2015 Report to the Community

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The Academic Health Sciences Center at East Tennessee State University

2015 Report to the Community

PresidentBrian Noland, PhD

Vice President for Health AffairsWilsie S. Bishop, DPA

Associate Vice President for Health AffairsJane M. Jones, EdD

DeansRobert Means, MD

James H. Quillen College of Medicine

Larry D. Calhoun, PharmDBill Gatton College of Pharmacy

Wendy M. Nehring, PhD, RNCollege of Nursing

Don Samples, EdDCollege of Clinical and

Rehabilitative Health Sciences

Randy Wykoff, MD, MPH & TMCollege of Public Health

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

EditorKristen Swing

Associate Director of University Relations at ETSU

WritingKristen Swing, Joe Smith,

Fred Sauceman and Carol FoxETSU Office of University Relations

DesignVirginia Buda

ETSU Department of Biomedical Communications

Principal PhotographyLarry Smith, Charlie Warden and Jim Sledge

ETSU Office of University Relations

East Tennessee State University is a Tennessee Board of Regents institution and is fully in accord with the belief that educational

and employment opportunities should be available to all eligible persons without regard to age,

gender, color, race, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

East Tennessee State University is an AA/EEO employer.Printing by Interstate Graphics. TBR 260-115-14 9.5M

On the cover: Wilsie Bishop, Vice President for Health Affairs

BENCHMARKS

Collaboration is key...As the health care landscape across the country continues to evolve, it is hard to say what the industry will look like in years to come. One thing, however, seems fairly certain – the move to a patient- centered medical home model is forging ahead.

It is this type of care – where primary care providers, other providers, patients and their families work in partnership to improve health outcomes – which we are embracing here at East Tennessee State University’s Academic Health Sciences Center.

Collaborative efforts are such an integral part of who we are here that much of this publication is dedicated to several such projects taking place in 2014. It is with great pride that we share these stories of partnership, teamwork and success.

Interprofessional education and research are emphasized at this univer-sity because we see it as the wave of the future and we know this model of overall care for patients tremendously impacts outcomes. We are preparing our graduates to become parts of collaborative care teams in order to make a difference in their professions and people’s lives.

Such collaboration, however, does not negate individual and profes-sional pride and excellence. This edition of Benchmarks also includes highlights from each of the colleges that make up our AHSC.

I hope you will spend some time reading this annual report to gain an appreciation of the amazing things happening at ETSU. We appreciate those of you who are our partners in health care. Your support of our programs and our students help us to be a better institution as we aim to serve the educational and health care needs of our region.

Wilsie S. Bishop, DPAVice President for

Health Affairs

For over 100 years, we at East Tennessee State University have been asking the question “What if?” Our university was established in 1911 based on the question, “What if there were formal training programs that prepared teachers for the public school system and what if those programs were located in Johnson City?” Over the next century, many ‘what if’ questions emerged centered on the health of our region. ‘What if’ ETSU could create a medical school that trained primary care physicians? ‘What if’ the university could have an accredited public health school; have its own four-year baccalaureate nursing program; and was home to a College of Pharmacy that was privately funded? Or, ‘What if’ we could establish a nurse-managed multidisciplinary health center that provided health care to the underserved and uninsured; and have a college that was solely dedicated to preparing students to serve in the clinical and rehabilitative health sciences?

Together, we answered those bold questions. The creation of the Aca-demic Health Sciences Center has brought distinction to East Tennessee State University and the support of our health sciences programs has helped our students realize their dreams while leading to great improve-ments in the health of the people of this region.

Brian Noland, PhDPresident

Answering bold ‘what ifs’

Answering bold ‘what ifs’

The Academic Health Sciences Center

BY THE NUMBERS5Colleges make up the AHSC

6 National ranking awarded to Quillen College of Medicine by U.S. News & World Report for the college’s rural medicine training

25Years the College of Nursing has operated its community health centers in Johnson City, Tenn. and Mountain City, Tenn.,

35 Programs of study at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels in the colleges that make up the AHSC

10 Years since the Gatton College of Pharmacy opened its doors at ETSU in 2005.

4,091Number of students

enrolled in the AHSC colleges in Fall 2014

7,000+People have participated in the Leading Voices in Public Health Lecture Series hosted annually by the College of Public Health over the last six years

2007 Year the College of Clinical and Rehabili-tative Health Sciences was formed, separating itself from the College of Public Health to become its own health sciences powerhouse

Who We Are... The Academic Health Sciences Center www.etsu.edu/ahsc • 423-439-4811

The Academic Health Sciences Center at ETSU is the flagship health sciences institution for the Tennessee Board of Regents System.

Quillen College of Medicinewww.etsu.edu/com • 423-439-6316

Founded in 1974 on a mission to increase the number of primary care physicians in rural, underserved areas, the college is annually ranked among national leaders for rural medicine.

Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy

www.etsupharmacy.com • 423-439-2068

Opening its doors in 2005, the college is a model of public-private partnership as the nation’s only privately funded school of pharmacy operating in a public institution.

College of Nursing www.etsu.edu/nursing • 423-439-7051

The largest public nursing school in Tennessee, the college officially opened in 1954 but has roots that can be traced back more than 100 years. The school also manages 12 health care clinics in the region.

College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Services

www.etsu.edu/crhs • 423-439-7454

The college is one of the most diversified in the AHSC in terms of programs. Its Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology is nationally renowned for teaching and research.

College of Public Healthwww.etsu.edu/cph • 423-439-4243

The only accredited school of public health in Tennessee, and the only one in Central Appalachia, the college also houses LIFEPATH, a federally funded public health training center for the region.

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INSIDE ETSU’s first-ever biomedical center

for research has arrived on campus

When disaster strikes: Simulated disaster brings real-world

training to students at ETSU

New fellowship program integrates pharmacy,

public health

Collaboration at the family medicine clinic

in Kingsport garners national attention

IPERC: Creating new and better ways to

teach the next generation of health professionals

An innovative program called

“The Family Checkup” is being used in the

primary care setting at ETSU

International Journal of Health Sciences

Education aims to share best practices

in health care education

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East Tennessee State University’s first-ever biomedical center for research has arrived on campus.

The Tennessee Board of Regents, on June 30, 2014, approved the university’s proposal to create the multidisciplinary research center for the study of inflamma-tion, infectious disease and immunity.

“Those have been areas of strength at this college for years, but it has been a lot of individual people working on individual projects,” said Dr. David Williams, a professor of surgery at the Quillen College of Medicine and co-director of the new center. “Science today is being done by large groups of people with different areas of expertise focused on a specific problem in society. This center will serve as a cata-lyst and a platform for doing that here.”

While many ETSU researchers within the biomedical fields have been collaborating on projects for years, the process has not been a formalized one.

“The goal is to have people with diverse backgrounds working together on this research. People from other parts of ETSU’s Academic Health Sciences Center and other parts of the university as a whole will be involved in this,”

Williams said. “You’ll have all these people under one umbrella and the center will be able to help coordinate their efforts.”

Multidisciplinary, or interprofessional, research and education are the wave of the future in health science fields, according to Dr. Robert Means, dean of the College of Medicine.

“The model for medical research going forward is going to be team-based, transla-tional research – combining basic scientists with physician scientists,” Means said. “The approval of the center will provide a structure to facilitate this mode of research so we can unite to come up with things that can improve the health of the community.”

Garnering grant funding is another import-ant reason for the creation of such a center.

“The National Institutes of Health em-phasizes multidisciplinary research,” said center co-director Dr. Jonathan Moorman, a professor of medicine at ETSU and section chief for infectious diseases at the Quillen VA Medical Center. “They expect it nowa-days, so this is really going to strengthen our opportunities for grant funding.”

That benefit, Williams noted, couldn’t come at a better time.

Multidisciplinary biomedical research center arrives at ETSU

The goal is to have

people with diverse

backgrounds working

together on this

research. People from

other parts of ETSU’s

Academic Health

Sciences Center and

other parts of the

university as a whole

will be involved in this.

You’ll have all these

people under one

umbrella and the

center will be able

to help coordinate

their efforts.

Dr. David Williams, co-director of the center

““

“To secure grant funding for research has always been difficult. However, it is harder today than it has ever been,” Williams said. “We need to gang up on this problem and work together to obtain research funding. That is the only way we will be competitive when it comes to securing grant money.”

It is also a way for the College of Medicine, and the university as a whole, to stay competitive in attracting quality students to study at ETSU, Williams said.

“There are a lot of multidisciplinary centers in the state, but very few are biomedically oriented,” he explained. “We’ll be educat-ing residents, graduate students, medical students and post-doctoral fellows. We’ll be providing them with formal training that will help advance their education and

ultimately their careers. Our goal is to attract the best and brightest people to work in the center.”

Both Williams and Moorman trained in similar multidisciplinary research centers and have continued to focus on collabora-tive and interdisciplinary research in their respective careers. Means, who has a long track record as a federally funded investiga-tor, was involved with a similar translational science center at the University of Kentucky prior to taking on his role as an ETSU dean early last year.

“We know it’s a model that works and there’s a very strong foundation for it here,” Williams said. “We already have had widespread interest in the center.”

Multidisciplinary biomedical research center arrives at ETSU

Williams and Moorman will spend about a year establishing the identity of the center, organizing the administrative arm of it, inviting faculty to join and determining how the center will be structured and governed.

While the center is just in the beginning stages, its co-directors are confident in its future success at ETSU and the impact work being done there will have on the world of health.

“The center is going to provide state-of- the-art research into diseases that affect people right here in the region and all over the world,” Moorman said. “What we are studying, this is at the core of most human disease.”

Dr. David Williams, left, and Dr. Jonathan Moorman

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In March 2014, students participated in a simulated third-world disaster during the Valleybrook Refugee Experience at ETSU’s Valleybrook campus in Kingsport.

The event was organized in part by ETSU public health associate professor Mike Stoots, who wanted to challenge his stu-dents in a real-world, low-resource setting.

“We’re trying to get our students to think about that and how they can apply their training and skill sets in those areas where you may not have everything we have here to work it,” Stoots said.

Public health graduate Dawn Sharp said the lessons taught in the simulation can apply to certain domestic situations as well, like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In the March situation, students were told they needed to set up a refugee camp. In an effort to make the simulation as realistic as possible, Stoots said he offered participants almost no instruction on how to proceed.

“I told them, ‘you need to create a refugee camp for 50 people, and you’re going to find the resources you have here’ ... and I stopped talking,” Stoots said. “They were waiting for the instructions, but that was it.”

Stoots did provide students with a tent full of supplies. He did not assign them to anyone in particular, though, nor did he tell them how they should be used. He told students to “get what you can use and go.”

Before those tools were selected, the stu-dents conducted a brainstorming session to determine which of them would handle which tasks, like digging sanitation ditches or setting up the field hospital. That type of independent action, Stoots said, was what he and other faculty wanted them to experience.

“The real learning is the strategic planning, the teamwork, how to prioritize (and) how to think on your feet,” Stoots said. “Those are all things researchers and employers are telling us they want to hire. They want people with training, with skill sets, but they have to have good planning skills and great teamwork. “That’s what we’re really shooting for out here.”

Students also needed to prepare for unex-pected events. Throughout the day, “refu-gees” — portrayed by students and other parties — arrived at the camp, with their own problems. Some characters had ma-laria, some had dysentery, and some were children whose parents had gone missing.

“Throughout the day, as they prepare the camp, there are different situations that are occurring,” Stoots said. “We had an entrapment under a tree where they had to extricate a young lady. We had one of our refugees come in early and deliver a child.”

Despite the surprises, Stoots expected his students were capable of handling them. Even if they weren’t capable, however, the situations may have still proven useful.

“You don’t learn until you fail in a lot of situations in real life,” Sharp said. “Out here, we do want to fail, because we learn how to pick up from that failure and make it right.”

What may prove to be the most important lesson, however, is the collaborative effort between students. For Wilsie Bishop, vice president for the health affairs department and chief operating officer for ETSU, the event’s focus on teamwork will help carry the students forward.

“We know that when they graduate and have to go out in the real world, they’re going to have to work in teams,” Bishop said. “They’re going to face crises that are unexpected. They’re going to have to determine who has what role and how you work together.”

Disaster drill gives ETSU students real-world testDisaster drill gives ETSU students real-world test

Refugee simulation.Editor’s note: This story was written by Max Hrenda with the Johnson City Press. It and the accompanying photo are reprinted with permission from the Johnson City Press. The story has been edited for length.

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Inaugural fellows entrenched in research, more

Left to right: Dr. Daniel Ventricelli, Dr. Nick Hagemeier, Dr. Rajkumar Sevak

It is the multidisciplinary research related to prescription drug abuse that initially drew Sevak to the fellowship.

