The goal of the Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics Graduate Program (PSPG) at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) is to educate and train PhD students to conceptualize, design and execute innovative scientific research in the interdisciplinary scientific areas encompassed by modern pharmaceutical sciences. We educate students to be leaders in the pharmaceutical sciences, posing and addressing the most critical research questions in the field. To this end, our students actively learn the fundamental concepts in the basic and translational sciences required to address these questions in an environment where each can develop into an independent and creative scientific problem solver. We challenge our students to propose new hypotheses and questions in the pharmaceutical sciences that can now be interrogated by the tsunami of large data sets and new technological and computational approaches that are introduced at an increasing rate.