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Professional Notes: January 2021

01/29/2021

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

Faculty and Staff

Awards
Ray Vollmer

Pictured is Ray Vollmer, AIMS education specialist, with the CILC award. Photo by John Fitzgerald.

Adventures in Medicine and Science (AIMS), a youth community outreach program that teaches human anatomy, medicine, health education and wellness to students, has won the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration’s Pinnacle 11 years in a row. AIMS has now received the CILC’S Hall of Fame Award for its continued excellence in education. 

Flavio Esposito, Ph.D. (Computer Science) is the Winner of the Comcast Innovation Fund (unrestricted Gift). This award is competitive and it is given yearly to very few institutions worldwide. Thanks to Esposito’s award on Network Verification using AI, SLU in 2020 was between Stanford, MIT, Princeton, U Chicago and a few others. 

Yolonda Wilson, Ph.D. (Health Care Ethics, secondary in Philosophy) was awarded the 2020 Public Philosophy Op-Ed Prize from the American Philosophical Association for her USA Today op-ed, “For Black Shooting Victims, Sometimes Anger (Not Forgiveness) Is the Best Response.”

Publications

An article by Jeffrey Bishop, M.D., Ph.D. (Health Care Ethics) Tenet Chair in Bioethics, “Technics and Liturgics” (Christian Bioethics 26:1) was recognized as one of the “Best of 2020” articles in Philosophy published by Oxford University Press. 

Timothy Wiemken, Ph.D. (Health and Clinical Outcomes Research) work for the Annual Reviews in Public Health was in the top 10 most read articles in 2020. 

Benjamin Looker, Ph.D. (American Studies) published the article “Neighbourhood Exceptionalism and Racial Liberalism in the Great Society City: Integration as Civic Showpiece at St Louis’ LaClede Town,” in the journal Urban History (Jan. 2021): 1-34.

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Tobias Winright, Ph.D. Submitted photo.

Tobias Winright, Ph.D. (Health Care Ethics and Theological Studies) edited and contributed to the T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2021), containing 47 contributions from international authors. He also authored an article “When It's Right to Take Up Arms,” The Tablet 275, no. 9385 (January 16, 2021): 6-7.

In addition, he authored an article “Thanks Be to God for Paul J. Wadell: Essays in Honor of a Friend and His Work,” Journal of Moral Theology 10, no. 1 (January 2021): 102-107, and he edited five essays honoring Wadell in a special roundtable in the same issue. Craig A. Boyd, Ph.D., of the School for Professional Studies, published a book chapter, “Prudence and Human Providence: Love and Wisdom,” in Divine and Human Providence: Philosophical, Psychological, and Theological Approaches, edited by Ignacio Silva and Simon Maria Kopf. (Routledge, 2020), pp. 14-30.

Sarah Coffin, Ph.D. (Urban Planning and Development) published a report on the state of manufacturing in the City of St. Louis for St. Louis Makes.

Amber Johnson, Ph.D. (Communication) and Kira Hudson Banks, Ph.D. (Psychology) published an “This is What Healing Justice Looks Liike” in Essence magazine. Johnson and Hudson Banks are two of the co-founders of The Institute for Healing Justice and Equity and recent recipients of the Norm White Award for Engaged Scholarship and Service.

The Saint Louis University School of Law published its quarterly Scholarship Spotlight, highlighting the work of law school faculty. 

Service to the Field

Rachael Bradshaw, has received a joint appointment with Washington University in St. Louis to serve as a program director for Wash U’s new master’s degree program in genetic counseling. 

Conferences, Presentations and Keynote Lectures
Farzana Hoque
Farzana Hogue, M.D. Submitted photo.

Farzana Hoque, M.D. (Internal Medicine) received an invitation as a Keynote Speaker to talk about “The Power of Emotional Intelligence for Physicians & Good to Great Healthcare” at the American College of Physicians (ACP) Missouri Chapter Annual Conference.

The conference will be held in September 2021 at Margaritaville, Osage Beach. 

Interviews, Op-Eds and Media Appearances

An opinion piece by Chris Prener, Ph.D. (Sociology and Anthropology), Kristi Donaldson, Evan Rhinesmith, Ph.D. (Education) and Timothy Wiemken, Ph.D. (Health and Clinical Outcomes Research) “Missouri can do more to safely keep schools open during COVID surge” was published Dec. 8 in the Missouri Independent

Benjamin M. Looker, Ph.D. (American Studies) is mentioned in Downbeat Magazine, for how his scholarship on the 1960s-70s Black Artists’ Group (BAG) helped inspire a recent documentary film on the same artistic collective.

An NIH grant to Cara Wallace, Ph.D. (Social Work) was highlighted by Eastern Michigan University Today.

Liz Chiarello, Ph.D. (Sociology) co-authored an article on digital privacy rights for The Conversation with Rutgers University Professor Sarah Lageson.

Alan Howard, J.D. (Law emeritus) co-wrote an editorial on Sen. Josh Hawley’s flawed legal argument against Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Webinars

Carol Beckel, Ph.D. (Physical Therapy and Athletic Training) shared the experience of Doisy College of Health Sciences moving to a single database to manage clinical education reporting, site data, and student assignments in a webinar for the Associate of Schools of Advancing Health Professions (ASAHP) held Jan. 22.

New Hires

Yolonda Wilson, Ph.D. will join the faculty of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics as a tenured associate professor on Feb. 1. Wilson brings to the Gnaegi Center expertise in racial issues in bioethics, justice in health care access, feminist scholarship, and social/political philosophy, among other areas of inquiry. She will also have secondary appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and African American Studies. 

Students

Publications

A research article titled “mRNA induced expression of human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 in mice for the study of the adaptive immune response to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” was published to the PLOS Pathogens Journal by Mariah Hassert, a graduate student studying under James D. Brien in the Molecular Microbiology Immunology department. 

Hassert’s research article has detailed her research into SARS-CoV-2 and its interaction with small animal models to help develop a deeper understanding of the recent pandemic of SARS-CoV-2. The lab has been working throughout the pandemic to help establish an accurate small animal model so that vaccine efficacy can be analyzed. This establishment of a model is critical to research development and Mariah Hassert has published this advancement in her article with the help of Elizabeth Geerling, E. Taylor Stone, Tara L. Steffen, Madi S. Feldman, Alexandria L. Dickson, Jacob Class, Justin M. Richner, James D. Brien and Amelia K. Pinto. 

Tayla Slay, a senior studying communication sciences and disorders, along with assistant professor Whitney Postman, Ph.D. (Communications Sciences and Disorders), published a paper “Leveraging the History of Black Excellence in Medicine to Promote Health Equity for Black Elders at Risk for Dementia,” in the Journal of the National Black Association for Speech-Language and Hearing. The work in Postman Our work was supported by SLU’s Gateway Geriatric Workforce Enhancement Program and the Nasrallah Center for Neuroscience. 

Interviews, Op-Eds and Media Appearances

Kirsten Dempsey (Doctoral candidate, Health Care Ethics) was interviewed on the National Catholic Bioethics Center podcast about her journey towards a career in Catholic Health Care Ethics.