Sali named associate dean of research

Andrej Sali, PhD, has been appointed associate dean of research of the UCSF School of Pharmacy, effective July 1, 2015. The appointment is in addition to Sali’s full professorship in the School’s Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. As he continues with his own research, Sali will advise Dean B. Joseph Guglielmo, PharmD, and School leaders on pertinent research issues and opportunities and will represent the School in critical campus research decisions.

“I am delighted with Dr. Sali’s acceptance of this position. He unequivocally has the qualities needed for a successful research dean—personal research success, demonstrated commitment to scientific collaboration, administrative leadership experience, and a global science perspective,” states Guglielmo.

Sali has a distinguished, internationally recognized research career in the use of computation to study the structure, function, and evolution of proteins and their assemblies. Moreover, he is an integral member of the larger UCSF and University of California research communities, having served as director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at UCSF (QB3-UCSF) from 2009–2012 and as a faculty affiliate of QB3-UCSF since 2003.

His UCSF service working with fellow researchers and administrators is expansive, including current service on the IT Governance Committee on Research Technology, the Bioinformatics Task Force, the Enabling Technologies Advisory Committee, the QB3 Executive Committee, and the Institute for Computational and Health Sciences Executive Committee. He joined the School of Pharmacy faculty in 2003 after a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and a subsequent faculty position at The Rockefeller University. He earned a PhD in chemistry from the University of London.

Sali follows retiring Associate Dean of Research Paul Ortiz de Montellano, PhD, who has served in the position since 2010. “As Dr. Sali assumes this new role,” notes Guglielmo, “I thank Dr. Ortiz de Montellano for his remarkable service and commonsense approach in helping guide the School toward the best possible research-related decisions. We wish him well as he retires from UCSF after a long and distinguished career in heme protein research.”