In India, while receiving his bachelor’s degree in pharmacy and master’s in phar-macology, Sevak was fascinated by how drugs impact the brain and behavior. He conducted nationally recognized re-search on abuse of stimulants during his doctoral and postdoctoral training. As a fac-ulty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, Sevak further expanded his research on stimulants prescribed in clinics and the abuse of those drugs on the streets.

When he discovered the team effort taking place with ETSU’s Academic Health Scienc-es Center to study prescription drug abuse, he quickly applied for the fellowship.

“This is so unique. Pharmacists and public health researchers have come together at ETSU and brought all of their expertise to the table,” Sevak said. “Pharmacy and public health professors joining forces to combat prescription drug abuse is rare, and that creates a fertile ground for research.”

For Ventricelli, becoming a pharmacy fellow wasn’t really in his plans, but he, too, was intrigued by the program at ETSU.

“I started looking into faculty positions and that’s when I found the fellowship,” he said. “I had no intention of taking on more training, but I couldn’t say no to this opportunity.”

Ventricelli got his pharmacy degree at the University of Connecticut before going to West Virginia University to complete his residency in community pharmacy. It was there, he said, that he realized the bigger picture.

“I worked with an addictions unit at an area hospital. I was really able to connect with the patients, who were struggling with this problem,” he said. “They had great care there, but I know that’s not the case everywhere. That killed me. I want to be able to do more and help as many people as I can.”

Soon, Ventricelli and Sevak will likely be able to do just that.

“Through this program, we’ll have expertise in many different areas of pharmacy practice,” Ventricelli said. “I have no doubt that this experience will allow us to have a major impact on the growing problem of prescription drug abuse as well as other future endeavors.”

As the first two fellows ever at East Tennessee State University’s Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy, Dr. Daniel Ventricelli and Dr. Rajkumar Sevak are setting the bar high for themselves – and for future participants in the new fellowship program.

Established in 2014, the Community Phar-macy Practice Research Fellowship is a two- to three-year training program that empha-sizes practice-based research, particularly in the realm of prescription drug abuse.

“This is a great way to bridge community pharmacy practice and research,” said Dr. Nick Hagemeier, assistant professor with the College of Pharmacy and mentor for the fellows. “Our profession offers multiple training paths, including clinical paths found in residencies and research paths in graduate programs. This fellowship is a path that combines those two areas.”

As the industry transitions to focus more on quality and answering broader questions about population health, Hagemeier said, the focus in research has become more and more valuable.

The community pharmacy fellowship program is one of only four such programs in the United States.

“It is definitely unique,” Hagemeier said. “And even more so given the emphasis on prescription drug abuse.”

In addition to being deeply entrenched in the university’s federally funded prescription drug abuse research, the intensive program offers each fellow the opportunity to earn a master’s degree in public health through ETSU’s College of Public Health as well as a teaching and learning certificate through the College of Pharmacy. They also do clinical work at the ETSU Charitable Pharmacy inside the John-son City Community Health Center, a clinic managed by ETSU’s College of Nursing.

“That’s why we offer the fellowship over either two or three years,” Hagemeier said. “It gets really intense when you’re trying to learn research, complete a master’s program, do clinical work and teach.”

Blackwelder Cross collaborate in family medicine clinicWhen Brian Cross, PharmD, first went to work for the Indian Health Service (IHS) on the San Carlos Apache Reserva-tion in eastern Arizona in 1991, he believed that the physician-pharmacist collabora-tion that he encountered there – a model pioneered by the IHS and a handful of other federal agencies and private health care systems – was common across the country.

“As you can imagine,” Cross told Pharmacy Today, “I was alarmed to find out that this was not the way it was done almost any-where else in the United States, other than the closed-loop systems such as Kaiser Permanente, Intermountain Health and the Veterans Health Administration.”

Three years later, his next career stop was at a small VA ambulatory care facility in north-central Florida where he oversaw the cardiovascular risk reduction clinics and had full prescribing privileges in collaboration with cardiologists and an internist.

It was around that time that Cross vowed to himself that whatever professional changes came later, “I wouldn’t do anything that didn’t allow me to practice like this.”

Three primary care clinicsHe kept his word. Today, Cross is a phar-macotherapy specialist with East Tennes-see State University Family Physicians of Kingsport, TN, and Associate Professor in the Departments of Pharmacy Practice and Family Medicine at ETSU’s Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy and James H. Quillen College of Medicine in Johnson City, TN.

The ETSU Family Physicians run three separate comprehensive primary care clinics that provide community-focused medical education as well as patient-cen-

tered care for the medically underserved population of rural southern Appalachia. Besides the Kingsport clinic, where Cross practices, the others are in Johnson City and Bristol, TN.

Working with American Academy of Family Physicians President Reid Blackwelder, MD, Professor of Family Medicine and Director of Medical Student Education at ETSU’s James H. Quillen College of Medicine in Johnson City, as well as other medical team members, Cross has not only been able to practice his vision of collaborative primary care, but also to help pass on that vision to scores of young pharmacists, physicians, and nurses at ETSU.

Blackwelder told Pharmacy Today that the clinics have worked hard to foster a collabo-rative culture “where everybody has a voice.

We’re all there to make sure our patients get the best outcomes,” he said.

The Family Physicians clinic at Kingsport has approximately 12,000 to 13,000 patient visits a year, Blackwelder said. They include individuals of all ages – “from cradle to grave” is the way he put it. Many of them have multiple chronic conditions, including diabetes, heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). And most are on complex medication regimens.

Typical weekdayOn a typical weekday, an average of about 55 patients arrive for appointments at the Kingsport clinic. Each is triaged by a nurse to a team that occupies one of the clinic’s five suites, each with three to four examination rooms. The team typical-ly includes a faculty physician, family medicine resident and medical students, as well as a faculty clinical pharmacist, student pharmacists, and a postgraduate year (PGY)2 ambulatory pharmacy resident rotating through the service. Patients with mental health or other personal or family issues have access to a psychologist and licensed clinical social worker. The clinic also performs routine laboratory tests and performs minor procedures including excisions, casting of fractures and nasolaryngoscopies.

When Blackwelder sees patients, he said he often includes student pharmacists in the discussions. “They are there learning about clinic flow,” he said, “but the expec-tation is that they are not just shadowing. They are part of the team. We encourage them to make suggestions about medication adherence and about specific medications.”

Cross said the comments that the ambulatory care residents and student pharmacists make after rotating through

An official publication of the American Pharmacists Association

OCTOBER 2014

HEARTHEALTHNew guidelines, novel agent

TREATING INSOMNIAFirst drug in class

SPECIALTYPHARMACYSECTION

FAMILYMEDICINE

BLACKWELDER and CROSS TEAM UP

New therapeutic agents marketed in 2014: Part 1

OCTOBER IS...

NE_10_Cover.indd 1 9/25/2014 10:36:35 AM

&

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared as the cover story in the October 2014 issue of Pharmacy Today, a national publication of the American Pharmacists Association. It is written by Bruce Buckley. Photos are by Lucas Alvarado. Copyright American Pharmacists Association (APhA). Reprinted by permission of APhA.

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the clinic show that they “are struck by the true integration that we have been able to accomplish.”

“On any given day,” he said, “we’ll have three or four medical residents in clinic, and at least a couple of those will have their own pharmacy student or pharmacy resident. I act as a sort of pharmacy attending, if you will. We take them into the room as a team. Sometimes the pharmacy student or resident will go in for a preliminary patient interview and medication review. They come out and briefly discuss their findings with the medical resident, identifying the medication problems they’ve uncovered. That allows the resident to have a much more efficient and effective visit with the patient. Often the pharmacy resident or student will join the resident during the visit.”

“I think it’s an area of mutual respect,” Cross said. “If there is one thing I would say is that if this is going to work, it is all about relationships, and egos being off the table.”

Sustaining team-based careOne of the biggest obstacles to establishing more universal pharmacist-physician collaborative practices, Cross said, is the inadequate reimbursement system currently in place in the United States.

Without the financial support that institutions like ETSU provide, he said it would be difficult to sustain this type of team-based care. He believes strongly that the reimbursement focus should not be on achieving individual provider payments but on creating a system in which payments are based on the care that teams provide, with payments within the team commensurate with the contributions of individual members.

“If where we’re going as a model is a team-based approach,” he said, “then as a profession we need to be aligning much more with models that will reimburse teams, not individuals.”

As for research demonstrating the benefits of pharmacist-physician team care, Cross said that a proposal had been submitted to the ETSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) to study outcomes at ETSU Family Physicians’ Interprofessional Transitions of Care (IPTC) clinic in Kingsport. This service works to improve care during the difficult time of transition from the acute care setting back to the ambulatory setting after discharge from the hospital. The clinic, established some 8 months ago, is staffed by third-year family medicine residents, a clinical pharmacy faculty, a social worker, an attending physician, and sometimes a PGY2 pharmacy resident in ambulatory care. It provides a unique

Encouraging interdisciplinary collaborationFor the past 3 years or so, Blackwelder and Cross have taught a series of 2- to 3-hour educational lessons to small groups of third-year ETSU medical students during their family medicine rotations. Often they are joined by fourth-year student pharmacists on their ambulatory or acute care rotations with family medicine.

The students are broken into small groups, each with two to three medical students at a table with a single student pharmacist. They are presented with a case involving a patient with multiple cardiovascular risk factors, and each group is asked to use evi-dence-based analysis to create and defend a course of action intended to lower at least one of the patient’s risks.

The “fun part,” said Cross, is watching the lively dynamic that develops within the

individual groups and among the different groups. Blackwelder and Cross use that de-bate, Cross said, “to show that in medicine it is much more about the ability to answer the ‘why’ question than the ‘what’ question.”

He said the lectures have proven to be a valuable way to demonstrate the effectiveness of blending the medical students’ diagnos-tic training with the student pharmacists’ knowledge about “crafting unique therapies for specific patients.”

Blackwelder said that the third-year students routinely see this as one of their favorite lectures in medical school.

“The question,” said Cross, “is how can we ramp this up so that more people do this consistently in the medical and pharmacy schools’ curricula.”

educational setting wherein the family medicine residents-in-training can be part of a clinical care team that will hopefully change their thought of what ambulatory medical practice should look like in the future.

Cross said, “We’re going to be measuring patient and provider satisfaction, readmis-sion rates and outcomes such as worsening heart failure, numbers of medications, costs of care – those kinds of things.”

“Hopefully, I’ll have more to tell you about that in a couple of years,” he added.

Long way to goDespite the advances that collaborative practice has made since Cross began his career more than 2 decades ago, he believes there is still a long way to go. “What we have done is craft these little niches where we have been able to make some signifi-cant impact. The problem is it needs to be scalable,” he said.

“Quite some time ago I said I did not want to get to the end of my career and look back as if the whole thing was a demonstration project.” His hope, he added, is that 10 years from now practice will have evolved to the point that if the students he teaches want to pursue a career in collaborative care in the ambulatory setting, “the oppor-tunity will be there for them.”

At East Tennessee State University, Reid Blackwelder, MD, and Brian Cross, PharmD, have developed an effective way to counter the silo mentality and egos that so often hamper interdisciplinary collabo-ration: start at the grassroots. Put medical and pharmacist students together in the same lecture room, and challenge them to jointly tackle a medical treatment puzzle.

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future health care professionals to learn in an interdisciplinary setting.

“We want to educate students in a way that, no matter which health field they are in, they will understand their own role as well as the roles of other health professionals involved in someone’s treatment,” said Dr. Wilsie Bishop, ETSU’s vice president for health affairs. “We want each profession to communicate and work with each other to develop a plan of treatment for a patient. We don’t want patients to even notice where one professional’s role ends and another health care provider’s role picks up. It should be seamless.”

Last year, Baker was named chair of ETSU’s Interprofessional Education and Research Committee (IPERC), a group of 20 individuals tasked with finding the best ways to develop and foster opportunities for students, particularly those in the Academic Health Sciences Center, to learn in an interprofessional setting.

Formerly known as the Interprofessional Education Committee (IPEC), the committee name changed to include the word research, emphasizing interdisciplinary experience at all levels and in all situations.

“Team-based learning works best when it’s in a real-world, hands-on setting,” Baker said. “While students are working on research or in a scenario-based case study, they are learning from one another.”

Baker is hopeful the move toward interpro-fessional research will open up the university for new grant opportunities, too.

The goal of offering interprofessional learn-ing is not particularly new for ETSU. In 2012, the university launched a pilot program in which approximately 110 students have participated to date.

