Fourth-year medical student Sam Brondfield has spent his student career exploring disease in every stage. It’s ambitious, but Brondfield — who first was interested in studying the stars — has always seen the bigger picture.

The UCSF Spine Center helps more than 10,000 patients every year, but few have the back story of Gloria Lyon, a Holocaust survivor who suffered from malnutrition and hard labor in seven Nazi concentration camps.

An aspiration of UCSF faculty and campus leaders is that the students trained here continue to transform biomedicine through innovation and risk taking, a theme highlighted by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, PhD, president at Rockefeller University, who delivered the 2012 Graduate Division commencement speech on May 18.

The UCSF community is invited to participate in World No Tobacco Day on May 31.