providers in medical, mental and social health emphasizing prevention.”

So far, SF HIP working groups have been launched to focus on four pressing needs: physical activity and nutrition, hepatitis B, alcohol abuse and dental caries in children.

“Part of this effort involves laying a foundation for long-term collaboration,” said Ellen Goldstein, M.A., program manager of the CEHP program. “That includes developing an ongoing framework for UCSF to productively engage with a wide range of community partners to tackle our city’s most compelling health problems.”

[Related: View more about UCSF's commitment to the community]

SF HIP is part of UCSF’s expansive community service efforts that span outreach in local, regional and global communities.

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Internship program takes students into private practices, public hospitals, dentist’s offices, optometry offices, safety net clinics.

Jodi Cerney, UC Santa Cruz human biology/health sciences intern

Human biology/health sciences is one of UC Santa Cruz’s most popular and rigorous majors. Students must work and study hard, with a high level of direction and self-motivation.

But classroom experience can’t show them what it’s really like to be a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist.

To pick up this essential hands-on experience, all of the program’s students take part in a required internship program, which takes them into private practices, public hospitals, dentist’s offices, optometry offices and “safety net” clinics, including Planned Parenthood.

Most of these internships take place in Santa Cruz County, and many of them place students in underserved communities.

Three students had a chance to talk in detail about these 100-hour, 10-week internships during an informal discussion on Tuesday at Sutter Maternity & Surgical Center of Santa Cruz with state Assemblyman Bill Monning, D-Carmel, chair of the State Assembly Health Committee.

The meeting was set up to spread awareness of UCSC’s groundbreaking and successful health sciences internship program, which will reach its 10-year anniversary next year. But participants also used the occasion to ask for Monning’s support for innovative programs that encourage students to consider primary care as a career goal.

Monica Santana, UC Santa Cruz human biology/health sciences intern

Monica Santana, 21 (Oakes, ’12, health sciences), told Monning that the internship at Salud Para La Gente, a clinic in Watsonville, “opened my eyes to what life is like in the medical field.”

Raised in Watsonville, Santana remembers seeing large numbers of uninsured people in her hometown. She wanted to help them by becoming a family doctor in an underserved community. “I felt it was my calling,” she said.

The internship also helped her communicate more clearly with patients, assess their needs, and help them understand the importance and impact of their diagnoses.

Jodi Cerney, 21 (Merrill, ’13, health sciences/psychiatry), works as an intern at Pacific Coast Pediatric Care Center in Watsonville. The internship opened her eyes to the passion and commitment of medical providers and how important it is to care deeply about one’s patients, she said. “It’s very uplifting.”

During the Tuesday meeting, Dr. Lawrence deGhetaldi, CEO of Sutter Health’s Santa Cruz Area health care services, and a UCSC graduate, said that UCSC students tend to be socially conscious and more likely to consider a career in primary care.

But he expressed serious concern about the nationwide shortfall of primary care providers, and said the issue must be addressed with incentives for medical school students, including tuition remission for those interested in primary care.

“America must get back to the days when half of its medical school graduates chose primary care careers,” deGhetaldi said. Today, he said, the level has dropped to a mere 9 percent. DeGhetaldi said many medical students decide to be specialists in part because it’s more lucrative.

“We’ve got to fight specialty bias,” said Dr. Jeannine Rodems, a UCSC graduate who attended the discussion.

Rodems, who works in family practice at Cedar Medical Clinic in Santa Cruz, was referring to the fact that many medical students decide to become specialists because it’s often a more lucrative career path.

Assemblyman Bill Monning

Monning applauded the health sciences students’ commitment and social consciousness, and their extensive training in Spanish. He noted that more than half of Monterey County’s residents speak Spanish as their primary language. In Santa Cruz County, the percentage is close to 25 percent.

While UCSC students have always been interested in health careers, these students did not have an organized, programmed way to extend their knowledge beyond the classroom until 2003, said Grant Hartzog, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCSC, who provided an overview of the program for Monning.

That year, the university launched an internship program to support their interests. The programs – and the major – have grown exponentially over the years; there are now 500 students majoring in health sciences.

“If we cultivate students through the system, they are more likely to practice here (in the Santa Cruz County area) and address health care needs here,” Hartzog said.

All of the health sciences students are “nudged” toward considering primary care as a career goal, said Caroline Berger, who coordinates the internship program.

After the presentation, Monning agreed universities should encourage more students to enter primary care, especially during a time when technological advances can diminish the level of personal interaction between doctors and patients, and when primary care physicians are under pressure to shorten the lengths of visits.