Taking part on a voluntary basis, the first cohort of students participated in interdisci-plinary courses and activities that culminat-ed with a full-scale simulation in March 2014 – a staged, third-world disaster that required

the students to work together to help refugees arriving at the simulated camp.

“That capstone event was transformation-al,” Baker said. “It certainly illustrated our strengths in interprofessional education at ETSU, but it also showed us some areas where there is room for improvement.”

The plan to create a health sciences center focused on interprofessional education and research doesn’t come without challenges, Baker noted.

Engaging faculty from all five colleges and providing them with opportunities for professional development, for example, are some of the first tasks, she said.

“It’s not second nature to know how to teach this or to work with people outside of your silos,” she explained. “The challenges we face also include scaling up to the point that all of our graduate and professional students go through the program. You are talking about as many as 450 students going through it each year.”

The other challenge, Baker said, is something she refers to as “the dosage issue.”

“We want to create a program that provides sufficient time and space for as many students as possible to acquire skill in the four core competencies for collaborative practice – values and ethics, roles and responsibilities, interprofessional communi-cation, and teams and teamwork,” she said.

Baker and four other committee members – Dr. Reid Blackwelder with the College of Medicine, Dr. Brian Cross with the College of Pharmacy, Dr. Ken Tillman with the College of Nursing and Dr. Kerry Proctor-Williams with the College of Clinical and Rehabilita-tive Health Sciences – traveled to Washing-ton D.C. in the fall for intensive training on interprofessional education.

“I’m excited to bring back what we learned there and apply it to us here at ETSU,” Baker said. “I’m committed to the longevity of this program. I think it will make a big impact on health care in our region.”

Interprofessional focus aims to change the way health care is administered

As the health care landscape changes across the nation, leaders at East Tennessee State University’s Academic Health Sciences Center are working to create new and better ways to teach the next generation of health professionals.

“Traditionally, students in our medical school, college of nursing and the other health sciences go through their learning autonomously. They went through their academic programs with few opportunities for team-based learning,” said Dr. Katie Baker, one of the university’s leading forces behind the educational changes and an assistant professor in the College of Public Health. “We are learning that, as health professionals, we can no longer function in silos. Not only is it inefficient and costly, but we’re not meeting the needs of our patients. So we want to be purposeful about training together in health care teams.”

Many leaders within the ETSU health sci-ences colleges believe that is the direction the health care industry is headed, making it not only important, but essential, for

Dr. Katie Baker

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The Family Checkup:Researchers introduce behavior intervention program within clinic

n innovative program called “The Family Checkup” is being used by mental health experts to help parents address behavior problems in children. This assessment and intervention project brings together nearly 10 years of evidence-based research and it is designed to be implemented over the course of just two sessions.

Up until now, the program has only been used within schools, but researchers at East Tennessee State University are interested in seeing how “The Family Checkup” will be received within the primary care setting.

Dr. Jodi Polaha, an associate professor of psychology, is part of a team at ETSU that is piloting this new study, which is being conducted at the ETSU Physicians and Associates – Pediatrics clinic.

“‘The Family Checkup’ has proven to be a great resource for helping parents deal with issues such as aggression, defiance, acting out or disobedience by using best-practice approaches,” Polaha said. “The sessions are led by a behavior health specialist, who works with the parents to identify what they perceive as their strengths and weaknesses, and then uses that assessment to develop a plan for addressing the behavior.

“And, research has shown that we are able to give parents the tools they need in only a

couple of sessions,” she said. “This is a tremendous advantage, because there are other therapeutic approaches that span several weeks and many sessions. That puts time demands on parents, and they may not be able to attend all of the sessions.”

“‘The Family Checkup’ has worked well in school systems because teachers were able to identify students that might benefit from the program and then refer parents to the mental health specialist,” said Dr. Karen Schetzina, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Quillen College of Medicine and co-investigator of the project. “But we also think this program would work very well in the primary care setting, where these behaviors often surface.”

A recent study conducted by the researchers found that approximately 25 percent of patients in one pediatrics clinic demonstrated “clinically significant psychological concerns.”

“The family pediatrician is a person the parents trust,” Schetzina added. “They see that person often, especially during the first five years of the child’s life, and they often turn to the pediatrician for guidance on how to deal with these behavior problems.”

In this new study, doctors at ETSU Physicians and Associates – Pediatrics will learn about “The Family Checkup,” recommend the program to parents as needed and arrange a referral with a behavioral health care specialist.

“Our ultimate goal for this study is to see how well the program is received when the referral is made by a pediatrician,” Polaha said.

Helping children address psychological concerns at an early age can prevent further and possibly more serious problems during adolescence, added Dr. Katie Baker,

an assistant professor of community and behavioral health in ETSU’s College of Public Health.

“Data clearly show that antisocial behaviors that go untreated are likely to only get worse and put the child at risk for other problems, such as substance abuse,” said Baker, who is also part of the study.

Polaha says she is very pleased with the interprofessional approach of the study and by the training opportunities it will provide to students and medical residents at ETSU. The faculty members will supervise the study while the screenings, assessments and data collection will be done by graduate students in clinical psychology and public health and by medical students and residents.

She added that this is one of a number of new initiatives at ETSU Physicians and Associates – Pediatrics designed to en-hance well-child visits for children in the practice.

For more information, call 423-439-4614.

The Family Checkup:Researchers introduce behavior intervention program within clinic

AA

Drs. Karen Schetzina, left, Jodi Polaha, center, and Katie Baker, right.

9

Last spring, East Tennessee State University researchers received a grant from the Tennessee Board of Regents to study osteoporosis risk in men.

The team is led by Dr. Ronald Hamdy from the Quillen College of Medicine and also includes Dr. Arsham Alamian and Dr. Shimin Zheng from the College of Public Health and Dr. W. Andrew Clark from the College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences.

The researchers are evaluating the usefulness of assessing the bone mineral density at various parts of the distal radius in the wrist, compared to the con-ventional sites, to identify male patients age 50 or older at risk for osteoporosis.

Current guidelines recommend scanning both the hips and lumbar vertebrae to make a diagnosis of osteoporosis and to use the distal radius only when the other sites cannot be scanned because of such factors as limited mobility of the patient, deformities, pain or mental impairment. The investigators are trying to deter-mine whether any parts of the radius bone in the forearm could be used to diagnose men at risk for osteoporosis.

Hamdy is professor of internal medicine and holder of the Cecile Cox Quillen Chair of Excellence in Geriatric Medicine at the College of Medicine. Alamian is assistant professor of epidemiology, and Zheng is assistant professor of biostatistics, both in the Department of Biostatistics and Epide-miology. Clark is professor of clinical nutrition and associate dean of research and clinical practice in the Department of Allied Health Sciences.

“Dr. Ron Hamdy is an internationally respected expert in geriatric medicine, and I am pleased that our researchers have the opportunity both to work with him and to support his work,” said Dr. Randy Wykoff, dean of the College of Public Health at ETSU. “This is an important opportunity to advance interprofessional research in our region while addressing an important health question.”

Dr. Nick HagemeierDr. Ivy Click

Study tofocus on osteoporosis in menResearchers

surveying providers

about NASfor cohorts of primary care physicians and Suboxone® prescribers.”

The researchers say that statistically babies who are born with NAS endure longer hospital stays and are at risk for developmental delays as well as other health concerns. The average health care cost associated with a child born with NAS is approximately $66,000.

Both Hagemeier and Click are actively involved in other research studies at ETSU related to prescription drug abuse. Hagemeier is a co-investigator on a $2.3 million study at ETSU funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse on communication behaviors among health care providers who prescribe drugs, the pharmacists who dispense them, and the patients who receive them. He is also leading a project to develop and test assessments that can be used to evaluate and strengthen health care providers’ communication behaviors specific to prescription drug abuse.

Click is a co-investigator on a project funded by the American Academy of Family Physicians Foundation using data from focus groups to develop a survey that would measure attitudes and methods among family physicians for prescribing opioid pain relievers in an effective and responsible manner.

For this new project, the researchers are collaborating with the Appalachian Research Network (AppNET), which is comprised of several rural primary care practices in East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. Click serves as research director for AppNET.

The incidence of neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) – a series of with-drawal symptoms that can occur in a newborn who was exposed to addictive illegal or prescription drugs while in the mother’s womb – is on the rise in Tennessee, say researchers at East Tennessee State University.

“It has become an epidemic across the state,” says Dr. Ivy Click, an assistant professor of Family Medicine at ETSU’s Quillen College of Medicine. “We’re talking about a tenfold increase in the Volunteer State over the past decade, and here in the eastern region, the numbers are higher than anywhere else in the state.”

Click and Dr. Nick Hagemeier from ETSU’s Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy are leading a study that aims to better understand the knowledge, beliefs and practices of health care providers and pharmacists regarding NAS. The one-year study is funded by the Tennessee Department of Health.

As part of the study, Hagemeier and Click initiated surveys with four groups of individuals – community pharmacists, pain clinic directors, rural family medicine physicians and health care providers who prescribe the medication Suboxone®, which is used to help treat opiate addiction.

“Our ultimate goal is to know which interventions are best when it comes to educating providers about NAS,” said Hagemeier, an assistant professor of Pharmacy Practice. “We will also pilot test an educational outreach program about NAS that will be led by a physician

10

Colleges of nursing, pharmacy partner to open charitable pharmacy

The FIRST-EVER drug take back event on the East Tennessee State University campus took place in September 2014. Students, staff and faculty members were invited to bring their unused, unwanted or expired medications to the drop off location at the ETSU Farmer’s Market. Everything collected – some 50 pounds of pills, liquids, bottles and labels – was incinerated as a part of the process. The event was part of a larger National DEA Take Back Day. Dr. Jeffrey Gray, an ETSU researcher in the Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy, partnered with law enforcement and community coalitions to host several take back sites in the region. The partnership was facilitated in part by the university’s $2.3 million grant garnered in 2013 by Dr. Rob Pack, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of community and behavioral health in the College of Public Health, to study prescription drug abuse. Pictured in the photo are Gray, far left, and Pack, second from left, with pharmacy students at the drug take back event.

Dispensary of Hope in Nashville, a national non-profit organization, to distribute medications at no cost to qualifying patients. The national organization receives the medications through donations from pharmaceuti-cal companies and doctors’ offices then sends them out to their affiliate pharma-cies and clinic sites to be dispensed.

“This service is a natural fit with the Johnson City Community Health Center and with ETSU’s Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy,” said Silas Tolan, executive director of ETSU’s community health centers. “We’re happy that we can provide these services in a location that’s very convenient for our patients. Rather than sending them out the door with a prescription and just hoping they’ll get it filled, now we’ll be able to fill most of those medications right here in the community health center.”

Others who are not patients of the JCCHC are also be able to fill their prescriptions there if they meet the qualifications.

Last year, East Tennessee State University began its management of the newly relocated and renamed ETSU Charitable Pharmacy, formerly known as the Northeast Tennessee Dispensary of Hope. It is operated by ETSU through a partnership between the College of Nursing’s Johnson City Community Health Center (JCCHC) and the Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy.

ETSU has been involved with the Northeast Tennessee Dispensary of Hope since it was founded by Mountain States Health Alliance in 2009 as the local affiliate of the national Dispensary of Hope, which is based in Nashville. Mountain States handed over manage-ment of the charitable pharmacy for underserved residents to ETSU in August 2014, at which time the pharmacy moved to the JCCHC.

The facility operation is managed by faculty from the College of Pharmacy.

The ETSU Charitable Pharmacy continues to partner with the

Interprofessional group researching metabolic profile of at-risk population

An interprofessional faculty group at East Tennessee State University has received a grant from the Tennessee Board of Regents to characterize the metabolic profile of an Hispanic at-risk pediatric population in Northeast Tennessee.

The team includes Dr. W. Andrew Clark from the Department of Allied Health Sciences; Dr. Geri Sokell, Department of Physical Therapy; Dr. Arsham Alamian and Shimin Zheng, Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology; and Dr. Jonathan Peterson and Dr. Effiong Otukonyong, Department of Health Sciences. Clark is the principal investigator for the grant.

Through the grant, the research team is working to identify key and emerging hormones and biomarkers that help predict children at risk for metabolic syndrome, which is a group of factors that increase the long-term possibilities for heart disease, diabetes and stroke.

“This research work has never been conducted in Tennessee and will provide important baseline data that can be used for future investigations,” said Alamian, who leads a Pediatric Metabolic Syndrome Working Group at Johnson City Community Health Center.

This grant makes use of plasma samples and information already planned for collection (from previously awarded grants) from 150 Hispanic children ages 2 to 10. The aim of the project is to evaluate markers of insulin resistance, appetite deregulation and chronic inflammation. Investigators will test differences in the levels of selected key emerging hormones in children with and without metabolic syndrome.

