Christopher Kerfoot was still a boy when he first knew that he wanted a career in science. By the time he reached his senior year at the University of Illinois, he also knew where he wanted to get his Ph.D. Raised in Falmouth, Massachusetts, he headed west after high school, "trying to find somewhere warm," and California seemed a likely place.

He also knew he wanted "to go into industry, into pharmaceuticals. I wasn't interested in academia, and I knew that I wanted to work in a medically related field." Still that left him with literally hundreds of options. Kerfoot had applied to UCLA's Department of Biochemistry, but part of his paperwork fortuitously reached the brand-new ACCESS program.

They said it was a multidisciplinary program and would I like to apply, and I said of course." Although he was accepted by other California universities, Kerfoot came to UCLA. ACCESS was the determining factor in his decision, because it matched the hundreds of potential directions his career might take with literally hundreds of academic opportunities. "It allowed me the flexibility to choose professors who did research that interested me. I could rotate through many different labs in different departments," Kerfoot said.

In many ways, Kerfoot is typical of the 70 members of UCLA's first ACCESS class. According to the program's director, David Meyer, many were drawn by the opportunity to "choose among roughly 150 different laboratories and mentors, spanning everything from the most structural atomic science to integral physiology, even disease-related research."

But those who would have come to UCLA without ACCESS also appreciated what the program offered.

Kerfoot spoke of first-year bugs in the program: late support checks, difficulty getting answers to questions that hadn't been asked before, problems with advising. But he is pleased with the personal outcomes.

Kerfoot started out in the laboratory run by Daniel Kaufman, a professor of pharmacology, who has done ground-breaking work on diabetes. Kerfoot worked on a project that's attempting to find a therapy for the disease.

Then he spent a quarter with Judith Gasson, the new head of the Cancer Research Center, helping with leukemia research, and a quarter with Sherie Morrison, head of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, cloning antibodies that might stimulate an immune response to cancer.

"All three of the labs were excellent," Kerfoot said, "and it was a tough choice. Many factors came into play." Eventually, he chose to return to Kaufman's lab, where his thesis will involve diabetes research. Its topic may be an outgrowth of his present work, in collaboration with City of Hope researchers, looking at "the direct cellular cause of destruction of beta cells in the pancreas."

Kerfoot's personal goal still involve working in pharmaceuticals or biotechnology.

Published in Fall 1995, Graduate Quarterly