News & Events

"The sun wasn't up at 5 o'clock Wednesday morning, but a new day had already dawned for Matthew Ouimet. Matthew, a 2-year-old Antioch boy who had waited 15 months for a life-sustaining kidney and liver transplant, had his new organs. Dr. John Roberts took the lead on the liver transplant, and Dr. Peter Stock, who...

" Dr. (Nancy) Ascher excels in her role as Chair of Surgery, not only for her inexplicable foresight, but because she stays connected to trainees and students. This year, Dr. Ascher received the Francis Moore Excellence in Mentorship in the Field of Transplantation Surgery Award from the American Society of...

"It was 1975 when Nancy Ascher, MD, PhD, chose surgery, a specialty shoulder-deep in men. Then again, so was medical school - Ascher was one of 20 women in her class of 180. After her residency, she blew past every gender barrier to become the first woman to perform a liver transplant, garnering enough speed to...

The annual Pediatric Transplant Picnic was held at McNears Beach in San Rafael, CA on Saturday, August 24, 2013, from 10 am - 4 pm, a celebration in honor of children who have been patients in the transplant program and their families. Attendees were treated to music, dancing, kayaking, face-painting, piñatas, and...

"Innovation in medicine is driven by need, but also by the market," said Dr. Michael R. Harrison, the director emeritus of the Fetal Treatment Center and the director of the Pediatric Device Consortium, both at the University of California, San Francisco. "Big markets have lots of folks developing devices, but...

The annual 26th Annual J. Engelbert Dunphy Resident Research Symposium was held on April 5, 2013. The award for "Best Abstract" went to Robert Bell, MD with runners-up Jessica Beard, MD, MPH and Randi Smith, MD MPH. Xiaoti Xu, MD received the award for "Best Quick Shot". Jack Harbell, MD and Cristina O'Donohue, MD...

The 16th Annual Maurice Galante Lecture took place on Febuary 22, 2013 and featured Malcolm Gladwell. The video of the lecture can be watched online . Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was...

Alden H. Harken, M.D. was recently honored with the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of University Surgeons (SUS). Dr. Harken is Chief of the UCSF-East Bay Surgery Program, and Chief of Surgery and Chair of the Surgery Department at Alameda Health System's (AHS). Over the course of his career, His...

Dr. Maurice Galante, whose professional career at UCSF spanned an incredible 44 years (1945-1989), passed away on February 5, 2013. Dr. Galante was born in Rhodes in 1919 and came to the United States alone to receive his undergraduate and medical education. He entered his residency training in general surgery at...

A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine touts a new medical device for the treatment of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD) as an alternative to standard therapy, long-term proton-pump inhibitors or Nissen Fundoplication.The new treatment is a surgical procedure in which a small band of magnetic...

Space Medicine in the 21st Century: A Panel on Commercial and Governmental Opportunities On Thursday, February 2, 2013, UCSF Vascular Surgeon Marlene Grenon, M.D., C.M., will moderate a session in which a panel of experts will discuss the lessons learned from the recent Red Bull Stratos Jump and how current and...

NBC Latino reports on the work of San Francisco General Hospital’s violence-intervention program, The San Francisco Wraparound Project: Javier Antezana is one of the first people to approach a patient’s bedside when doctors rush a gunshot victim to the emergency room but he’s no surgeon. As a case manager for the...

Dr. Minnie Sarwal discusses the omics approach to transplant monitoring and the potential use of sensitive and effective biomarkers for diagnosiing and treating disease. Rapid progress in high throughput molecular screening and in bioinformatics tools have provided the scientific community with new tools for...

Alfonso Garcia and his parents pose with the UCSF medical team that cared for him during his 2010 life-saving liver transplant. From left: mother Marta Garcia; Emily Perito, MD; nurse practitioner Susan Diaz, MSN; Garcia; Philip Rosenthal, MD; and father Oscar Garcia. Alfonso Garcia still carries around a baseball...

SFGate.com, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, reports on the health challenges of space tourism, highlighting a paper published by UCSF Vascular Surgeon Marlene Grenon, M.D., C.M. and colleagues in the British Medical Journal discussing the field of space medicine for non-experts and clinicians alike...