FIRST-EVERdrug take back event hosted on ETSU campus

11

EYE ON THE FUTURE:

Leaders hope new microscope means more

research funding

Two faculty members co-author book chapter on depression, suicide

Peer-reviewed journal at ETSU shines spotlight on health sciences education

“We have seen a number of people submit articles,” Nehring said. “The most popular articles, by far, are the simulation-based articles. In the United States, simulation is understood now to be a part of the curric-ulum.”

The concept of interprofessional education is also becoming synonymous with teaching in the health sciences fields. That, Nehring said, is why the editors have planned a special issue to showcase such work being done at ETSU.

“This university has had an emphasis on in-terprofessional education in health sciences since the 1990s,” she said. “Even without its growth on the national level, we would have continued to grow in this area because we know its impact on the care provided to patients.”

Dr. Jacek Smurzynki, a professor in the ETSU College of Clinical and Rehabilita-tive Health Sciences, and Lisa Haddad, an assistant professor in the ETSU College of Nursing, are also editors of the journal. To view the journal, visit http://dc.etsu.edu/ijhse/.

THE International Journal of Health Sciences Education is still new to the pro-fessional publications scene, but that hasn’t stopped leaders at ETSU from recognizing and promoting its value both locally and worldwide.

The peer-reviewed academic journal launched by ETSU in October 2013 serves as a platform for sharing the best practices and latest technologies in health care educa-tion around the globe.

“We felt it was very important to talk about how we teach the health sciences,” said Dr. Wendy Nehring, dean of the ETSU College of Nursing and one of three editors for the publication. “There are a number of schol-arly journals devoted to health care practice and research, and we saw a need for a pub-lication that focuses specifically on how we teach students in the health professions.”

Available online, three issues of the journal have published so far with a special edition focused on interprofessional training at ETSU set to come out in summer 2015.

The editors seek submissions from all aca-demic institutions and health care facilities where experts share best practices used to instruct students or patients.

East Tennessee State University’s Quillen College of Medicine has a new tool that leaders hope ultimately will result in additional research funding for the university as a whole.

The $350,000 state-of-the-art confocal microscope arrived at the medical school’s Microscopy Core facility in November 2014.

“There’s not another one around here. Probably the next closest one of these is at Duke (University),” said Dr. Don Hoover, director of the Microscopy Core in the Biomedical Sciences Department. “It lets us do things we couldn’t do before. It gives us new ways to collect some detailed informa-tion about how cells are functioning.”

The top-of-the-line microscope replaces the facility’s previous confocal microscope that the university garnered through a grant more than a decade ago.

“Ours was really on its last legs and it was extremely slow,” Hoover said. “This new one can do things really fast.”

Hoover said he hopes the presence of the new microscope will serve as a catalyst for garnering more research money from funding agencies.

“Having this tool tells the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies that ETSU is serious about its research,” he said. “They are going to take notice.”

While housed at the College of Medicine, the microscope is available for use by all researchers at ETSU.

Two ETSU faculty members co-authored a chapter for a text book on depression and suicide.

Dr. Michelle Chandley, a professor in the Department of Health Sciences in the College of Public Health, and Dr. Greg Ordway, a professor in the Department of Medical Sciences in the Quillen College of Medicine, wrote the chapter titled, “The noradrenergic system in depression and suicide” for the book, Concise Guide

to Understanding Suicide: Epidemiology, Pathophysiology and Prevention.

The book was published in 2014 by Cam-bridge University Press.

The chapter written by Chandley and Ordway was created to summarize the information currently known about the role of the neurotransmitter known as norepi-nephrine in the pathology and treatment of depressive disorders that lead to suicide.

55Pictured: Zac Walls with the ETSU Gatton College of Pharmacy looks into the new microscope as Rolf Fritz, lab coordinator, looks on. In background, Sean Stacey, a PhD student.

12

• Nation’s only privately funded pharmacy school in a state institution • Admits 80 students per year and has a 97.5 percent graduation rate

• PGY2 residencies in ambulatory care and internal medicine

• 72 percent of students are from Southern Appalachian region

College of Pharmacy

• Largest college of nursing in Tennessee with more than 1,100 students

• Runs 12 nurse-managed clinics, including the federally funded Johnson City Community Health Center

• Officially began in 1954, but ETSU has been training area nurses since it opened in 1911 • Leader in nursing education at bachelor, master’s and doctoral levels

College of Nursing

• Offers programs that address workforce shortage issues

• Over 10,000 visits annually to dental hygiene, speech-language pathology and autism clinics • Growing presence in the Johnson City Community Health Center

• Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology is nationally renowned for teaching and research

College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences

• More than 1,800 graduates, 50 percent of whom practice in Tennessee

• 38,000 patient encounters per month

• Admits 72 medical students annually

• 14 residency programs and a Family Medicine Rural Fellowship

College of MedicineEast Tennessee State

University is the flag-

ship health sciences

institution for the

Tennessee Board of

Regents System,

offering more than 25

programs of study at

the undergraduate and

graduate levels as well

as 10 at the doctoral

level, and accredited

residency training

programs in the

colleges of medicine

and pharmacy. The fac-

ulty and students that

make up the Academic

Health Sciences Center

conduct research to

better understand

health issues specific

to rural areas and are

forming partnerships

with local residents

to work with them to

identify and address

health concerns in our

own communities.

See back page for degrees

55Colleges make up the AHSC

• Only currently accredited college of public health in Tennessee

• Attracts students from across Tennessee, 44 states and 39 countries in the past few years

• Houses the Tennessee Institute of Public Health, which releases the County Health Rankings each year

• Actively involved with State Department of Health to better understand population health in the region and state

College of Public Health

13

Means named new dean of Quillen College of Medicine

A graduate of Rice University, Means earned his medical degree from Vanderbilt University and completed an internal medicine residency at Baylor College of Medicine before returning to Vanderbilt for a hematology fellowship.

He remained at Vanderbilt as an assistant professor in the hematology division before being recruited by the University of Cincinnati in 1992 to become associate professor of medicine and director of the diagnostic hematology laboratory, as well as associate chief of the hematology/oncology section at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center.

In 1998, he joined the Medical University of South Carolina faculty as professor of internal medicine, associate director of the hematology/oncology division, and chief of the hematology/oncology section at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center. He became director of the hematology/ oncology division in 2000, serving until his recruitment to University of Kentucky.

UK named Means as associate chair for research in the Department of Internal Medicine in 2004 when he also became chief of the medical service at Lexington VA Medical Center. He was later appointed interim director of the Markey Cancer Center from 2006-2009 and senior associate chair of the Department of Internal Medicine from 2007-2011. UK promoted him to executive vice dean in 2011, and he was named executive dean in 2012.

Means gained significant attention in the research arena for his work on the patho-genesis of the anemia of chronic diseases. His studies have received funding support from several federal and national agencies. He is the author of more than 120 original scientific reports, invited commentaries or editorials, review articles and book chapters. He is an editor of the 12th and 13th editions of Wintrobe’s Clinical Hematology and of a textbook on nutritional anemia. He serves on the editorial boards of several medical journals and has served on several research review panels for the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“Although the Quillen College of Medicine is a young institution as medical schools go, it has already achieved a national reputation in a number of areas, including rural med-icine and primary care,” Means said at the time of his hiring. “I am honored and excited to have been chosen as the next dean. I look forward to working with the faculty, students, university leaders, our clinical partners and the community to achieve greater excellence in the missions of education, service and scholarship.”

In addition to serving as dean, Means is president of the Medical Education Assistance Corporation, which oversees Quillen ETSU Physicians and other clinical services for the College of Medicine.

Dr. Robert T. Means Jr., became dean of the Quillen College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University in March 2014. He succeeded Dr. Philip Bagnell, who retired in 2013 after serving in the role since 2006.

Means, who is board certified in internal medicine and hematology, came to ETSU from the University of Kentucky where he served as executive dean and professor of internal medicine and was a member of the hematology and blood and marrow transplant division. He is also a fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Dr. Robert T. Means, Jr.

The rankings from U.S.News & World Report released in spring 2014 found East Tennessee State University listed among the top schools in rural medicine.

The 2015 “America’s Best Graduate Schools” edition ranked ETSU’s Quillen College of Medicine sixth in the nation for rural medicine training. The school tied

for sixth place with the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

“The Quillen College was founded 40 years ago… and was created with the mission to train primary care physicians who would serve in rural, underserved areas,” said Dr. Robert Means, ETSU dean of medicine. “This school has held true to that mission ever since,

and this continued recognition by U.S.News demonstrates that we have emerged as one of the nation’s top schools for rural medicine.”

The rankings are based on surveys sent to academic experts in various fields. Quillen College of Medicine is consistently ranked among the nation’s best for rural medicine education by the U.S. News & World Report.

Quillen ranked 6th

in nation for rural medicine training

14

College of Medicine

Goodkin brings HIV/AIDS expertise to ETSU

Dr. Karl Goodkin

Last fall, Dr. Karl Goodkin became the chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Quillen College of Medicine.

Previously, he worked in Los Angeles as the director of mental health at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. He also has served as professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles and at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where he was the director of clinical research for several years.

Goodkin has an extensive background in HIV/AIDS research as it relates to mental health and looks forward to continuing his work in a multidisciplinary setting.

“I saw that there was already interest at ETSU in my specialty area of HIV – as the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic has evolved beyond the epicenter model – and in multidisciplinary research as has always been my interest,” he said.

Goodkin received his medical degree from the University of Miami and was trained in psychiatry at Stanford University. He is excited about pushing for a model of health care in which psychiatry and pri-mary medical care operate side by side.

“I want to take psychiatry from being viewed as a separate and distinct specialty unrelated to primary health care and put it right back in there,” he said. “There is no health without mental health.”

Quillen celebrates yearsThe Quillen College of Medicine celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2014, beginning with a celebration in March of those individuals considered to be the founders of the college. The Found-ers’ Day event kicked off a months-long anniversary celebra-tion that culminated with a special gala held in November.

Stanton receives Quest Award In 2014, Dr. Paul Stanton, ETSU president emeritus, was named the second-ever recipient of the ETSU James H. Quillen College of Medicine Quest Award.

The Quest Award was established to recognize leadership for the advancement of health care for the underserved.

Former Tennessee Governor Ned Ray McWherter was awarded the inaugural Quest Award in 2004.

More than 40 years ago, McWherter, Speaker of the House for the Tennessee General Assembly at the time, cast the deciding vote to establish the Quillen College of Medicine.

Stanton became the second individual to receive the award when it was bestowed upon him during the College of Medicine’s 40th anniversary gala.

“I can’t think of anyone more deserving to have the Quest Award,” said Dr. Wilsie Bishop, ETSU’s vice president for health affairs. “He has led us on a wonderful jour-ney toward excellence at the College of Medicine, in the Academic Health Sciences Center and at ETSU.”

Dr. Paul Stanton, second from left, with wife, Nancy on far left, Dr. Wilsie Bishop, second from right, and Dr. Robert Means, far right.

Stanton became the eighth president of ETSU in 1997. After 15 years, he retired and was named president emeritus in 2012.

Before becoming the institution’s chief executive, Stanton held several roles at the university. He was hired in 1985 to teach surgery in the College of Medicine and soon was promoted to chair of the department, then to dean and then to vice president of health affairs in 1988.

Throughout his retirement, he has continued to serve ETSU and the College of Medicine.

15

College of Medicine

College of Medicine Research Highlights

When Dr. David Wood arrived on the ETSU campus as the new pediat- rics chairman for the Quillen College of Medicine last fall, he was wearing more than one hat. Wood was hired to serve not only as the pediatrics chair, but also as the chief medical officer at Niswonger Children’s Hospital, a Mountain States Health Alliance facility.

“A community-based medical school like Quillen achieves its goals through strategic partnerships, and the most critical partnerships are those with our clinical affiliates,” said Dr. Robert Means, dean of the College of Medicine. “Dr. Wood’s dual role with the Quillen College of Medicine and Niswonger Children’s Hospital ensures alignment of our goals.”

Steven Godbold, CEO of Niswonger Children’s Hospital, also sees the partnership as promising.

“Niswonger Children’s Hospital and Mountain States Health Alliance have made the expansion of pediatric subspecialties and the improvement of child well-being our priorities and we enthusiastically praise ETSU for finding us a physician leader who can keep us aligned toward these goals,” he said. “Dr. Wood is internationally known in pediatrics and we are thrilled to have him as the first chief medical officer of Niswonger Children’s Hospital.”

