Mid-Summer 2021 Professional Notes

06/24/2021

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

Faculty / Staff 

Bidisha Chakrabarty, Ph.D., Edward Jones Endowed Professor and Chair of the Department of Finance at the Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business, has been recognized by the Fellows of the Academy of Management and the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM) with its 2021 Award for Responsible Research in Management. Chakrabarty and her colleagues were selected for their research on the impact of CFO gender on financial misreporting in U.S. firms.

Benjamin Looker, Ph.D. (American Studies) has won the 2021 Dyos Prize, granted annually to the author of the best article submitted to the journal Urban History, published by Cambridge University Press, during the past year. The award is for Looker’s article “Neighbourhood Exceptionalism and Racial Liberalism in the Great Society City.”

Joanne Langan, Ph.D. (Nursing) and Karen Moore, DNP, (Nursing) received Delta Lambda Chapter Research Award from Sigma Theta Tau International for their study: “Assessing Nurses' and APNs' Competence, Confidence and Willingness to Respond to Public Health Emergencies after a Learning Management System (LMS) Delivered Intervention: A Quantitative Study.” They also received the Association of Community Health Nursing Educators (ACHNE) 2021 Evidence Based Practice Award for “Student, Faculty and Community Practice Partner Collaboration: Measuring APRN, RN and Nursing Student Confidence to Teach Safety Measures in Disasters and Public Health Emergencies Following an Educational Intervention.”

Moore, Langan, Kristin Wilson, Ph.D., and Enbal Shacham, Ph.D.,  (Behavioral Science and Health Education) received the $10,000 SLU Applied Health Sciences Grant Award for “Assessing Nurses’ and APNs’ Competence, Confidence and Willingness to Respond to Public Health Emergencies after a Learning Management System (LMS) Delivered Intervention: A Quantitative Study”

Erick Messias, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., has accepted the position of Chair, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, effective Aug. 1.   

Messias comes from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences—College of Medicine (UAMS). He was associate dean for faculty affairs, professor of psychiatry, tenured in the College of Medicine, Professor of Epidemiology in the College of Public Health, and Program Director for the Baptist-UAMS psychiatry residency program.

He also founded and served as editor in chief of the UAMS literary journal Medicine and Meaning.

Messias received his M.D. from the Federal University of Ceará—Brazil and practiced family medicine in rural areas before moving to Baltimore. He completed a residency in general psychiatry at the University of Maryland/Sheppard Pratt Program, working at the leading Maryland Psychiatric Research Center.  He also completed a residency in preventive medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychiatric Epidemiology and his M.P.H. at Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health.   

Messias has held academic appointments at Johns Hopkins University, the Federal University of Ceará, the Medical College of Georgia and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He also served as vice president and medical director at Beacon Health Options Arkansas, overseeing the treatment of Medicaid recipients of behavioral healthcare in the state. In addition, Messias has lectured extensively on the topics of positive psychology/psychiatry and diversity, equity and inclusion.  

Kathryn Banks joins SLU LAW having previously served as the director of the Children’s Rights Clinic at Washington University School of Law’s legal clinic. Her extensive work with children and youth advocacy includes time as the Legal Services Director for Voices for Children and an attorney in the Youth Advocacy Unit of the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office. She is an appointed member of the Missouri Supreme Court’s Committee on Practice & Procedures in Municipal Division Cases, having also been an appointed member of the Missouri Supreme Court’s Municipal Courts Working Group. She is also a board member of the National Association of Counsel for Children and the Clinical Legal Education Association. She received her J.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia and an LL.M. from Loyola University Chicago.

Professor Banks will be directing a new a clinic addressing children's rights in the SLU LAW Legal Clinics.

Michael Duff is a visiting professor from University of Wyoming College of Law, where he has been tenured since 2012 and serves as Winston S. Howard Distinguished Professor of Law. He is a scholar-member of the Center for Progressive Reform and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. He is widely considered a national expert on workers’ compensation law and on the National Labor Relations Act. Duff is the author of a workers’ compensation textbook and the co-author of a labor law textbook. Prior to academia, Duff spent nearly a decade working as an attorney, adjudicative official and investigator in various National Labor Relations Board offices. He worked for two years as an associate attorney in a high-volume progressive law firm in Maine – McTeague, Higbee & MacAdam – where he represented injured workers and labor unions. He graduated in 1992 from Harvard Law School where he studied labor law. For 11 years prior to law school, Duff was a Teamsters shop steward and blue-collar ramp service worker in the airline industry. 

