End of Semester Professional Notes

05/30/2018

As the 2017-2018 academic year closed, SLU's staff, faculty and students were busy winning awards, presenting research and taking part in community engagement activities.

FACULTY AND STAFF

The speakers and organizers for the Third Annual Saint Louis University Wound Healing Symposium: (left to right) Scott Sell, Ph.D., (Biomedical Engineering), Matthew MacEwan M.D., Ph.D. (Acera Surgical, Inc), Laurie Shornick, Ph.D. (Biology), Devin Bland, M.D. (Tuba Regional Medical Center), Koyal Garg, Ph.D. (Biomedical Engineering). Submitted photo

Symposia

The Third Annual Saint Louis University Wound Healing Symposium was held on Thursday May 24. The symposium brought together basic scientists and clinicians interested in wound healing from across the University.

The keynote speakers were Matthew MacEwan, M.D., Ph.D., chief science officer from Acera Surgical, Inc., and Devin Bland, M.D., chief of podiatry at Tuba Regional Medical Center, Tuba, Arizona.

Presentation and poster topics included perspectives on the development of novel wound dressings, treatment of complex wounds, and optimizing recovery for traumatically injured patients during inpatient care (the Oberle Institute Holistic Care Model).

SLU faculty members Scott Sell, Ph.D., of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Laurie Shornick, Ph.D., of the Department of Biology, and Koyal Garg, Ph.D., of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, organized the symposium.

The symposium was sponsored by a SLU Spark Microgrant and Acera Surgical, Inc.

Awards and Fellowships

Joel Eissenberg, Ph.D., of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, was honored by the editorial board of Missouri Medicine and the Missouri State Medical Association for his work coordinating and authoring scientific papers. Eissenberg has authored nine articles for Missouri Medicine since 2013.

Sydney Norton, Ph.D., of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, is one of ten participants selected for the summer seminar, Österreich: ein Land mit vielen Gesichtern (Austria: Country of Many Faces). She will travel with colleagues to Vienna, Leibnitz and Innsbruck and will learn about multiple facets of Austrian literature and culture. The seminar is organized by the American Association of Teachers of German and is funded by the Austrian Bundesministerium für Bildung and the Bundesministerium für europäische und internationale Angelegenheiten.

Publications

Carlos Segovia, Ph.D., of SLU-Madrid’s Humanities Program, published The Quranic Jesus, a new interpretation of the figure of Jesus in the Qur’an that analyzes the typology and plausible date of the Jesus texts in the Qur’an. The book, published by De Gruyter, will be released in November.

Presentations and Lectures

The Prison Program hosted author Edwidge Danticat as part of its Inside Out Speaker Series on Monday, May 21. Danticat’s work has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and her book, Brother I’m Dying was a finalist for the National Book Award. Danticat spoke at two of the program’s partner facilities. The visit was part of the Prison Program’s semester-long involvement with the National Endowment for the Arts’s “Big Read” project.

Appointments

Teri Murray, Ph.D., dean of the School of Nursing, was elected to the Ranken Jordan Pediatric Bridge Hospital’s board of directors.

Tina Luster, supervisor, Laurie Mosbacher, assistant supervisor, Joyce Meyers, Mellisa Villars, Lisa Columbo, Melody Trousdale, Jennifer Ulrich, Pam Speis, Lille Brown and Wilma Donald, of SLUCare's payment posting department, took part in Red Nose Day on Thursday, May 24. Submitted photo

Community Engagement

SLUCare’s payment posting department took part in Red Nose Day on Thursday, May 24, to raise awareness about child poverty.

STUDENTS

Presentations and Panels

Anne Sescleifer, a student in the School of Medicine, won first place for her presentation, “Crowdsourcing shows lip angle more influential than scar in lay ratings of cleft-repair aesthetics,” at the 51st annual meeting of the Missouri Chapter of the American College of Surgeons. Plastic surgery resident Caitlin Francoisse, M.D., won third place for her presentation, “Three-dimensional printing in pediatric medical and surgical applications – A systematic review.”

Research Symposia

The SLU Chapter of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society held its annual symposium on Monday, May 7, featuring more than 70 posters from undergraduate and graduate student researchers. The posters were judged by more than 40 judges.

Prizes were awarded in three divisions: biological/life, physical/mathematics/engineering, and social/behavioral sciences

Prizes

Physical Sciences, Graduate, "Potassium and the Prebiotic Formation of Peptides," Thomas Campbell, Ph.D., Rio Febrian, Clara A. Hart, Jack T. McCarthy, Holly E. Kleinschmidt, and Paul Bracher, Ph.D., Department of Chemistry
Physical Sciences, Undergraduate, "The Use of a 3D-Printed Microfluidic Device for Capillary Electrophoresis and Electrochemical Detection," Melissa Kimlinger and Scott Martin, Ph.D., Department of Chemistry
Biological Sciences, Graduate, "Glutathione is Important to Virulence and Vaginal Colonization in Group B Streptococcus," Elizabeth Walker, Rachel M. Treat, and Blythe E. Janowiak, Ph.D., Department of Biology
Biological Sciences, Undergraduate, "Neuronal Differentiation from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells of Neurodegenerative Patient with Mutation in CtBP1," Aravinda Ganapathy, KayKay San, T. Subramanian, Uthayashanker Ezekiel, Ph.D., and Govindaswamy Chinnadurai, Ph.D., Doisy College of Health Sciences
Social Sciences, Graduate, "Ownership Trajectories of Foreclosed Properties in the St. Louis County, MO Single Family Market," Luke Henson and Sarah Coffin, Ph.D., School of Social Work
Social Sciences, Undergraduate, "Is Variability in Undergraduate Research Participants’ Task Performance Associated with Indicators of Effort?," Jayne Siudzinski, Lijing Ma, and Lisa Willoughby, Ph.D., Department of Psychology

The event was sponsored by the Office of Vice President for Research, Office of Graduate and Undergraduate Education, College of Arts and Sciences, Parks College of Engineering, Aviation, and Technology, and International Faculty and Staff Association (IFSA).

Awards

Students work with SLUcode-AR, a model for educating the public on how plant health is affected by different environmental conditions that was developed by Vasit Sagan, Ph.D., of the Department of Biology, and the Remote Sensing Lab. Submitted photo

Four projects generated by SLU faculty, students and staff members were selected as this year's winners of the University-wide Innovation Challenge. The contest was announced in January and was sponsored by the innovation department.

Students, faculty and staff had a chance to learn about and to experience the winning projects first-hand on Tuesday, May 8.

Each winning group received financial support for their projects and a $1,000 prize.

The projects included:

SLUcode-AR from Vasit Sagan, Ph.D., of the Department of Biology, and the Remote Sensing Lab developed visual models for use with tablets and Microsoft’s Hololens. Both models are used to educate the public on how plant health is affected by different environmental conditions.
Living Books and geolocation within the Madrid library, developed by Sulma Sossa, Sara Perez, and Isabel Hurtado to improve user experience and facilitate access to professor published intellectual property. This project is just getting started with the next phase kicking off this month. A video demonstrating their both Living Books and geolocation is available.
A multi-user virtual reality environment for remote drone operations developed by Srikanth Gugurajan, Ph.D., from the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and David Ferry, Ph.D., from the Department of Computer Science. The goal of this project was to address the need for skilled drone operators that are also experts in their field.

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