Now in its ninth year, the Osher Center has been a steadfast role model in this health care revolution in San Francisco.

Most scientists agree that increased risk to breast cancer is more strongly associated with environmental and lifestyle factors.

Cancer, diabetes, inflammation, malaria. The list of diseases ripe for new treatments is long. Yet the pace of drugs coming to market is actually flat.

Gender equity, sexual harassment, conflict resolution and ethics. These are a few of the challenging issues that UCSF has tackled over the years as it tries to make the University a better place for faculty, staff and students.

UCSF Today highlights a few of the people and programs that make this University a place of hope and promise.

UCSF postdoctoral scholar Elizabeth Fair is helping to shape the future direction of Global Health Sciences (GHS). Since GHS began only three years ago with the vision of Executive Director Haile Debas, Fair has been working alongside about 65 researchers from UCSF and UC Berkeley on strategic planning to determine the institute's mission and future goals, as well as to devise models for applying basic science to global health work over the next five to 10 years.

New research from the National Institute on Aging found that eating vegetables could help keep our brains younger. Howard Rosen, MD, professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, talks about the study with KPIX Health and Science correspondent Dr. Kim Mulvihill.

Louann Brizendine, MD, is director and founder of the Women and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic, at UCSF, the first clinic in the country devoted to the study of women, and their mental, sexual and physical health. Brizendine is one of the country's foremost neuropsychiatric experts, best know for her ground-breaking work in the field of female neurology, and now, for her much-lauded book, The Female Brain.

A. Eugene Washington, MD, executive vice chancellor (EVC) and provost of the University of California, San Francisco, has been named one of the 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology for 2006, in an annual listing selected by eAccess Corp.

Ricky Choi likes to challenge assumptions with experience. A self-described intellectual with a passion for health and human rights, Choi has traveled and studied widely. But there was no place on earth about which this third-year pediatric resident in UCSF's PLUS (Pediatric Leadership for the UnderServed) program was more passionately curious than North Korea.