October Professional Notes

 A round-up of awards, presentations, papers and the other professional achievements of SLU faculty, staff and students. 

Faculty

Awards

Anthony Breitbach, Ph.D., of the Department of Physical Therapy and Athletic Training, was recently named a fellow of the Association of Schools of Allied Health Professions (ASAHP) award recipient and as the recipient of the ASAHP Outstanding Member award. Breitbach, the director of SLU's athletic training program, is one of three individuals to be recognized as fellows of the ASAHP in 2018 and is the sole recipient of the ASAHP Outstanding member award. He was recognized for his achievements at the 2018 ASAHP Annual Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The ASAHP Fellow award was designed to provide meaningful recognition to those members who have contributed significantly to allied health as administrators, educators, clinicians or researchers. The award seeks to stimulate the striving for excellence within allied health. The ASAHP Outstanding Member award recognizes Breitbach’s work within the organization, which includes making great strides in research and advocacy for interprofessional education with health care.

“I feel honored to receive this unexpected recognition from such an outstanding organization,” Breitbach said. “I appreciate the trust that the ASAHP leadership has shown me in my time with the organization.”

Breitbach has worked diligently for years in his time as a member of the ASAHP, where he serves as the National Athletic Trainers’ Association liaison. He also serves as the chair of the Interprofessional Subcommittee of the ASAHP’s Professional Education Committee.

“Interprofessional collaborative practice is an effective means of providing efficient quality health care and improving overall health outcomes,” he said. “Interprofessional education is essential to help our graduates be collaboration-ready as they enter the workforce to provide the highest level of patient-centered team-based care.”

Mardell Wilson, Ed.D., dean of Doisy College of Health Sciences, applauded Breitbach’s achievements.

“To be recognized with both of these national awards in the same year is a tremendous accomplishment,” Wilson noted. “It is a true testament of Dr. Breitbach’s dedicated service and many contributions to the larger profession for which all of our disciplines are represented. The honors speak volumes to both the impact of Dr. Breitbach’s work and the national reputation our programs have garnered among our educational peers and aspirants dedicated to the allied health professions.”

Cara Wallace, Ph.D., of the School of Social Work, is one of five researchers awarded seed grants by The Gary and Mary West Foundation to advance palliative care research.

Matthew J. Mancini, Ph.D., emeritus professor of American Studies, is the recipient of this year’s Mary C. Turpie Prize from the American Studies Association (ASA). The award is a major recognition and a longstanding national award honoring senior faculty in the American Studies field for significant career accomplishments in the areas of program development and student mentoring.

The ASA selection committee chose to honor Mancini specifically for his success in his fifteen years of work enhancing and deepening the degree programs in SLU’s Department of American Studies, which was founded in 1963.

Mancini served as department chair from 2000 to 2015 before retiring in 2017. During his SLU years, he also advised 17 American Studies doctoral dissertations and closely mentored dozens of other graduate and undergraduate students.

The ASA selection committee noted that, “It is our pleasure to award you the Mary Turpie Prize, in recognition of your years at Saint Louis University as a scholar, teacher, colleague, mentor, and program builder in the American Studies department there. Your colleagues wrote eloquently about your distinguished career as a scholar, and your transformative role during the fifteen years as department chair (2000-2015), building the program into a vibrant intellectual location for training in the field’s major approaches and methods. The record of SLU's recent doctoral students and the department's placement record speaks volumes, and we can think of no one more deserving of the 2018 award.”

Mancini’s Turpie Prize is the third national-level ASA prize won by SLU American Studies scholars in the past seven years. Other ASA prizes to SLU community members include the 2011 Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for Best American Studies Ph.D. dissertation, and the 2016 John Hope Franklin Prize for Best American Studies book publication.

The Turpie Prize will be awarded to Mancini at a ceremony in Atlanta  this month.

Publications and Projects

A review essay covering a number of recent new works about Mark Twain examined a new edition of the Twain-Twichell letters for which Hal Bush, Ph.D., of the Department of English, was lead editor.

On Oct. 4, Simone Bregni, Ph.D., associate professor of Italian and coordinator of the Italian Studies Program in the department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, met with Martin Dionne, cultural attaché of Québec in Chicago, by invitation of Lionel Cuillé, French professor and Jane and Bruce Robert Chair in French and Francophone Studies at Webster University in St. Louis.

Bregni will be part of a project that involves video game-based learning in second/foreign language acquisition that is planned for fall 2019 at Webster University. The project, sponsored by the Government of Québec, will include roundtables on video game-based language learning, higher education and the job market in the French Canadian gaming industry.

The presence of companies such as Ubisoft, EA, Eidos, Bethesda, Square Enix, Warner Bros, makes the French-speaking  Canadian province of Québec one of the leading regions for the gaming industry worldwide. Effective foreign language acquisition in higher education provides students with the necessary skills to attain fluency in other languages, which increases their opportunities in job markets throughout the gaming industry worldwide.

In addition, Bregni published "Using Video Games to Teach Italian Language & Culture: Useful, Effective, Feasible?" in NEMLA Italian Studies XXXIX's special issue “The Italian Digital Classroom: Italian Culture and Literature through Digital Tools and Social Media.” It is available as a PDF download and in print.

Presentations and Talks

Amanda Izzo, Ph.D., of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, spoke as part of a public panel, “Finding Lost Histories in the Modern LGBTQIA+ Alphabet,” at the Missouri History Museum on Wednesday, Oct. 24. The talk was co-hosted by the museum and the St. Louis LGBT History Project.

Appointments

The members of American Society for Dermatologic Surgery (ASDS) recently elected Dee Anna Glaser, M.D., a professor of dermatology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, as the organization's new treasurer.