He will teach Torts and Workers’ Compensation in the fall.

Dr. Afonso Seixas Nunes, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was ordained in 2010, joins the faculty as a full-time professor from a recent appointment at Oxford Institute for Ethics, Laws and Armed Conflict (Oxford University). He is originally from Portugal and graduated in law from the Portuguese Catholic University (Porto Law School). He is also graduated in Philosophy (Braga) and Theology (Rome). He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, where he studied the U.S. involvement in Pakistan. He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Essex, where he researched the legitimacy and accountability for the development of autonomous weapons systems under international humanitarian law. He specializes in the use of force in international law and international humanitarian law and the challenges of new technologies of warfare for international law.

Seixas Nunes will teach International Law in the fall and both International Criminal Law and International Humanitarian Law in the spring.

Julie O’Heir (A&S ’06, MTS from Boston College ’10) will lead  the Prison Education Program. O'Heir has spent 10 years with the program first as program coordinator and then as program manager. O'Heir has coordinated and managed the daily operations of the Prison Education Program inside of its partner facilities, serving as the first contact for incarcerated and staff students, SLU faculty, and prison administrators. Additionally, O'Heir's grant writing has brought in over $1.5 million for the Program. After graduating from SLU in 2006, Julie served with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Washington, DC, working for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. 

Fred Rottnek, M.D. (Family and Community Medicine) and Aaron Laxton published “Homeless and COVID-19: Interventions for an Acute Exacerbation of a Chronic Condition,” in Missouri Medicine. 

Laxton is the director of behavioral health at ARCA and a doctoral student in the College for Public Health and Social Justice. Rottnek leads SLU’s Addiction Medicine program and Laxton is a core faculty member in the Addiction Medicine Fellowship. 

Whitney Postman, Ph.D., and Maureen Fischer, along with students Samantha Thompson, Laura Sankey, Kailin Leisure, Rebecca Ferron, Tayla Slay, and Sydney Rosenthal were published in the Journal of the National Black Association for Speech-Language and Hearing. This new paper describes Postman's Cognitive Stimulation Therapy group for low-income African American elders of North St. Louis. This work was supported by the SLU Gateway Geriatric Workforce Enhancement Program in the SLU Division of Geriatric Medicine, and the Neuro-Rehabilitation of Language Lab benefited from a Spark Microgrant from the Office of the Vice President for Research, a Summer Supplies Grant awarded by the SLU Center for Neuroscience and a private patient donation.

David Rice, associate director in Student Financial Services, published “The Year of Jubilee.” Watch a YouTube trailer for the book.

Anthony Breitbach, Ph.D., (Physical Therapy and Athletic Training) collaborated with a group of expert colleagues from the USA and Canada on "Global Leadership in IPECP Research; an Intro to Co-Creation of Best Practice Guidelines" published in the Journal of Interprofessional Education and Practice.  This invited paper was based on a pre-conference workshop hosted by the authors at the Collaborating Across Borders VII Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana in 2019.

Jamie Emery, M.S. and Rebecca Hyde, M.L.I.S., both of Pius XII Memorial Library, along with Amanda Albert of Washington University in St. Louis, coauthored an article which was recently named to the American Librarian Association's Library Instruction Round Table's "2020 Top 20 Articles." The award identifies the 20 best articles from the library instruction literature for the year. The article, The Proof is in the Process: Fostering Student Trust in Government Information by Examining its Creation, includes a sample lesson plan to be used in any course where students must understand the value of and use information produced by the government. The list of top articles, along with article reviews can be found starting on page 11 of the Library Instruction Round Table June 2021 Newsletter. 

Ik-Whan Kwon, Ph.D. (Operations and IT Management) co-authored a paper with Sung-Ho Kim (Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea) "Population Health from Social Determinants of Health Prospects: A Global Comparison" in the Journal of Hospital and Health Care Administration. 

