UCSF's Amy Levine will work on an initiative focusing on career advancement of women staff at the UC Office of the President in 2007.

It is time once again to take stock. Here is my ninth annual survey of the past year at UCSF. It has been a year of great achievement and persisting problems. I have tried to give a representative sample of both.

During two weeks in October and November, Susan Merrell, a photographer who works in the Public Affairs department as a news assistant, spent time capturing images of the children, families and caregivers at UCSF Children's Hospital.

A new multi-center trial clinical trial now under way has the potential to "open up a whole new world of treatment" for patients recovering from stroke, says Gary Abrams, MD, chief of the rehabilitation service at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and associate professor of clinical neurology at UCSF. Abrams is site co-principal investigator at UCSF and SFVAMC.

The holiday season brought ballerinas and purple fairies to UCSF Medical Center recently.

On NPR's All Things Considered, Louann Brizendine, MD, neuropsychiatrist and director of the UCSF Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic, is interviewed about her book, The Female Brain, which attributes differences between the sexes to brain chemistry. Brizendine discusses these differences with Debbie Elliott.

Rene Salazar, Alice Wong and Hamdan Almas will receive the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Awards at a special ceremony at UCSF on Jan. 16, 2007.

Families participated in the Worldwide Candle Lighting ceremony at UCSF on Dec. 10.

UCSF School of Nursing faculty Geraldine Padilla and Erika Froelicher and Frederic Marteau, who is visiting UCSF from Belgium, are among the 2006 Fulbright scholars.

It has been widely reported that Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota was treated on Wednesday, Dec. 13, for a ruptured arteriovenous malformation, or AVM. To learn more about this condition, we contacted Michael Lawton, MD, associate professor of neurological surgery at UCSF and an expert on AVMs.