The 20th annual Macy’s Tree Lighting Ceremony, benefiting UCSF Children’s Hospital. Macy’s partners with UCSF each year to raise funds for the UCSF Children’s Hospital palliative care program – Compass Care – which provides essential medical care and emotional support for families whose children have life-threatening illnesses. Over the last six years, more than $800,000 has been raised through sponsoring lights that adorn Macy’s gift to the city, an 85-foot-tall Shasta Fir tree.

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to UCSF’s Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD – along with Carol Greider, PhD, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Jack Szostak, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital – recognizes the importance of the most fundamental kind of basic biological science.

Activists, scientists and administrators convene to discuss research on the role of environmental chemicals in breast cancer.

The UCSF community is invited to attend a town hall meeting on December 4 to hear an update on the UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay project.

UCSF scientists have shown for the first time that the rigidity of a tissue can induce cancer. The research team identified an enzyme that is crucial for regulating tissue stiffness and demonstrated that the enzyme can turn abnormal but non-malignant breast tissue into tumors, according to a study published in “Cell” online.

A $2M gift for the new UCSF Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay was unveiled on November 19 in San Francisco during a conference hosted by the cloud computing company Salesforce.com. The gift is comprised of $1M from the Salesforce.com Foundation and a matching gift of $1M from Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and his family. The Foundation gift is part of a new initiative called Healthy Communities and honors General Colin L. Powell, USA (retired), who is a strong child advocate and friend of the Foundation.

The UCSF community is invited to offer ideas on the future of the University of California on December 1, when members of the UC Commission on the Future will visit the campus.

No need to go to the mall when shopping from local vendors will be available in the Millberry Union on December 2 and 3.

UCSF scientists studying fruit flies have uncovered a new function for a gene whose human equivalent may play a critical role in schizophrenia.