He said that an increase in the number of primary care providers will be especially important in 2014, when 3.5 to 4 million Californians would become eligible for health care coverage under President Obama’s health care reform law, also known as the Affordable Care Act.

Two physicians — Jack Watson of Family Doctors of Santa Cruz and Dr. Jeanine Rodems, a UCSC graduate who works at Cedar Medical Clinic in Santa Cruz — also attended the informal discussion.

UCSF prepares to launch Participant Recruitment Service.

Bill Balke, UC San Francisco

Although the vast majority of Americans (94 percent) understand the importance of taking part in clinical research to advance medical science, according to the online resource CenterWatch, three in four adults have little to no knowledge about how clinical research works or how to participate.

Looking to bridge that information gap, UC San Francisco’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) supported and coordinated AWARE for All Clinical Research Education Day on Nov. 5. The event, which happens in major cities across the U.S., was held in San Francisco for the first time. It attracted hundreds of attendees and brought together more than a dozen community partners who provided health-related information and free health screenings, such as glucose and blood pressure checks, chiropractic evaluations and flu shots, among other services.

“Volunteers are really the engine of clinical research, and without them there is no research,” said Bill Balke, M.D., director of CTSI’s Clinical Research Services (CRS) program, which is preparing to launch the UCSF Participant Recruitment Service (PRS). The PRS, which was responsible for the event, provides services to support UCSF and affiliate researchers in recruiting study participants.

Balke led off the event with the presentation, “What Clinical Research Means to You,” and was one of several physicians, nurses and other health professionals on hand to address topics ranging from cancer supportive care to maintaining memory. More than 12 UCSF programs and departments joined in the event providing speakers, free health screenings or recruiting for studies.

Attendees had a wide range of experience with and understanding about clinical studies, and expressed varying reasons for attending the event:

• “I don’t know anything about [clinical research], but my friends and I are here to learn.”
• “I’m interested in learning more about studies. It’s the ‘clinical’ I don’t understand.”
• “There is some valuable information and it is good to hear from the experts.”
• “I would volunteer for a study, but I’ve never been asked.”

“This was a great opportunity to connect researchers and clinicians with potential research volunteers, and to hopefully dispel some myths about clinical research,” said Nariman Nasser, director of the UCSF Participant Recruitment Service. “And considering that more than 80 percent of clinical trials are delayed due to recruitment problems, we as a scientific community have a lot to learn by hearing directly from the community in order to gain a better understanding of the barriers to study recruitment.”

Other co-sponsors included the Stanford Cancer Institute, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, BreastCancerTrials.org, Biogen Idec and EMD Serono. AWARE for All, which provides clinical research education events nationwide, is a project of the Center for Information & Study of Clinical Research Participation (CISCRP).

CTSI at UCSF, a member of the national, National Institutes of Health-funded Clinical and Translational Science Awards network focusing on accelerating research to improve health, provides services for researchers at every stage through its Accelerate, and promotes online collaboration and networking through UCSF Profiles.

Yeast We Can — winning team just one of two made up of high school students.

Julia Loi, a Lincoln High grad and iGEM team member, working this summer in the Wendell Lim lab at UCSF.

Some kids spend the summer after high school graduation hanging at the beach or chilling with friends. CJ Wong and five other graduates of San Francisco’s Lincoln High School spent their summer developing ways to make yeast clump. They won a gold medal for their efforts.

Wong and his fellow Lincoln High grads spent 10 weeks in the UC San Francisco lab of Wendell Lim, Ph.D., a professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology, learning about the emerging field of synthetic biology and preparing to compete against 74 teams of students from schools like Harvard, MIT and Yale in an international competition called iGEM. The Lincoln High-UCSF team, one of just two made up of high school students, came home from the Americas Regional iGEM jamboree, held in Indianapolis Oct. 8-10, with a gold medal for their entry, “Building a Synthetic Community: Yeast We Can!”

It was the fifth year in a row that a team from Lincoln High’s two-year biotechnology class received a summer of training in the Lim lab and entered the iGEM contest, competing against teams of older, more advanced students. For 18-year-old Christopher “CJ” Wong, now a molecular biology student at City College of San Francisco, it was an opportunity to challenge himself and to find out how much a team, working together, could accomplish in one summer. He also learned a critical lesson about the nature of scientific research.

Wong said he’d never really struggled with anything before but while working in the lab, he found himself getting frustrated as his early experiments failed.

