Meet the Champions

Meet the Champions

At UCSF Medical Center, the champions don’t wear gold medals. They wear scrubs, nurses’ smocks, and lab coats. They cover post-chemo baldness with wigs, and tiny preemie heads with the world’s smallest watch caps. They wear downtown suits, hard hats, gowns that open at the back, and sweat pants for long nights by a sick child’s bedside. At UCSF, all these ordinary-looking people are extraordinary. Patients, caregivers, scientists, philanthropic partners—they are the faces of advanced science translated into innovative medicine. And they are the inspiration for The Campaign for UCSF Medical Center—transforming health care for the world, starting right here in San Francisco.

Gideon, Susan, and Jonathan Yu

“Father of an angel. Investor in awesome entrepreneurs.” That’s how Gideon Yu describes himself in his profile on Twitter. And in his family’s experience at UCSF, both labels come to life.
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Peter Carroll

Three things drive Peter Carroll: a penchant for perfection, a passion for the big questions in cancer, and patients. This third priority—people—gives a sense of urgency to everything Carroll undertakes. Luckily, he doesn’t need a lot of sleep.
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Regis B. Kelly

If you think a distinguished neuroscientist like Reg Kelly spends all his time in the laboratory, exploring life at nano-scale, think again. Kelly is a man with a talent and a passion for the big picture-including an inspired vision of tomorrow's San Francisco.
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Laura Esserman

In 17 years at UCSF, Laura Esserman has seen thousands of patients. She's helped many vanquish breast cancer. She's been by the bedsides of others at the end. But her work for each woman begins in the laboratory, where she remembers her patients' stories, their courage, and their hope.
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Dipti Anderson

Women diagnosed with breast cancer often face a daunting recovery regimen-test after test, lumpectomy or mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, ongoing screenings-and turbulent emotions. Dipti Anderson understands. She has walked that journey, and shares the perspective of a true survivor.
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Jessica Galloway

Jessica Galloway hates to be called a 'cancer survivor.' It's been four years since she began her battle with breast cancer, and she feels healthy and strong, but the thought that her cancer might return is never far from her mind, and she resists the label of conquering hero. "I don't know that I will survive breast cancer," she says.
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Paddy O’Brien

What's it like to be a 9-year-old soccer superstar one day and a boy with Ewing's sarcoma-a rare bone cancer-the next? Paddy O'Brien's poem Needles tells some of the story young cancer patients at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital know by heart.
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Cristina Dirksen

When you're pregnant with multiples, it helps to have a plan. And when that goes awry, it helps to have UCSF on your side. That's what Cristina Dirksen discovered when her three lovely daughters made an early entrance-at just 32 weeks.
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Art Kern

When Art Kern discovered he had prostate cancer, he didn't just become a UCSF patient. He became part of the research. And through his perseverance, insight, and generosity, he is influencing prostate cancer solutions that will help men everywhere.
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Beverly Ray Garza

When Beverly Ray Garza went in for her 19-week prenatal ultrasound, she thought she'd leave knowing whether she had a baby girl or boy on the way. While the ultrasound answered that question - the child, her fifth with her husband Gabriel, was a girl - it raised some new, and frightening, questions.
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Mohammad Diab

Classic themes pervade the life story of Mohammad Diab. Born in Cairo to political refugees from Syria, raised in the U.K. and the U.S.—his is a tale of freedom and opportunity. Drawn to medicine, he has lived a life of service. But it is generosity that inspires his future.
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Cassandra Robertson

It takes a strong personality to turn an operating room full of surgeons, technicians, scrub nurses, and residents into a team. With rare, salt-of-the-earth character and a gospel singer’s power to inspire, Cassandra Robertson unites them all.
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Michelle Cathcart

Welcome to UCSF’s Intensive Care Nursery, where the patients are tiny, the challenges are life-and-death, and the nurses—caring for fragile, at-risk newborns, preparing anxious families to take them home—seem to have superpowers. Michelle Cathcart, who manages the ICN, can’t imagine working anyplace else.
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Joshua Adler

There was no “aha!” moment that turned Josh Adler toward medicine— just the lifelong belief that healing others is an important thing to do with your life. Now, he’s renewing his profession’s emphasis on its guiding principle: First, do no harm.
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Mari-Paule Thiet

Mari-Paule Thiet specializes in high-risk pregnancies in which mother, child, or both face complications. But when you’re her patient, she doesn’t just deliver your baby. She joins your family.
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Julie Pollman

School number 864 doesn't look like any other school on the San Francisco Unified School District roster. The students can wear pajamas to class. Sometimes, their teacher visits their bedside. But then, Julie Pollman isn't like any other teacher.
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Ronnie & Karen Lott

If you know football, you know Ronnie Lott: legendary San Francisco 49er, hard-hitting Hall of Famer, the toughest tackler of his day. But, as his wife, Karen, can confirm, if you really want to see what Ronnie's made of, ask him about the kids.
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Diane B. Wilsey

With institutions all over the Bay Area inviting her to get involved, why did Dede Wilsey say yes to UCSF? The answer is deeply personal: “I’ve experienced UCSF’s genius and compassion firsthand. And I will never forget what it meant.”
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