By Eric Brooks, UCSF
Some people have their work families and their personal families, but for a large number of faculty and staff at UC San Francisco, they’re actually one and the same.
While there are no actual statistics that track such occurrences, UCSF and UCSF Health employees related by blood or marriage include mothers and children, brothers and sisters, partners and, yes, even entire families, working toward UCSF’s mission of advancing health worldwide.
When it comes to bloodlines, the Carmonas may be the de facto “First Family of UCSF.” All four members of the Carmona family — father, mother, son and daughter — are employed by the university.
It started in 1994 with Mario Carmona who came to UCSF when he got a job at the Millberry Union bookstore. His wife and former high school sweetheart, Esther, moved over to UCSF five years later from UC Law San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings). Mario is currently the associate director of UCSF Documents and Media and Esther is the UCSF Human Resources operations manager.
Years later, their son, Antonio, settled in as an applications programmer for the IT Web Services Access Management Team. He was followed by his younger sister Brianna, now a diet clerk at UCSF Health St. Mary’s Hospital. “I think I always was going to end up at UCSF,” Brianna Carmona said.
Following in the family footsteps
“UCSF is all the kids have ever known,” Esther Carmona said. “I’m going on my 32nd year. I’ve been here a long time, and it’s all I’ve ever known. I’m just so proud that the kids are following in our footsteps as Mario and I near retirement.”
Both kids did summer stints at UCSF before taking on full-time jobs later in life, a familiar pattern for other UCSF children that have gone on to careers at the university.
“I told them to think about UCSF when they were looking for a job,” Mario Carmona said. “We’re huge, right? We’re the second largest employer in the city. The opportunity is there. You can leverage your institutional knowledge to get in here. They did.”
Family lunches on campus can be hard to come by, with Brianna separated from the other three in her role at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. Meanwhile, the other Carmonas often find themselves working remotely out of the family home in San Francisco all at the same time — logging into Zooms from the bedroom (Esther), dining room (Mario) and downstairs area (Antonio).
The family joked that their house is essentially a UCSF satellite office.
There is time for non-UCSF talk when the family sits down together for dinner almost every single night, though UCSF comes up from time to time. “How can you avoid it?” Esther Carmona said.
They’d not have it any other way.