For Wood, the role is most exciting because of the opportunity to build more services for kids.

“I hope that we expand the scope of services available for children so they can stay local and not have to travel for their health care,” he said. “This is an opportunity to work together to be a strong, powerful voice for the children in the community.”

Pediatrics chief links ETSU, Niswonger

Dr. David Wood

1

Drs. Moorman (standing) and Yao (seated)

For individuals with chronic viral infections such as hepatitis C or HIV, protecting their already compromised immune systems from other diseases can mean the difference between life and death. That’s why doctors who treat these patients find it so frustrating that vaccines to prevent additional diseases, like influenza or pneumonia, for example, are significantly less effective in individuals with chronic viral infections. Dr. Zhi Qiang Yao, a professor of medicine at ETSU and director of the Hepatology Program at the Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center, worked with Dr. Jonathan Moorman, professor of medicine at ETSU and section chief for infectious diseases at the VA, to garner $1.825 million in federal grant funding to further study the issue.

Drs. Yao, Moorman study effectiveness of vaccines in patients with chronic viral infections

16

College of Medicine

Dr. Don Hoover was awarded more than $330,000 in federal funding to conduct research related to the nervous system’s interaction with the spleen in restraining inflammatory responses. The research studies a novel feedback mechanism in which the nervous system can act at the spleen to prevent excessive inflammatory response in the body. However, the feedback system is not activated enough by itself to prevent tissue damage in patients with sepsis and other inflammatory diseases. “We are trying to understand how this feedback system works,” said Hoover, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and a member of ETSU’s Center for Inflammation, Infectious Disease and Immunity. “We want to see if we can target it and exploit it for therapeutic advantage, particularly with sepsis.”

Dr. Don Hoover

Dr. Don Hoover awarded $337,340 federal grant for sepsis research project2

Researcher gets $422,000 to study treatment, prevent fungal infection At best, a yeast infection is uncomfortable. At worst, it is deadly. Dr. Mike Kruppa, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and member of the recently established Center for Inflammation, Infectious Disease and Immunity at ETSU, is working to find ways to prevent such in-fections. Kruppa received approximately $422,000 in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research over the next three years to better understand the interplay between the fungus Candida albicans and normal flora in a human’s ecosystem. “If we can understand how they are talking to each other, we can potentially prevent the imbalance that leads to the infection,” Kruppa said.

Dr. Mike Kruppa

17

College of Medicine

Dr. Yue Zou, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, garnered $316,000 in National Institutes of Health funding to continue his research into a protein within the body and its involvement with cancer prevention. The protein, Ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3-related – better known as ATR – is found in every human body and is involved in detecting DNA damage when a person’s cells are exposed to gene-damaging agents from the environment. In addition to serving an important role in regulating the body’s repair responses, ATR also appears to actually protect cells in the body. While ATR is a needed protein inside the body and often serves a positive function, finding ways to stop it from protecting cancer cells is important for cancer treatment, Zou said.

Scientist working on ways to improve cancer prevention

Dr. Yue Zou

3

The National Institutes of Health awarded more than $1.2 million to Drs. Chuanfu Li and David Williams to continue their research on heart failure in critically ill patients who suffer from sepsis syndrome or septic shock. The pair had been looking at the heart’s involvement for some seven to eight years before officially receiving the first round of NIH funding for this particular study in 2009. Another of Li’s grant-funded research projects related to the heart also received continued funding. The NIH has funded Li’s re-search related to heart attacks and heart disease for more than a decade. In 2014, the NIH awarded him another $1.46 million to continue his work in analyzing the cellular and molecular mechanisms of heart attacks, and to, hopefully, discover new ways to prevent or reduce the injury associated with heart attacks.

Dr. David WilliamsDr. Chuanfu Li

ETSU scientists garner $2.66M to continue heart-related research4

5

Dr. Krishna Singh, a physiologist at the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center and a professor at Quillen College of Medicine, received a Veterans Affairs Merit Grant of $965,456 to study the role of a protein, called osteopontin, in cellular processes that can lead to heart failure. The grant will advance her laboratory’s ongoing work in studying cellular activity during heart failure, a condition in which the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body’s demand.

Dr. Krishna Singh

Physiologist receives nearly $1M in VA funding to study heart failure

6

Students at Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy now have the opportunity to spend a portion of their training studying in places like Ireland, Scotland and Hungary.

In April 2014, school officials announced affiliation agreements with five pharmacy schools in Europe that allow ETSU pharmacy students to spend one month in an international exchange program.

“This exchange program provides our students with an international educational experience that will allow them to understand health care delivery systems in other countries,” said Dr. Larry Calhoun, pharmacy dean. “The students will see first-hand how pharmacists function in inner city, metro and rural settings.”

Six ETSU Gatton College of Pharmacy students studied abroad last spring. Another eight students are scheduled to do so in 2015.

Pharmacy school inks affiliation agreements in Europe

As part of the program, students from the European colleges also come to ETSU for a month at a time.

“For all of the students, it is an eye-opening experience relative to the many different ways the world delivers health care,” Calhoun said. “The program has been so well received.”

In fact, Calhoun is now considering expanding the exchange program to include more countries and locations.

“The students really want me to work on Australia and New Zealand,” Calhoun said. “But I’m also looking at Germany and Spain.”

As the student program grows, Calhoun said it is opening doors for a faculty exchange program as well. “We’ve already had one faculty member go to Hungary,” he said. “Our faculty are starting to get excited about the possibilities.”

Linda Lakatos, of Újpesti Pharmacy; Matthew Crawford of University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center; and Jake Peters, ETSU Gatton College of Pharmacy, at a community pharmacy in Budapest.

A group of students from the Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy at East Tennessee State University brought home the championship from a statewide competition hosted by the Tennessee Pharmacists Association.

In July 2014, the College of Pharmacy team, nicknamed “The Cure Alls,” won the fifth annual NASPA/TPA Student Pharmacist Self-Care Championship at the association’s annual meeting in Hilton Head, S.C. Teams from all six colleges of pharmacy in Tennes-see competed in the event, which featured a Jeopardy-like format.

The National Alliance of State Pharmacy Associations (NASPA) and the Nonprescrip-tion Medicines Academy (NMA) partnered

‘The Cure Alls’ bring home pharmacy championshipin 2006 to launch the competition. The event, which is endowed by Proctor & Gamble, promotes interactive learn-ing. During the event, pharmacy students answered questions that demonstrated their knowledge of various over-the-counter med-ications and products as well as their ability to identify and explain aspects of self-care treatments.

Members of the winning team from ETSU are Scott Brewster, Aaron Garst, Brandon Farmer and Ryan Smith. Serving as alternates were Abby Surles and Allison Philips. Dr. Katelyn Alexander, an assistant professor at the College of Pharmacy, serves as the team coach.

Pictured, from left to right, are team members Aaron Garst, Class of 2016; Ryan Smith, Class of 2015; Brandon Farmer, Class of 2016; and Scott Brewster, Class of 2017.

18

College of Pharmacy

Pharmacy student saves professor’s life with CPRDr. Charles Collins doesn’t remember a lot of details about March 16, 2014, but it’s a day he won’t forget, either.

That day, the professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy attended the Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway (BMS) with family and a friend. During a significant rain delay, Collins and his companions decided to head home.

According to what he has been told, Collins stopped as they were walking to the parking lot and said, “Help me,” before falling down.

“That was when a couple of people came and did CPR until EMS arrived,” he said.

As it turned out, one of those individuals who administered CPR on Collins that day at BMS was one of his students at the Gatton College of Pharmacy – Kristin Lester.

The second-year pharmacy student attended the race with a friend and, like Collins, decided to leave early due to the rain.

That’s when she noticed a crowd gathering in the parking lot around a man who was lying on the ground. No one was doing CPR, but Lester heard someone say the man was turning blue and was not breathing.

Lester dropped her bag and pushed through the crowd. Having been through mandatory CPR training as a pharmacy student, she checked for and could not find a pulse, and noted that the man, indeed, was not breathing and his face and fingertips were turning blue.

“I was there, and the next instant I was doing CPR on this man I didn’t recognize,” she said.

A BMS worker jumped in and began assisting with chest compressions until EMS arrived and took over.

“I thought, ‘This is it. I’ll never know what happened with him,’” Lester recalled.

The following morning, though, a professor came in before class and told the pharmacy students that Collins had a heart attack and was in ICU at Bristol Regional Medical Center.

“I got that feeling in the pit of my stomach when I realized the man I’d done CPR on was my professor,” Lester said. “Because of the timing, the place and his condition, I didn’t know who he was. At the time, I was so focused on what needed to be done, on what I’d been trained to do.

“I’m grateful I was there,” Lester continued. “I don’t think God would’ve put me there in that place, at that time, with all those people, if it wasn’t going to be okay.”

Collins, naturally, is grateful, too.

“I’m so thankful they (Lester and the track worker) were there and jumped in to help and helped save my life,” he said.

After having his heart restarted with shock paddles and being transported to the BRMC, Collins was brought out of an induced coma and soon discovered he had four vessels that were 70 percent blocked. Cardiac bypass surgery followed, and soon thereafter, he was released from the hospital.

Kappa Psi earnsnational award

Approximately 100 of East Tennessee State University’s Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy stu-dents celebrated a national victory after their chapter of the Kappa Psi organization was named the “Most Improved Chapter” in the country last year.

Kappa Psi is the oldest and largest professional pharmacy fraternity.

In August 2014, the ETSU chapter earned the “Most Improved Chap-ter” award for the district, which is made up of 18 different chapters. Less than two weeks later, it was named the national winner, beating out the top chapter from each of the other 10 districts located through-out the United States.

The competition is based off a rubric that measures the amount and extent of the chapter’s com-munity service, philanthropy and scholarship involvement. The chap-ter’s participation and leadership in regional, state and national profes-sion activities is also measured.

Members of the ETSU chapter have worked with philanthropic events including the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life, the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree program and a Veterans Associa-tion benefit. They have also hosted service events including medical awareness classes and breast cancer awareness activities.

Collins and Lester

19

College of Pharmacy

Inside a research lab in Stanton-Gerber Hall at East Tennessee State University, second- and third-year pharmacy students with ETSU’s Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy work diligently to fill dozens of wells with various cancer cells.

As part of the extensive research work being done by associate professor Victo-ria Palau, the students are helping to test plant-derived compounds to determine their impact on different types of cancer.

“We add the compounds to the cancer cells and see if we can kill them,” Palau explains. “Different compounds work better for different cancers.”

Research spotlight:

Professor searching for better cancer treatment options

Palau’s colleague in Colombia – an organic chemist – has dedicated his life to identify-ing plants that can be used medicinally. He collects the plants from the Andean region and takes them to a botanical garden to be properly identified.

“Since my specialty is cancer, he sends me all the compounds from plants that have something to do with cancer,” says Palau, who has been conducting this research since she came to ETSU in 2007. “All of us, in some way, have been touched by cancer. We all know someone who has fought cancer or is going through that fight right now. Putting a little piece of informa-tion out there that might make a difference – that is really important to me.”

To conduct the research, Palau and her students start with the plant extract, running it through glass columns filled with silica gel to separate it, ultimately ending up with the various compounds, which are in yellow powder form. From there, they identify the compounds so they are able to test them.

In testing, the researchers dose cells of a specific type of cancer – colon, breast, pan-creatic – with varying strength levels of a compound.

“Then we do an analysis to see what got killed and what survived,” Palau says. “If it works, if it kills the cancer cells, then we move on to trying to detect how it is happening. We also test the compound on normal cells to make sure it is not toxic.”

Some compounds work well on one type of cancer, but do nothing for another type, she says. Interestingly, the same compound

Dr. Victoria Palau, right, and Yachang Liu, a second-year pharmacy student, review the results of some recent compound testing.

Generation Rx recognized nationally

for prescription drug abuse efforts

ast Tennessee State University’s Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy students in the American Pharmacists Association Academy of Student Pharmacists (APhA-ASP) organization brought home awards and recognition from a national conference in spring 2014.

The ETSU chapter was awarded the First Runner-Up Generation Rx Award for the second year in a row in recogni-tion of the impact the members have on prescription drug abuse in East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.

Under the direction of faculty advisor Sarah Melton, the group has reached some 6,000 young people through presentations at schools, clubs, community centers and juvenile detention centers. They also created a Provider Toolkit, designed to educate all health care providers on “The Ten Universal Precautions to Prescribing.”

The chapter was named one of the top five fundraisers for the APhA Political Action Committee, and the recognition that brought the students the most satis-faction was the national Most Improved Chapter Award.