“I couldn’t get anything to work,” he said. Wong went to the lead instructor for the group, Veronica Zepeda, Ph.D., and to some of the graduate students working as mentors for advice and encouragement.

“I was frustrated and they were even-keeled,” he said. “Their attitude toward failure is it’s not the end of the world. I learned that if you stick with something eventually it will work and that sometimes you learn more from failing than you do from succeeding.”

Zepeda led the team through a two-week boot camp in molecular biology, teaching them how to copy DNA and other lab tricks. Then they started brainstorming ideas for the iGEM competition.

The students decided to focus on a finding ways to get yeast, a single-celled organism that doesn’t normally aggregate, to stick together in clumps. This involved looking for proteins they could attach to the outside of yeast cells to get them to cling to each other, Zepeda explained. They tried one protein found in fungi, another that mussels use to grab onto rocks and a third called cadherin that cells use to stick together in human and animal tissues.

“They were able to see that yes, yeast was able to stick together and form clumps we could see under the microscope,” Zepeda said. “They went from a beginning idea and, by the end of the summer, we had lots of nice microscope images of these cells sticking together.”

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All is not lost, despite aging, injuries or mental illness.

Adam Gazzaley, UC San Francisco

Our mature brains may not be so old and inflexible after all. Scientists are discovering that the human brain can improve its performance to counter the consequences of cognitive impairment and even the trauma of stroke-induced brain damage.

To help celebrate the first, Bay Area Science Festival, which concluded on Nov. 6, UCSF hosted lunchtime panel discussions on science topics, including a panel on “Retraining the Brain.”

UCSF neuroscientists described research that shows how even mature human brains can significantly adapt to counter aging, traumatic injury and even the disruptive impact of complex developmental diseases such as schizophrenia.

Using some the latest technologies for monitoring brain activity and signaling within neural circuitry, these UCSF researchers are demonstrating how brain activity changes with training exercises and learning games. They are discovering that the brain essentially alters the strength of its signaling within and across critical brain regions as we adapt to improve our functioning in response to new patterns of stimuli.

David Ewing Duncan, best-selling author and chief correspondent of the public radio program Biotech Nation, moderated the discussion, which included Adam Gazzaley, M.D., Ph.D., the founding director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center at UCSF; Sri Nagarajan, Ph.D., a UCSF brain imaging researcher who study brain changes in disease and development; and Philip Sabes, Ph.D., who studies how the brain processes information to plan movements.

These scientists conceptualize and evaluate models to describe how the brain works, which helps them to move toward a better understanding. But modeling still cannot answer all the questions researchers have nor adequately explain the results of all the experiments they are conducting. In painting a picture of the brain, panelists said, researchers are at the “crayon and colored pencil” stage.

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One of nine organizations cited.

SEP intern Chanelle Dorton (left) explains her Alzheimer's research to UCSF's Bruce Alberts (center) and Keith Yamamoto.

President Obama has named the Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP) High School Internship Program at UC San Francisco as one of the 2011 recipients of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, the White House announced today (Nov. 15).

The UCSF internship program was one of only one of nine organizations cited, and one of two from California.

“Through their commitment to education and innovation, these individuals and organizations are playing a crucial role in the development of our 21st century workforce,” Obama said. “Our nation owes them a debt of gratitude for helping ensure that America remains the global leader in science and engineering for years to come.”

The award will be given during a White House ceremony in December and will include a grant of $25,000 to advance mentoring efforts.

Since the UCSF SEP High School Internship Program began in 1989, nearly 250 students from San Francisco’s public schools have spent their summers conducting scientific research under the direction of UCSF scientist mentors while simultaneously learning how to maneuver the critical and difficult transition from high school to college.

“It is an honor to have our work recognized at a national level,” said UCSF professor emeritus Bruce Alberts, Ph.D., co-founder of SEP.  “This Presidential Award recognizes the critical role of science education for the future and validates the extraordinary efforts of the students and scientists we work with.”

The core of the high school intern program is immersion in the world-class research environment of UCSF. Students work on a research project designed by their mentors, with the projects often being a component of the mentor’s own research. Last summer, for instance, San Francisco high school senior Alex Yu worked in the UCSF departments of pathology and laboratory medicine, studying of the inhibition of Myc, a protein that affects gene expression and is linked to cancer.

“I’d say I’m very lucky to have had this opportunity,” Yu said. “I never thought I could do this type of stuff, especially at my age.”

Yu’s mentor, Nicole Sodir, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar, noted how the high school student became more independent as the summer went on, adding, “He now has almost a full understanding of the project and he can critically perform an experiment.”

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