UCSF Storytellers Take Top Honors

Creativity, curiosity and extraordinary storytelling are on full display in the winners of the eighth annual Synapse Storytelling Contest, with this year’s honorees transforming experiences in medicine, science, nature, identity and everyday life into memorable works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry...

August 25, 2026

Synapse

Campus

Bird Banding

February 7, 2023

Nina Djukic

On the phone she’ll tell me stories about shorebirds which breed in warmer marshland winters and still cross the continent...

Ours Is Not to Reason Why

February 7, 2023

Abu Taha

When I found out the next patient I’ll be following is a retired army cardiothoracic surgeon in his late eighties...

Student Life

Meander

January 23, 2023

Nina Escueta

Been drifting along A sea of green. Been free to be, to breathe, to dream

Arts & Culture

Assiduously

January 15, 2023

Nina Djukic

This morning, strolling soddenly down Harmon street, the rain became a sudden shield; with sudden clarity I felt calamity dismissed...

Student Life

Big Surprise

December 11, 2022

Camille Moore

It was sunrise Nail clipping of a moon, an incisor tooth Peeking and covered again, the colors of the sky...

Travel

Introspection

December 11, 2022

Catherine Oksas

Often, I used to drop by to ask a patient of mine about his mood, and one day he just...

Student Life

Electron microscopy images of bacteriophage docking on and injecting genetic material into a bacterial host.

The Infinitely Big in the Infinitely Small

December 3, 2022

Julianne Riggs

[Third place winner in the Synapse Storytelling Contest nonfiction category.] The typical existential thoughts of a graduate student drifted through...

Student Life