Catalyst Awardee Ida Sim MD, PhD, UCSF’s chief research informatics officer, was recognized as one of 50 influential people on STAT News’ 2024 STATUS List, which highlights influential people shaping the future of health and life sciences. The recognition described Prof. Sim as a “major force behind the advancement of digital medicine” and cited her largely “behind-the-scenes work on gnarly technical problems” including co-founding Open MHealth and co-developing the open-source software suite Common Health. Prof Sim's work as co-director of the new UCSF UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health and the newly launched Agile Metabolic Health effort was also cited. 

Delve Bio, a pioneer in metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) for infectious diseases, in collaboration with UCSF announced data on the use of mNGS for the diagnosis of infectious causes of meningitis and/or encephalitis in real-world clinical settings. The study was presented by Catalyst Awardee and Delve Bio co-founder Charles Chiu, MD. PhD.

The Innovation Ventures' global online entrepreneurship course, Global Life Sciences/Healthcare Entrepreneurship Course: Virtual Master Class Direct from Silicon Valley, has brought best practices from Silicon Valley to almost 40 countries worldwide.  The 10 week, part time professional online course teaches essential business basics for startups and is offered once per year in the fall.

The course covers the essence of a business plan: assessing if the science can be the basis for a company, how to identify a business model, building the startup team, intellectual property, FDA, investment criteria and much more. Diverse professionals have joined, including scientists, clinicians, researchers, academics, founders, potential entrepreneurs, management teams, ecosystem managers, tech transfer, corporate executives, investors, policymakers, and consultants.  

The UCSF Pain and Addition Research Center (PARC) announced that current Catalyst Awardee Tommaso Di Ianni, PhD, has been selected as the PARC Fellow of 2024-2025. Asst. Prof. Di Ianni's project is titled "Minimally Invasive Closed-loop Neuromodulation via Combined Focused Ultrasound and Functional Ultrasound Imaging."