What did you miss? Santa swooped in to pick up a ton of toys for tots, and Employee of the Year Pam Alverson clearly tops the Nice list. Still ahead: Say bye to Blazers bound for the Bahama Bowl and hello to new way to treat cancer.

INTO UAB Adviser Achala Gunasekara-Rockwell is working to improve education for young girls in her native Sri Lanka and be a catalyst for cultural and social change.

Lindsay Hall, a registered nurse in labor and delivery at UAB’s Women and Infants Center, is the winner of UAB Medicine’s first DAISY Award, which honors extraordinary nurses who are making an impact in their health care setting.

Assistant Registrar Tiffany Hearns, whose job it is to assign classrooms and meeting spaces every semester for every class and every student, is UAB’s Employee of the Month.

Faculty fellows are eligible to receive as much as $5,000 per team for seed funding to design and execute a project to advance interprofessional education during a one-year program.

Covered employees whose household income, based on family size, is 1.5 times the federal poverty level or less, are eligible for funds to offset the cost of medical premiums.

What's new at UAB this week? Two coaches cast a long shadow on campus, physicists work to improve on perfection and UAB artist-in-residence Eric Essix literally took all his jazz hands for a ride around town. See it all in one video. Catch up in about a minute.

Beginning Dec. 11, traffic will be reduced to single lanes in each direction on University Boulevard between 16th and 18th streets for construction of a pedestrian crosswalk, and a portion of 10th Avenue South between 13th and 16th streets will be closed to traffic for utility work.

The policies govern access and use of sensitive data and university computers and networks. The full text is available online.

Parth Bhagat, a programmer and analyst in the Office of the Vice President for Research, is UAB’s Employee of the Month.