Second-year ETSU pharmacy student Loren Kirk was elected as the national APhA-ASP Speaker of the House, joining two other Gatton students in national leadership positions. Abby Surles serves on the APhA-ASP National Standing Committee on Awards and Haley Trivett serves as the vice chair of the National Standing Committee on Education.

ELoren Kirk

20

College of Pharmacy

Research spotlight:

Professor searching for better cancer treatment options

can have a major impact on cancer cells with a specific mutation while other mutated cells of the same type of cancer are not impacted at all by the compound.

“Cancer is a disease where you have pro-gressive loss of cell polarity in molecules associated with the normal cell,” Palau says. “So as that process is happening you have different stages of cancer – and you have different mutations found in different people.”

In fact, the group is looking at four different types of colon cancer alone to make sure a compound is targeted to work effectively for the specific mutation it impacts.

Palau’s goal, of course, is to discover new compounds that offer better treatment op-tions for those diagnosed with various types of cancer.

“These are all new compounds that nobody has tested. We could find one that is very ef-fective. That is how Paclitaxel isolated from the Pacific yew tree, and used in chemother-apy now, was found,” she says. “I’m always hopeful one of my students will make that huge discovery.”

Palau already has spent seven years re-searching compounds and admits it can get frustrating from time to time when the an-swers just aren’t there. Still, she says she has no plans to stop searching for those answers any time soon.

“Five years ago, we didn’t have the treat-ments we have now,” she says. “There are thousands of people working on cancer all around the world. As long as we keep work-ing on it, we’re bound to make strides.”

Bea Turner, a second-year pharmacy student, doses colon cancer cells with a compound to test that com-pound’s effect on the cells.

Second-year pharmacy student Cody Irick looks at cancer cells through a microscope in Dr. Victoria Palau’s lab.

Breast cancer cells are put into a dish to be tested with a compound.

A close up of some of the cells after they were tested with a compound.

21

College of Pharmacy

Johnson City Community Health Center receives $250,000 for mammography servicesA grant awarded in August 2014 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is helping East Tennessee State University provide more health care services to the people of the region.

The Johnson City Community Health Center, an ETSU nurse-managed clinic serving the homeless, migrant workers, those in public housing, school chil-dren and hundreds of other residents of Northeast Tennessee, received $250,000 from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to expand services to include mammography screening.

“Quality monitoring has identified that less than 50 percent of women referred by the community health center have kept their appointment,” said Silas Tolan, executive director of ETSU’s community health centers. “Currently, the women served at the JCCHC have to travel to another site for this service and often face travel, language and other barriers. Having mammography services at the clinic provides service for the patients at a single point of care.”

Through the grant, part of the JCCHC is being renovated and transformed into a digital mammography screening room.

Ousley co-authors book on common skin conditionsWhen Dr. Lisa Ousley started taking photographs of her patients’ various skin diseases more than 10 years ago, she had hopes the growing catalog would help her in making diagnoses throughout her career as a nurse.

Now a doctor of nursing practice, Ousley, who serves as East Tennessee State University’s clinical services director for Student/University Health Services, is using those hundreds of photographs to help other health providers, too.

“We were hoping to create a reference book that would increase a provider’s proficiency at the recognition, diagnosis and treatment of common dermatolog-ical disorders,” Ousley said of the book she co-authored with fellow DNP Faye Lyons. “It’s the first reference book on dermatology written by nurses, for nurses.”

“Dermatology For the Advanced Practice Nurse,” published by Springer Pub-lishing Company, hit bookshelves in late July 2014. It details the 60 most common conditions in dermatological care and includes approximately 100 of Ousley’s photos as well as others contrib-uted by ETSU nurse practitioners. The electronic version of the book includes another 200 photos of skin conditions captured by Ousley over the years.

The grant will also allow the clinic to purchase patient portal software that will integrate with the facility’s electronic medical record system.

The JCCHC was one of 147 health centers across the nation to receive a grant through the Affordable Care Act funding for patient-centered medical homes. It is the only facility in the state of Tennessee to get the funding.

College of Nursing graduates appear on “60 Minutes”

Two graduates of East Tennessee State University’s College of Nursing were featured on the CBS news program “60 Minutes” in April 2014.

Teresa Gardner is the executive director and Paula Meade is the clinical director of The Health Wagon, a nurse-managed mobile clinic based in Clintwood, Va. Both women received B.S.N. degrees from ETSU in 1989.

Scott Pelly, a “60 Minutes” reporter, as well as anchor and managing editor of “CBS Evening News,” conducted interviews with the women in December 2013 at a health and food distribution fair in collaboration with Feeding America-Southwest Virginia and the Zion Family Ministries. In addition, the CBS crew filmed The Health Wagon in action over a period of two months.

22

College of Nursing

Sixty alumni from the ETSU College

of Nursing were honored during the

anniversary celebration held last fall.

The ETSU alums, pictured at right at the

nursing gala, were recognized as outstand-

ing College of Nursing graduates who

have demonstrated significant leadership

in the nursing field in areas of education,

research, service and/or practice.

ETSU alumni honored for leadership in the nursing field

when the Tennessee Council for Nursing Committee for the Expansion and Improve-ment of Nursing Education recommended that ETSC establish a baccalaureate program in nursing.”

Starting out as a four-year baccalaureate program was pretty unusual at that time in Tennessee, according to Sharon Loury, a nursing professor at ETSU and health care historian.

“Diploma nursing was probably the most common path to becoming a RN back then so this was rare,” Loury said. “The role that ETSU had in educating nurses in the region during the early years was very significant.”

Today, ETSU’s College of Nursing is the largest in the state. It boasts five different routes to obtaining a baccalaureate in nurs-ing – the traditional four years of study, an accelerated second degree program, a dual degree RN-to-BSN option, a LPN-to-BSN option and a RN-to-BSN option. The school also offers a master’s degree in nursing, in-cluding a clinical nurse leader track, as well as a Ph.D. program and a doctor of nursing practice (DNP) degree.

More than 6,500 degrees have been con-ferred through the nursing school at ETSU.

Nehring believes much of the school’s suc-cess over the years stems from the environ-ment within and surrounding the College of Nursing.

“It’s the faculty and staff that give students their attention and their time, that want to see the students succeed, that are passion-ate about nursing,” she said. “And it is the opportunities that are present here. It is being a part of an Academic Health Sciences Center that is growing and making avail-able interprofessional opportunities for our students and faculty. It is having upper administration who believes in you. It is the encouraging atmosphere here at ETSU.”

Nursing program celebrates 60 yearsDr. Wendy Nehring isn’t sure what the next 60 years will hold for East Tennessee State University’s College of Nursing, but if they are anything like the program’s first 60 years, the dean says things are looking bright for the school.

“The program began with a vision and, from the beginning, it was a quality program,” Nehring said. “I think the first faculty and leaders would be very pleased with where we are today and I think 60 years from now, we will think the growth equally phenomenal.”

East Tennessee State College, as it was then called, began its official program for nursing in 1954. The college already had been working with the area hospital for ap-proximately a decade to help train nurses. During the 1940s, nurses went to ETSC for academic education in areas such as psychology, sociology, English and chemistry while getting their clinical training at the hospital.

Then, 60 years ago, efforts to move nursing toward professional status led to the integration of the entire educational experience being offered at ETSC.

“The hospital was having us teach some courses for them and partnered with us

Dr. Wendy Nehring

College of Nursing

New exhibit features history of ETSU’s nursing school Dr. Wendy Nehring, dean of the College of Nursing, unveiled a new, permanent exhibit at The Museum at Mountain Home on the Veterans Administration Medical Center campus in October 2014.

“East Tennessee State University College of Nursing (Est. 1954)” showcases the history of the nursing school and the partnerships it shared over the years with area hospitals to train nurses of the region.

The exhibit is the second part of a comprehensive permanent display called, “The Heritage of Nursing in South Central Appalachia: A Legacy of Caring and Resilience.”

It includes the history of Knoxville General Hospital School of Nursing, Johnson City’s Appalachian Hospital and Memorial Hospital schools of nursing, the ETSU College of Nursing and the Veterans Administration Medical Center nursing. It also features documents and artifacts from nurses in a variety of practice settings and nursing schools in the south central region of Appalachia.

The Museum at Mountain Home is located at Building 34 of the Veterans Administration Medical Center.

American Cancer Societygrant to promote health equity in area

ing for colorectal cancers to individuals in Washington and Hancock counties.

The grant is part of a $6.4 million gift from the Walgreens Way To Well Commitment program that engages Walgreens customers in supporting the American Cancer Society’s Community Health Advocates implementing Nationwide Grants for Empowerment and Equity (CHANGE) program.

Funding for the CHANGE grants comes from Walgreens customers nationwide, who choose to donate to the American Cancer Society as they pay for their purchases at checkout. The CHANGE grants help promote health equity and ensure that communities with a higher

The American Cancer Society announced late last year a $50,000 grant awarded to the East Tennessee State University Research Foundation to support the College of Nursing’s Northeast Tennessee Community Health Centers to provide cancer awareness, education, and screen-

burden of cancer have equal access to education and screening resources.

“We are pleased to receive this grant and excited for our patients,” said Dr. Patti Vanhook, associate dean for the College of Nursing’s Office of Practice. “We have not had the resources to send our patients for colonoscopy screening. This grant and our partnership with The Center for Digestive Wellness: TriCities Gastroenterology will reach many patients who would not have access to this life saving procedure.”

The health indicators for Tennessee reveal that colorectal cancer deaths are the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the state.

CONFERENCE

Academic Health Sciences Center

will host FIRST annual

Interprofessional

Education Conference

24

The East Tennessee State University College of Nursing and Center for Nursing Research, in collaboration with the Academic Health Sciences Center, will host their first annual Southeastern Interprofessional Education Conference at the Music Road Convention Center in Pigeon Forge on June 11, 2015.

The conference seeks to provide a plan and open dialogue for ongoing interprofessional/ collaborative education and dissemination of shared practices among academic health centers to meet the new core competencies of interprofessional education in relation to the management of patients with multiple chronic conditions.

For more information about the conference, visit www.etsu.edu/nursing/ipecon.aspx.

College of Nursing

American Cancer Societygrant to promote health equity in area

East Tennessee State University adjunct faculty member Billie Sills never imagined herself as the president of the professional organization that represents nurses across the entire state of Tennessee. But with a penchant for doing things that “just make sense,” Sills is now more than halfway through her two-year term at the helm of the Tennessee Nurses Association.

“I started my nursing career 60 years ago. I can’t remember a time that I didn’t want to be a nurse,” Sills said. “It’s just the fire in my belly. And I love it more today than ever.”

While becoming a registered nurse, Sills worked in Rochester, Minn. at the St.

Mary’s School of Nursing before moving to California to do her post-graduate work.

“Then I joined the Air Force,” she said. “I was a U.S. Air Force flight nurse. I loved it.”

But an injury forced Sills to retire from military service with a disability. That’s when she decided to head back to school to get her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing.

She spent much of her professional career working in a variety of nursing roles in both Florida and Texas. Following a short stint as the director of quality resource manage-ment at a hospital in Kentucky, Sills took on the role of director of nursing at the NHC Health Care Center in Johnson City in 1999.

She has served as an assistant professor at ETSU since 2003, teaching classes that include Communications for Health Professionals, Introduction to Professional Nursing, Ethical/Legal Aspects in Nursing, and Health Care Organization and the Law.

“I want to instill in my students that love and that pride in being a nurse,” Sills said. “I want nurses to stand tall and say, ‘I’m a nurse.’”

In October 2013, Sills took over as the president of the TNA, an organization

aimed at promoting and protecting the registered nurse and advancing the practice of nursing.

“Nursing has been good to me, so I decided I wanted to give back,” Sills said. “I believe in our professional organization and what it stands for.”

During her tenure, Sills wants to increase membership to the TNA, something she said has become less of a priority over the years with those who become nurses.

“It is so important,” she said. “These organizations are the spokesperson for the profession. If lawmakers want to know how nurses feel about something, they turn to the professional organizations to get an opinion.”

Equally important, she said, is the education of those in the nursing field.

“We have to be educating nurses much more on advocacy, nursing’s role and pol-itics – how all these regulations that come in have changed nursing,” she said. “And we’ve got to get people who come into nursing to understand this is a profession, not just a paycheck.”

ETSU faculty member at the helm of Tennessee Nurses Association

Research spotlight: Stidham studying MRSA knowledge, perception in nursing homesApril Stidham, a faculty member in the College of Nursing, is visiting dozens of nursing homes in the region over a one-year period to investigate just how much caretakers at such facilities know about Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA or staph infection.

