The spotlight recognizes and celebrates achievements and contributions staff make
to the successful operation of the college. This is an opportunity to acknowledge
the dedication and exemplary performance of individuals that deserve special recognition.
Adrienne McCarthy, of the Center for Health Care Ethics, is the staff spotlight selection
for the month of May.
Adrienne McCarthy does a little bit of everything for the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health
Care Ethics. McCarthy has been in the center for close to seven years. Her job entails
anything and everything to help the center run efficiently: assistant to the director(s)
(current and past), planning detailed travel for endowed chairs, managing budgets,
planning and updating course schedules, graduate assistant contracts, undergraduate
paperwork for the minor and newly implemented major, coordinating multiple annual
lectures, planning conferences (ex: SLU 200: Health and Social Justice Conference last
fall), maintaining calendars, hashing out details for international symposiums, and
much more. However, the most important of tasks is probably “customer service” which
means making sure all of the center's Ph.D. students and our faculty have a main point
of contact and someone to turn to when they need help finding an answer or solution
to any question.
Jason Eberl, Director of Health Care Ethics, said, “Adrienne is absolutely indispensable to every domain of activity in which the Albert
Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics is engaged. From coordinating applications to
our doctoral program, to maintaining an accurate audit of our undergraduate majors
and minors, to organizing the logistics for major conferences we’ve hosted — three
in 2018 alone! — Adrienne does it all with a cool head and an ever-ready smile to
greet everyone on the fifth floor of the Salus Center. Having just taken over as director
of the center this past January, Adrienne has been my Virgil guiding me through the
nine circles of Excel-hell and making sure our financial and other resources are being
optimally deployed to serve our students’ and faculty’s educational and scholarly
needs. The Gnaegi Center educates over 900 students each year in Arts & Sciences,
Medicine, Public Health, Nursing, Doisy, and Law, enjoys a 100% placement of our doctoral
students, and has an internationally-renowned scholarship profile — none of which
would be possible without Adrienne’s single-handed and efficient management of the
Center’s business affairs and academic records. All of us at the Gnaegi Center are
grateful without measure to Adrienne’s incomparable skills, demeanor, and devotion
to our collective mission in service of our university, discipline, and community."
Adrienne was born and raised in St. Louis and has a master’s in advertising and marketing
from Webster University.
