QBC Graduate Program Retreat

About the retreat

World-class science as an educational experience

The annual QBC graduate research conference has evolved and grown from separate retreats serving individual graduate programs and their students and postdocs to one encompassing faculty of multiple departments and four graduate programs:

1. Biological and Medical Informatics
2. Biophysics
3. Chemistry and Chemical Biology
4. Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics.

Our annual graduate research conference has become a cornerstone in the training of graduate students. Held at the end of the fall quarter, the retreat performs a vital role for all levels of students:

• First-year students are introduced to the breadth of research available to them in pursuit of their PhD degree.
• Poster presentations, given by students starting in their third or fourth year, are vital to the development of these young scientists.
• In addition, four advanced students are chosen by their program to present talks dedicated to the outstanding work they have accomplished during their training at UCSF.

The retreat features sessions of mixed talks posters, and socializing with broad exposure to the many complementary research directions of the four programs. It will offer opportunities for informal faculty/student interactions. These interactions are lively, immensely valuable, and often result in new research collaborations. It is a right of passage, which we believe is in the best tradition of scientific enterprise.

We need your donations

About 200 students are served by this meeting, which is considered a foundational element of their training. However, budget constraints have become severe because of state cutbacks and tuition increases.

We do not wish to reduce our commitment to this facet of student development, and we welcome donations to support this excellence of tradition in training at UCSF that must continue.