Nursing homes, she noted, are reservoirs for the drug-resistant bacterium that is easily spread by basic physical contact. Stidham’s research project will allow her to collect data to assess bedside caregivers’ knowledge and perception of MRSA and ways to prevent the spread of it.

She will focus her efforts on certified nursing assistants working at nursing homes within a 60-mile radius of ETSU, in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina. Stidham’s project is being funded through a university Research Development Committee grant she received in the spring.

Billie Sills

25

College of Nursing

If you truly are what you eat, then children attending East Tennessee State University’s Child Study Center are now made-from-scratch bits of goodness.

Thanks to a grant awarded this fall to ETSU College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences assistant professor Michelle Johnson, a registered dietitian, the childcare facility transitioned to a lunch and snack menu focused specifically on nutrition enrichment for pre-school and toddler-age children.

“We’ve been working and talking about Rainbow In My Tummy for at least two years now,” Johnson said. “It was developed around the idea of creating a new food culture.”

The nutrition program began in 2008 at Verner Center for Early Learning in Ashe-ville. Since then, it has expanded to more than a dozen other childcare facilities in western North Carolina. The CSC marks the first childcare center in Tennessee to adopt the RIMT program.

“We are using fresh, non-processed foods. The idea is to use as much scratch-made food as possible,” Johnson explained. “The only canned food we’ll be using will be beans because they are so time consuming to soak.”

Utilizing RIMT recipe books based on the season, meals incorporate diverse, healthy and nutritious foods created from fresh, local ingredients whenever possible.

Gavin Arsenault, a pre-schooler at the Child Study Center, enjoys a cranberry orange zest muffin as part of the new Rainbow In My Tummy menu.

College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences brings ‘Rainbow in My Tummy’ to ETSU’s Child Study Center

‘Rainbow In My Tummy’

“We have such an opportunity with kids at this age to create change. These menus are that opportunity,” Johnson said. “We’re trying all sorts of foods, even things like leeks and bok choy that many of the children here may not have tried up until now. Exposure to the new foods will increase their willingness to eat those foods as they get older.”

The CSC is working with Aramark, the vendor that provides the food for the majority of the ETSU campus, to transition the childcare center into the new menu. Items featured include turkey meatballs made with whole wheat breadcrumbs and sunflower seeds; baked cheddar polenta fries; pasta salad featuring sunflower seed pesto and mozzarella; cranberry orange zest muffins; white bean dip with garlic and rosemary; and sweet potato hummus.

“It’s such a plus for us to have Aramark because they have so many more resources than we do by ourselves,” Johnson said. “They’ve been really willing to work with us and change with us to do this program.”

Johnson said she is flexible with the menu, taking note of what works for the CSC.

“We’re trying to be creative, but if a menu item doesn’t work here, then we’re going to change it,” she said. “We’re hoping just being exposed to these kinds of food will improve the children’s baseline nutrition knowledge.”

Recipes for the items served to the children at the CSC also are provided for parents so they can be incorporated at home as well.

26

College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences

Dr. Lynn Williams Although Dr. Lynn Williams has worked at ETSU since 1995, it was a return to her roots last fall that truly made her feel at home again at the university.

A speech-language pathologist, Williams spent more than a decade working as a faculty member in the Depart-ment of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology in what was then the College of Public and Allied Health. The department is now housed in the College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences, which formed its own separate college in late 2007.

That division into two separate colleges occurred around the time Williams left her faculty position to take on the role of associate director of the Center of Excellence for Early Childhood Learning and Develop-ment in ETSU’s College of Education.

“I moved into that position in 2008 as an attempt to facilitate more interprofessional research liaisons,” Williams said. “But right after I went there, the grant and funding landscape shifted drastically.”

The nation’s economic recession made grant funds sparse, and extremely difficult to obtain.

“The grants I was getting were in audiology and speech-language pathology,” Williams

said. “I kept coming back to my roots with trying to do these larger, interprofes-sional grants.”

So in August 2014, Williams accepted a new job – as the associate dean of academic affairs for the College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences.

“It just seemed like a natural thing to come back home,” she said. “I feel like I can make a bigger contribution to the university in this role.”

Williams is already trying to do just that.

“My first goal is to increase the visibility of the college on campus and in the community. I’m trying to think of different ways to do that,” she said. “I want to work with the student organizations and let them know the college supports their efforts, because they are our ambassadors. And I want to work with the faculty members, too, to increase awareness of their work.”

Williams said she also plans to serve as a liaison between the faculty within each of the college’s departments and the administration of the college.

Prior to joining ETSU, Williams was on faculty at Oklahoma State University. Before that, she worked as a faculty member at California State University at Fullerton.

Originally from Jumping Branch, W. Va., Williams and her husband, also an ETSU

Dr. Lynn Williams

On April 19, 2014, the 1st Annual Bunny Hop 5K was held and sponsored by the

Tri-Cities Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. The event was organized and carried

out by a team of ETSU students and Dr. Eileen Cress from the College of Clinical

and Rehabilitative Health Sciences nutrition program. The effort raised $1,900 for

the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee.

Bunny Hop raises money for Second Harvest

returns

‘home’ as

associate

dean in

College of

Clinical &

Rehabilitative

Health

Sciencesprofessor, have two daughters. Outside of the office, Williams is a Science Hill High School band mom and enjoys walking her dog, baking bread and visiting the family’s cabin in West Virginia.

27

College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences

Dr. Andrew Clark takes over as associate dean of research and clinical practice Dr. W. Andrew Clark was named the new associate dean of research and clinical practice at ETSU’s College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences in early 2014.

He moved into the role after serving as a professor in clinical nutrition in the Department of Allied Health Sciences since 2011. Prior to that, Clark served as a professor in ETSU’s College of Business and Technology for nine years and spent 18 years working at Eastman Chemical Co. as a researcher scientist.

In 2012, Clark established a lab at the ETSU Valleybrook campus and educational center for nutritional biochemistry. He still manages the lab, conducting research related to the utilization of fat soluble nutrients.

In his new role, Clark is responsible for mentoring college faculty in the development of a research program and assisting in grant development. He also continues to serve as a professor in clinical nutrition.

“Research became an integral part of my life during my junior year at Colorado State University when my advisor, Dr. Gerry Ward, got me involved in his nutrition research projects,” Clark said. “In my new job as associate dean of research, I have the opportunity to help others achieve their potential as a researcher by acting as a research mentor. I think Dr. Ward would be proud.”

Clark earned his bachelor’s degree in animal science and pre-veterinary medicine from Colorado State University, his master’s degree in animal science and agricultural biochemistry from the University of Delaware, a Ph.D. in nutrition from North Carolina State University and became a registered dietitian through East Tennessee State University.

ETSU Alumna Selected to Head Up University’s Physical Therapy Program Patricia (Trish) King was named the new chair of the Depart ment of Physical Therapy at ETSU’s College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences in March 2014.

King is a graduate of Bristol’s Tennessee High School and ETSU, where she earned a bachelor of science in community health education. She also holds a B.S. in physical therapy from the University of Tennessee in Memphis, a master’s in medical anthropology from the University of Memphis, and Ph.D. in both medical anthropology and women’s studies from the University of Florida.

King has over 25 years of experience as a physical therapy educator, having taught at the University of Tennessee Center for the Health Sciences, Shenandoah University, Tennessee State University and Arkansas State University.

“I am very happy to be home and to have the opportunity to contribute to the continued growth and success of ETSU,” King said. “I owe a lot of my professional success to the solid foundation I received in health sciences as a student here.”

King is a board-certified clinical specialist in orthopaedic physical therapy and a certified orthopaedic manual physical therapist.

Patricia (Trish) King

Dr. W. Andrew Clark

Dr. Ester Verhovsek named chair of Allied Health Dr. Ester Verhovsek was named the new chair of the Department of Allied Health Sciences at ETSU’s College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences in April 2014.

A registered technologist in radiography and mammography, Verhovsek received a bachelor of arts in radiologic technology from LaRoche College,

a master’s degree in education from Frostburg State University and her doctorate of education in educational leadership from West Virginia University.

In addition to serving as the chair of the department, which includes dental hygiene, nutrition, imaging sciences and cardiopulmonary science, Verhovsek has been the graduate coordinator since 2006. She teaches several courses within the department, including classes in allied health leadership and imaging sciences.

Dr. Ester Verhovsek

28

College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences

Work conferences. Dinner parties. Lecture halls. While most people find themselves in these group settings on a regular basis, such locations can be a source of much anxiety for those who are hard of hearing.

Our normal system has a way to suppress the background noise and place signifi-cance to the speech you are listening to,” said Dr. Saravanan Elangovan, an associate professor in audiology and speech language pathology in ETSU’s College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences. “You lose the ability to do that when you have a hear-ing impairment. It becomes very difficult to separate out what you are wanting to hear from the rest of the noise in the room.”

Through the installation of an induction loop system, Elangovan and others at the Johnson City Community Health Center have created a better listening environment in one of the facility’s conference rooms for those with a hearing impairment.

“Most people with hearing aids or cochle-ar implants have a way to switch over to

Room for the hearing impaired now open at Johnson City Community Health Center

what is called a T-coil. The technology was actually set up to enable them to do better with a telephone. It is devoid of any back-ground noise or static,” Elangovan said. “The induction loop system uses the same technology.”

With this system, a sound source – a speaker’s voice, a cinema sound system or other audio system – is captured using a microphone. From that sound signal, the induction loop generates a current to pass the signal to a metal wire that encircles the

Last year, ETSU’s audiology program and the university’s chapter of the Student Academy of Audiology set out to help prevent noise-induced hearing loss caused by the high sound levels at music venues.

Dr. Krisztina Johnson of ETSU’s Depart-ment of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology designed the project to educate those who visit area venues. Johnson arranged with Dr. Robert Ghent, a research audiologist and manager for Howard Leight Acoustical Testing Laboratory, for the donation of 8,200 pairs of earplugs.

Audiology students and ETSU staff placed jars of earplugs at local venues with loud music. They also provided information about safe levels of noise and the potential damaging effects of excessive noise levels,

ETSU audiology students helping music lovers protect their hearingalong with contact information for the university audiology clinic.

Approximately 40 million Americans suffer from hearing loss, and one-fourth of those cases are related to one-time noise exposure to loud sounds or repeated exposure to damaging levels of noise. Generally, loud music causes tempo-rary hearing loss. However, when music exceeds 100 decibels, permanent hearing damage may occur.

Hearing protection is particularly import-ant because it is impossible to predict an individual’s susceptibility to noise damage. All noise-exposed individuals should protect their hearing when anticipating exposure to high sound levels.

room, which in turn produces a magnetic field. That magnetic field, Elangovan ex-plained, is picked up by the T-coil located inside a hearing aid and delivers the sound directly into the person’s ear canal without the background noise.

The looped area, or part of the room encircled by the wire, allows enough space for multiple people to sit. In addition to a microphone in the front of the room for a speaker, four other microphones are placed throughout the room to help when some-one from the group is talking.

“We have been using it to demonstrate this feature on hearing aids and cochlear im-plants for our audiology clinic patients, but we’d also like to invite community groups that might have a need for it,” Elangovan said. “Hearing aids and cochlear implants have come a long way, but they still haven’t matched the natural ability of the ear. That’s why we want to spread the word that this feature is available here. We think it is an excellent resource.”

Wearing foam ear plugs provides a significant reduction in the high- and mid-frequencies. Listeners can still enjoy music, but at a safe loudness level.

The ETSU Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology maintains an audiology clinic at the Johnson City Community Health Center.

Dr. Saravanan Elangovan shows doctoral student Brittany England how the system works.

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College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences

Grant allows ETSU trio to work on water quality in Rwandan village, all over the worldCooking pasta for dinner. Rehydrating after a long run. Sterilizing a child’s scraped knee. For many, these are basic everyday tasks. For others, they are nearly impossi-ble feats because of the quality of water in their community.

ETSU doctoral student Beth O’Connell has seen some of the world’s worst water quality issues up close and personal and, with help from some of faculty in the College of Public Health, she is working diligently to improve such conditions in low-resource communities.

O’Connell is starting out by offering aid to those living in Cyegera, a small village in Rwanda.

“My first trip there was in 2009,” said O’Connell, who also received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from ETSU. “At that time, I had a general interest in global health, but not specific to water quality until I saw the need for it there.”

During her undergraduate field experience, O’Connell helped place biosand water filters in a children’s home and at a school in the village. Commonly used in develop-ing countries, the filters remove pathogens and other contaminants from community drinking water to make it safer for use and consumption.

