The Dermatology Department at the University of California, San Francisco, has a long tradition of training promising young scientists to be successful, independent investigators. With the expansion to the Mission Bay Campus, UCSF has added >600,000 square feet of new research space and is in the process of recruiting approximately 100 new faculty members. The UCSF Dermatology Department is also expanding in terms of research space, the number of faculty conducting basic and applied research, and the number of residents and fellows. The UCSF Dermatology Training Program encourages physician scientist trainees to pursue cutting edge research in any laboratory in the UC system, and, if it makes sense, in laboratories in other eminent institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Stanford University and UC-Berkeley. This allows trainees to choose from all outstanding faculty members at UCSF and our neighboring institutions, regardless of their departmental affiliation. Building on our successes in the past and capitalizing on the UCSF expansion, we propose to continue our training program to groom not only train physician scientists, but also PhD fellows who will become successful researchers in skin biology. The UCSF dermatology training program is designed to prepare physicians and PhD scientists for a lifetime of scholarly pursuit with the ultimate goal of understanding the molecular basis of skin diseases and finding new therapies for these diseases. Our two-fold goals of exposing our physician scientist trainees to the rich scientific research milieu at UCSF and of recruiting PhD scientists to study skin biology in the department will ensure that a cadre of young scientists will pursue academic careers in dermatological research and advance the field in fundamental ways.