Kwon also co-authored of "Fostering trust and commitment in complex project networks through dedicated investment in partnership management in the Journal of Sustainability, "Has the ACA Impacted Charity Care and Bad Debt?" in Journal of Hospital and Health Care Administration,  "Digital transformation in healthcare" in Biomedical: Journal of Scientific & Technical Research, and "Integrating Social Determinants of Health to Precision Medicine Though Digital Transformation: An Exploratory Roadmap" in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

He co-authored "Vaccine supply chain distribution under Covid-19 pandemic: stressed, resourceful and resilient: lesson learned from the United States experiences in the Impact of Covid-19 on Supply Chain Management" in Diamond Scientific Publishing  and "Trust and Commitment in Supply Chain during Digital Transformation: A Case in Korea" in the Journal of Asia-Pacific Marketing and Logistics were accepted for publication.

The Edward A. Doisy Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Department of Biology received a $514,000 grant from the NIH towards acquisition of a new Analytical Ultra Centrifuge. The AUC is a sophisticated tool to capture the formation of macromolecular complexes 

The Antony Research Group, which includes Edwin Antony, Ph.D., Yuna Ayala, Ph.D., Enrico Di Cera, M.D., Nicola Pozzi, Ph.D., Sergey Korolev, Ph.D., and Susana Gonzalo, Ph.D., from Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Sofia Origanti, Ph.D., and Brian Downes, Ph.D. from Biology, received a $520,000 grant from the Department of Energy to support their work on electron transfer in enzymes .

Nancy Bell, theatre program director in fine and performing arts, appeared on St. Louis Public Radio to discuss “SHE,” a play she wrote for St. Louis theater company Equally Represented Arts. “SHE” was rewritten as a radio play and was released to streaming services in June. 

Patrick McCarthy, associate dean of University Libraries, wrote a commentary for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the impact of an international genocide verdict on the Bosnian community in St. Louis. 

Sergey Toymentsev, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Russian, was mention in a New Yorker article on director Andrei Tarkovsky. 

The Times Higher Education Campus magazine/website featured an article by Hamish Binns, Director of ESL & Modern Languages (Madrid), on gaining perspectives on cheating. 

Timothy Wiemken, Ph.D., appeared on the PDI Perspective Podcast. In the podcast, Wiemken discusses the importance of proper and effective cleaning and disinfecting within healthcare facilities, specifically against SARS-CoV-2 and other important epidemiologic pathogens.

Philip Vaidyan, M.D., was quoted in an ACP Hospitalist article, "Never too late for a career change."

Farzana Hoque, M.D. has received the invitation as a Speaker at the International Panel Physicians Association (IPPA) Annual Conference. She will talk about "Interviewing skills for Pre-migration Immigration Medical Examination" on June 30.

Terrence Dempsey, S.J. (MOCRA) was recognized by Nancy Kranzberg in a recent St. Louis Jewish Light  article about retiring St. Louis arts leaders. 

Students 

On June 1, students in the Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business’ One-Year MBA class of 2022 began coursework in the school’s nationally ranked full-time MBA program. With 49 students from across the country and around the world, the record-breaking class marks the largest and most diverse group of students in the program’s history.

This year’s students come to the program from six countries and 27 different undergraduate institutions, while persons of color make up 31 percent of the class of 2022 

Michael Brickey, a doctoral candidate in American Studies, received a competitively awarded 2021-22 Research Grant from the State Historical Society of Iowa to fund dissertation work in the Society’s archival holdings in Des Moines, IA.

Amelia Flood (Grad A&S '18), a doctoral candidate in American Studies, participated in an virtual, international Ph.D. Seminar hosted by the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies on June 11. The institute, located in Middelburg, The Netherlands, is one of the leading centers for the study of American history and culture in Europe. Flood presented on work on the nexus of immigration law and U.S. imperial expansion that is related to her dissertation-in-progress. 

Flood also presented research on the connections between Danish and American imperial legal regimes and women's franchise as part of the panel, "Empires in Tension: Case Studies of Samoa, Liberia, and the Caribbean," as part of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Virtual Annual Meeting, "Variations on a Theme," on Friday, June 17. Her paper was "'En Mand,' One Vote?: Women’s Suffrage Between Empires in the U.S. Virgin Islands."