“When I first went there, the children were routinely sick with all sorts of things, but especially with diarrheal diseases,” says O’Connell, who took her sixth trip to the village in July 2014. “That is really at a minimum at this point. Diarrheal disease is the No. 1 cause of death in children under 5

in sub-saharan Africa and No. 2 cause of death in the world, so that is huge.”

While the success of the filters is evident, how long they last remains a mystery.

Through a university Research Develop-ment Committee grant awarded to Dr. Megan Quinn, an assistant professor in biostatistics and epidemiology, the two women, along with Dr. Phillip Scheuerman, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health, hope to create and evaluate a tool that can be used out in the field to test the filters.

The researchers want to find a low-cost, easy-to-use field-use indicator that the people of the village can utilize to test their own filters and have long-term trust in the functionality of the filters.

“Clean water plays such a huge role in quality of life. When there is a guarantee of clean water, a mother doesn’t have to worry anymore about her kid drinking water that is contaminated and dying from it,” Quinn said. “There’s just so many things it impacts. If they can take that piece – the lack of clean water – out of the equation, hopefully it will improve the overall wellness of the community.”

Rachel Ward and Christian Williams, two recent doctoral graduates from ETSU’s College of Public Health, have co-written a chapter in the book, “Public Health in Appalachia: Essays from the Clinic and the Field.”

Along with Dr. Carl J. Greever, Ward and Williams co-wrote the chapter titled, “The Growing Problem of Diabetes in Appalachia.” Greever is a family physician who practiced in Appalachia for more than 50 years.

The chapter explores some of the factors that cause diabetes to be worse in Appalachia than in other parts of the country. It focuses on changes in dietary habits, the impact of smoking and sedentary lifestyles, and the socio-economic realities of Appalachia as they impact the causes and consequences of diabetes in the region. The authors also propose some potential solutions to address the challenge.

The book, edited by Wendy Welch, and published by McFarland & Company, is the 35th publication of the “Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies” series. The chapter was written while Ward and Williams were completing their doctoral programs.

in

ETSU doctoral students publish book, chapter on

diabetes Appalachia

Rachel Ward Christian Williams

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College of Public Health

Dr. Joel Hillhouse, director of East Tennessee State University’s Skin Cancer Prevention Laboratory, was featured in multiple national publications in 2014 and the start of 2015.

In August, his expertise in the area of the dangers related to tanning was cited in an article titled, “The End of Tan-ning?” featured in The Atlantic, a publication that focuses on a variety of news-based topics including cultural trends.

In November, Hillhouse was extensively quoted in a Nature magazine article titled, “Prevention: Lessons from a sunburnt country.”

Then in January 2015, he was featured in a New York Times front-page article titled, “Indoor Tanning Poses Cancer Risks, Teenagers Learn.”

Hillhouse is the associate dean for research and a professor in the ETSU College of Public Health. He has been doing work in prevention science for more than 20 years and is one of the nation’s foremost researchers on indoor tanning.

ETSU professor featured in national publications about tanning

Dr. Joel Hillhouse

When a country music star, a doctor-turned-senator and the dean of the College of Public Health at East Tennessee State University get together, there’s no telling where the conversation might lead.

While they come from three very different walks of life, Big Kenny of the country duo Big & Rich, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and ETSU Dean Dr. Randy Wykoff, it turns out, share a huge passion for improving the health and wellness of people all over the world.

And now, the three are setting their sights on doing just that as a team.

“It all started with ETSU’s Leading Voices in Public Health Lecture series. In October 2007, we invited Bill Frist to come speak about ‘Health Diplomacy: Using Medicine as Currency for Peace,’” Wykoff said. “Through him, I met Big Kenny, who came in 2010 and did a Leading Voices lecture titled, ‘Personal Responsibility and Social Action: Sudan, Haiti and Appalachia.’”

The trio realized they share a passion for public health issues and began working together to create what turned into a 12-part

ETSU dean, country music star, former U.S. Senator create ‘An Essential Conversation’

series called, “An Essential Conversation: Things We Must Care About For a Better World.” The series takes a look at a dozen different “topics of importance” to the human condition, including food and water, poverty, education, the criminal justice system and free speech.

“These are global issues in the sense of being issues that affect everyone,” Wykoff said. “They are things that can and should be dealt with by everyone. They’re issues that can be addressed, but it has to start with dialogue.”

The trio’s project aims to open up that dia-logue among people all over the world.

“The crazy thing about people talking, we often come up with simple solutions to complex problems,” said Big Kenny, who funds philanthropic projects in the United States and across the globe through his Love Everybody Foundation. “We inspire each other. Next thing you know, we find ways to take action and do something about them.”

Frist, founder and chairman of the nonprofit organization Hope Through Healing Hands, said the project is helping him focus on “the now.”

“My hope is that we will build a commu-nity committed to talking the small steps now that will have a lasting impact,” he said. “Together we can build a different world in a year.”

The trio plans to continue collaborating on efforts that shine a light on public health issues.

“I found a common bond with Bill and Randy. We are each just audacious enough to believe we can each make things a little better,” Big Kenny said. “(And) if there’s a hungry kid anywhere, that’s enough to know we got plenty to talk about and plenty to do.”

“An Essential Conversation: Things We Must Care About For a Better World” can be viewed in its entirety by visiting www.etsu.edu/cph/blog_articles/intro.aspx.

From left, Wykoff, Big Kenny and Frist in Nashville working on ‘An Essential Conversation.’

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College of Public Health

Spend any time at all with Dr. Patrick Brown and his passion for teaching will become obvious. Still, at the end of his first year as a college professor in 2008, Brown, now an assistant professor of health sciences at ETSU, admits he was “frustrated” with his profession.

“I put so much effort into my class. I was very personable. I was charismatic. I got great reviews from my students,” Brown recalls. “But at the end of the semester, half of the class was failing my exam. There was a real disconnect with what I thought I was teaching and what they were actually learning.”

Brown attended a workshop that summer on a teaching method called process orient-ed guided inquiry learning, or POGIL. It is a student-centered instructional approach that simultaneously develops content mas-tery and key process skills like critical think-ing, effective communication and teamwork.

“Every piece of these POGIL activities that students do has a purpose,” Brown says.

“Students are never told anything directly. It’s all about discovery.”

That, Brown says, is a far cry from the “old-sage-on-the-stage” model of teaching in which professors simply stand in front of a classroom and lecture. Now, instead of telling his students what they need to know, Brown uses POGIL activities to give them hands-on opportunities to figure it out themselves.

Students work in small groups on specially designed materials that supply them with data or information for interpretation followed by guiding questions to lead them toward the formulation of their own valid conclusions. The professor serves as a facil-itator, observing and periodically address-ing individual and classroom-wide needs.

The method is based on three main determinations about learning – first, that teaching by telling does not work; second, that students who are part of an interactive community are more likely to be successful; and third, that knowledge is personal and students develop greater ownership over

Chris Bush and Milca Nunez, students in ETSU’s College of Public Health, were named as the Volunteers of the Month last fall by an organization called Project HOPE.

Bush and Nunez, both seeking bachelors of science degrees in public health, are completing their field experience with Project HOPE’s clinics in the Dominican Republic. They have been involved with the distribution of vaccines and with educational programs about HIV/AIDS as well as teenage pregnancy.

“This is the first time we have placed student interns with Project HOPE’s program in the Dominican Republic, and we are thrilled to see their value recognized,” said Mikki Johnson-Maczka, clinical instructor in the Department of Community and Behavioral Health at ETSU and overseer of international internships for the College of Public Health.

Project HOPE, an international non-profit health organization founded over 50 years ago, has been collaborating with the Dominican Association of the Order of Malta since the mid-1990s, and opened two women’s and children’s health clinics in different areas of the region.

Two ETSU public health students named ‘Volunteers of the Month’ by Project HOPE

material when they are given an opportunity to construct their own understanding of it.

“My fail rate on my final exam was almost 20 percent when I was just lecturing,” Brown says. “With POGIL, it dropped steadily to about 5 percent – and that 5 percent is the ones that just gave up.”

The POGIL effect: ETSU professor takes teaching method to new heights

Chris Bush Milca Nunez

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College of Public Health

The POGIL effect: ETSU professor takes teaching method to new heights

Two federal grants were awarded last fall to LIFEPATH, the Tennessee Public Health Training Center that is operated by ETSU’s College of Public Health. The funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) will help continue the statewide work being done by the center.

“Without this money, LIFEPATH would be gone,” said Paula Masters, director of the center and assistant dean for student services in the College of Public Health. “Originally, we had a five-year grant for this center, but funding for all public health training centers ended early because of fed-eral budget cuts.”

LIFEPATH began in 2011 as a facility to help those working in public health fields

LIFEPATH gets new lifeblood thanks to two federal grants

continue to receive training and education. Several dozen public health professionals have utilized LIFEPATH in receiving diplo-mas or certificates in graduate programs from ETSU. LIFEPATH has also provided 150 statewide training sessions to more than 15,000 workers.

In September, the program got a major boost through the two HRSA grants. The first grant, the Tennessee Pub-lic Health Traineeship Program, is for $150,000 annually for three years. It will provide financial support to recruit and re-tain students in the public health shortage areas of environmental health, biostatistics and epidemiology.

The second grant is a sub-award from the Region IV Public Health Training Center to provide training to current and future public health workers in Tennessee, fo-cusing on health professionals working in governmental organizations in medically underserved areas.

Paula Masters

Alexis Decosimo, a doctoral student in the College of Public Health, spent much of last fall creating an organization called “Playing to Live.”

Playing to Live, as of October 2014, utilizes its resources toward the effort to provide art and play therapy programming to children who have been affected by Ebola in West Africa. The environments with the highest need for such services are the interim care centers (ICCs) and communities that house Ebola survivors and children.

Playing to Live will continue to use research techniques and a clinical team to work toward the goals of cultural relevance and empowerment, efficient and concise reporting and evalu-ation, publication and advocacy, and continued growth and development to follow the Ebola crisis and recovery.

For more, visit www.playingtolive.org.

Alexis Decosimo

Doctoral student starts organization to benefit children in Ebola-stricken communities

Four ETSU faculty members and a doctoral student authored an article addressing the independent and joint effects of prenatal maternal smoking and maternal exposure to second-hand smoke on the development of adolescent obesity.

The article was published last summer in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health.

Drs. Liang Wang, Hadii Mamudu, Arsham Alamian and James Anderson – all faculty within the College of Public Health – and Billy Brooks, a doctoral student in public health, conducted the longitudinal study that resulted in the article.

Using data from 1991-2007 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, the researchers examined children ages 12-15 whose mothers had smoked while preg-nant and/or had been exposed to second-hand smoke during pregnancy.

Results of the study showed that obesity was more prevalent among adolescents whose mothers smoked or had second-hand smoke exposure than adolescents whose mothers did not smoke or have such exposure. The odds for obesity more than doubled among adolescents when there had been exposure to both types of smoking compared to those without any exposure.

Additional factors determined to be associated with increased odds of obesity were maternal obesity, not breastfeeding and longer screen viewing hours per day.

ETSU researchers find connection between prenatal smoke exposure, adolescent obesity

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College of Public Health

Colleges make up the AHSC5Quillen College of Medicine• MD Program• PhD Program• MD/MPH joint degree program

Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy• PharmD• PharmD/MPH joint degree program• PharmD/MBA joint degree program

College of Nursing • Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN)• LPN to BSN (for licensed practical nurses)• RN to BSN (for diploma or associate degree nurses)• Accelerated Program (bachelor’s degree in another field)• AAS/BSN Dual Degree• Master of Science in Nursing (MSN)• MSN to RODP• DNP• Ph.D.• Post Masters Family Nurse Practitioner• Post Masters Nursing Administration• Post Masters Nursing Education• Post Masters Certificate Programs in a variety of areas

College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences• Bachelor of Science in Allied Health – Concentrations in Allied Health Leadership, Cardiopulmonary Sciences, Nutrition and Foods, Radiography• Bachelor of Science in Dental Hygeine• Master of Science in Allied Health• Master of Science in Clinical Nutrition• Master of Science in Communicative Disorders with concentration in Speech Pathology• Doctor of Audiology• Doctor of Physical Therapy

College of Public Health• Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) – Community Health, Epidemiology• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) – Environmental Health Sciences• Master of Science in Environmental Health• Master of Public Health – Biostatistics, Community Health (on ground and online), Environmental Health, Epidemiology (on ground and online), Health Services Administration (on ground and online)• MD/MPH joint degree programs• PharmD/MPH joint degree programs• Bachelor of Science in Public Health – Community Health• Bachelor of Science in Public Health – Health Administration• Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences – Human Health• Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences – Microbiology• Bachelor of Science in Environmental Health