Glaser's term officially began at the 2018 ASDS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.

Glaser, a former ASDS board member, is interim chair of the Department of Dermatology in the School of Medicine. She is also the director of Cosmetic and Laser Surgery and Clinical Research at SLUCare Physician Group. A passionate ASDS member for more than 20 years and President’s Award winner in 2015, Glaser has served on the ASDS Board of Directors and is a Lifetime Sustaining Stegman Circle Member having donated generously to the Society.

Troy Hargrove, associate dean of enrollment management and partnerships in the School for Professional Studies, has been selected as the next president-elect for The North American Association of Summer Sessions (NAASS). The organization explores new opportunities and advances dialogue among higher education professionals to ensure academic quality, student services and fiscal success for summer and special sessions.

At the recent 2018 NAASS annual conference, Hargrove led a two-day workshop for new administrators managing summer and special sessions which focused on the key areas of organization, curriculum, planning, finance and marketing.  With more than 16 years of experience in higher education in many different capacities, Hargrove will contribute to the continued success of the NAASS organization.

More than 100 university and college member institutions across the United States contribute to the research, education and advocacy of quality summer and special session programs.

Students

Awards

Christina Vivit, a third-year student in the Physical Therapy Program, received the title of 2018 Elwood Scholar for her unique contributions to community health and purpose as an allied health professional. She was awarded scholarship funds from the Association of Allied Health Professionals (ASAHP) as well as funding for the 2018 ASAHP Annual Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, for her achievements.

Conferences and Presentations

Four of SLU’s McNair Scholars presented their research on Friday, Oct. 5, at the University of New Mexico McNair Scholars Research Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Scholars included Wesley Agee, Maria Garcia, Ricardo Saucedo and Carissa Villanueva.

The students had the opportunity to stay in student apartments on campus, network with other McNair Scholars from around the country and attend workshops related to the graduate school application process. They also received feedback on their research presentations from a select group of faculty and staff.

Graduate students in the Department of American Studies organized the department’s fifth biennial graduate-student visual culture conference, “Reflections in the Funhouse Mirror,” in October. The conference ran from Thursday, Oct. 18 through Saturday, Oct. 20. Graduate students from Delaware, New York State, Texas, Chicago, and St. Louis gave papers, while Yale scholar Laura Wexler, Ph.D., delivered the keynote address. Artist Sarah Paulsen gave the conference’s closing talk.

Papers given by SLU students included:

• Doctoral student Emily Quartarone’s “The Corcoran Gallery of Art and Racial Meaning Making: An Investigation of the Cultural Effects of the Depictions of Native Americans at the Corcoran Gallery, 1869-1888.”
• Doctoral student Cara Lebonick’s “Lewis Hine: Using Pomp and Circumstance to Put a Lens on the Tennessee Valley Authority.”
• Senior Taylor Schleisman’s “How to Target a Niche of Lesbian Car Buyers in a Masculine Market and Get away with It.”

The conference’s organizing committee included doctoral students Cicely Hunter, Mary Maxfield, Elizabeth Eikmann, Amelia Flood, Manu Engstler, Michael Brickey and Alan Blair.

Three American Studies graduate students presented papers at the Western Literature Association conference in late October. The papers were:

• Doctoral student Michael Brickey’s “Buying the Bull: Gender, Class, and the Implied Politics of 'Urban Cowboy'.”
• Doctoral student Tori Cannon’s “What They Are Drawing On: ‘Love and Rockets,’ Chicano Comics, and Feminist 'Zines.”
• Doctoral student Amelia Flood’s “Beware La India! Indigenous and Feminist Disruption in the Speculative World of Jaime Hernandez's ‘Love and Rockets’ Series.”

Emily Lutenski, Ph.D., of the Department of American Studies, also spoke at and moderated the opening plenary event, “Whose Streets? Film Screening and Discussion with St. Louis Activists.”

Grants 

Stephen M. Grote, of the School of Medicine, is the recipient of a new travel grant from ALPCO, a leading producer of research and clinical immunoassays. Grote is first person to receive the company's new young investigators award, the Diabetes Research Travel Grant. The grant was created to help advance progressive diabetes and obesity research by graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and early stage investigators. The program seeks to stimulate and reward research applicable to the investigation and eventual development of diabetes and obesity treatments, therapies and/or innovations.

Grote received the award for his work with the novel peptide neuronostatin shows great promise to the diabetes research community. His research suggests that neuronostatin has an effect on glucagon synthesis and release, while also proposing that the peptide may have therapeutic potential in the treatment and prevention of hypoglycemia and alpha cell dysfunction in diabetes.

Projects

Celine Reinoso, a senior in the Department of Communication, has collaborated on a video project with the staff of SLU’s McNair Scholars Program. Reinoso interviewed several McNair Scholars who were participating in the program’s Summer Research Internship at that time, shot video footage, collected relevant photos and conducted her own research on the program.

“The best thing about working on the project was being able to show all the good work that the McNair Program and Scholars do,” Reinoso said. “I am grateful for the opportunity to apply my talents and what I have learned at SLU outside of a classroom environment.”

“Celine has helped our department with a number of projects – big and small,” said Jamie D. Motley, Ph.D., director of the McNair Scholars Program. “But it wasn’t until I told her about my own undergraduate experiences and how I majored in journalism that we realized we have some common interests. That made me all the more excited to learn about her experience at her internship and how I could create a win-win situation for both her as budding professional and the McNair Scholars Program.”

Reinoso’s video on the McNair Scholars Program is featured on the program website.

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