The Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care at UCSF was established in 1958 by Stuart Cullen MD. Since then, it has risen to become one of the preeminent departments in the world. We are enormously proud of our tradition of outstanding patient care, research, and education. UCSF has a storied history of innovation in anesthesia, critical care, and pain medicine. Our department has been ranked in the top ten nationally in NIH-funded research, for the last 10+ years. Important discoveries by the department include the first use of CPAP in premature infants, key contributions to the pharmacology of muscle relaxants and inhaled anesthetics, first demonstration of intraoperative transesophageal echocardiography, and many others. We have robust research programs, spanning the range from ion channel structure and function to clinical and translational research.
Our trainees have become leaders across the country. We are particularly proud of our residency program, which provides unequalled diversity of experience in a major university medical center (Helen Diller Medical Center at Parnassus), the San Francisco Veterans Hospital, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (Trauma), Mount Zion Hospital, the UCSF Orthopaedic Institute, and the Benioff Children's, Betty Irene Moore Women's and Bakar Cancer (NIH-designated Cancer Center) Hospitals in the Mission Bay neighborhood. We offer ACGME fellowships in Critical Care Medicine, Pain Medicine, Cardiac Anesthesia, Obstetric Anesthesia, Pediatric Anesthesia, Acute Pain and Regional Anesthesia, and many additional non-ACGME fellowships. The faculty is dedicated to teaching, nurturing, and mentoring the next generation of leaders.
We provide updates about our department's activities in our Anesthesia News magazine publication, within the News section of this website, and via social media platforms.
Finally, we are fortunate to be located in San Francisco, in the middle of the most beautiful, diverse, and innovative part of America. We invite you to learn more about the department.
Michael Gropper, MD, PhD
Professor and Chair