Professional Notes: December 2022
12/19/2022
Professional Notes is a round-up of awards, presentations, papers, and other professional achievements of SLU faculty, staff members, and students.
Faculty and Staff
"Patient education for breast cancer-related lymphedema: a systematic review” has been published in the Journal of Cancer Survivorship and is now accessible online. Kim Levenhagen, DPT (Physical Therapy and Athletic Training) was a co-author oh the review with authors from other institutions.
Craig A. Boyd, Ph.D. (General Studies) has an article in “Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture” in the Winter 2023 volume on “The Unbearable Sadness of Being Gollum: Envy as Insatiable Desire,” pp. 85-104. This essay continues Boyd's series of essays on Thomistic virtues and vices in Tolkien's fiction.
Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Ph.D. (Theological Studies) contributed a chapter on the ethics of immigration and asylum for The Routledge Companion to Christian Ethics (2022) entitled, "Grad, Immigration, Refugees."
Patrick Corrigan, Ph.D., DPT (Physical Therapy and Athletic Training) and his colleagues recently published a peer-reviewed manuscript in Arthritis Care & Research: Relation of temporal asymmetry during walking to 2-year knee pain outcomes in those with mild-to-moderate unilateral knee pain: an exploratory analysis from the Multicenter Osteoarthritis (MOST) Study.
Sarah Frye (Clinical Health Sciences) published a paper with the Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology about the impact of COVID on Nuclear Medicine Technology Educators. The title of the article is called "Interview with Nuclear Medicine Technology Educators on the Impact of COVID-19 on Programs, Outcomes, and Employers."
Kristine L'Ecuyer, Ph.D. (Nursing) and Diyva Subramaniam, Ph.D. (Health Data Science and Health Outcomes Research Programs), have published their work to validate a Nursing Preceptor Self Assessment tool. L’Ecuyer, K., Subramaniam, D. S., Reangsing, C., Dubois, J. (2022). Psychometric testing of the Preceptor Self-Assessment Tool (PSAT)-40 for nursing preceptors. Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 53(11), 491-499.
Bruce O'Neill, Ph.D. (Sociology and Anthropology) published the article "The Digital Underground: Public Life Beneath the Streets of Bucharest, Romania" in Anthropological Quarterly 95(4), 815–838.
O'Neill also published "Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula: An Anthropological Study of the Tapija Phenomenon in Northwest Croatia." Andrea Matošević. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2021. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 31(2), 161–163.
O'Neill also organized and chaired the panel, "Inequalities of Inclusion" at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Seattle, WA. As a part of that panel, he gave the paper, "Bunkers Below Bucharest."
Both the article and the conference activity are part of a larger, book-length project on underground urbanism supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and SLU's Research Growth Fund.
Director of the Neuro-Rehabilitation of Language Lab Whitney Postman, Ph.D. (Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences), and her two senior-year undergraduate research assistants Serina Daniels and Ellie Hill, presented their Research Growth Fund project “Ultrasound Intra-Oral Visual Feedback for an Adult Case of Stroke-Induced Apraxia of Speech" at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's 2022 Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana on Thursday, Nov. 17.
In November 2022, Nori Katagiri, Ph.D. (Political Science) moderated a panel on cybersecurity and COVID at the 2022 Saint Louis Cybercon. The panel was titled "The COVID-19 Inspired Fraud Spike: How Are We Fighting Back" and drew speakers from Crowdstrike, Cigna, SLU Law and UMSL.
Dhiren Patel, M.D. (Pediatrics) presented "Investigating Colonic pH in Cystic Fibrosis: Wireless Motility Capsule to Single-Cell Sequencing" at the North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference held recently in Philadelphia. Patel also chaired and moderated the session "Motility & Functional GI Disorders." Patel is a pediatric gastroenterologist with specific clinical and research interests in CF, which is rare in the field.
Diana B. Carlin, Ph.D. (Communications emerita) was a panelist at the November National Communication Association Conference on the pardoning ceremony for Homer Plessy. The panel included descendants of Homer Plessy and Judge John Ferguson who formed a new foundation--Plessy and Ferguson—to create unity and understanding.
Carlin spent two weeks in Kuwait City in May as a Fulbright Specialist conducting
workshops for potential women political candidates and journalists who cover them.
She currently serves as a board member and treasurer for a new professional association,
First Ladies Association for Research and Education (FLARE) for which she is a founding
member. She has an article on First Ladies and Sesame Street in the November 2022
issues of White House History Quarterly which focuses on The White House and Television.
Eva Gonzales, Ph.D. (Biology) will participate in the NetVUE seminar, Teaching
Vocational Exploration, which will be held June 12–16, 2023. The seminar is designed for early to mid-career faculty members at the rank of assistant or associate
professor or the equivalent. Participants will learn to strengthen the teaching of
vocational exploration by probing a variety of understandings of vocation and their
importance in educating undergraduates, by developing new courses or course materials
or redesigning existing courses, and by establishing a broader network of faculty
members committed to teaching vocational exploration.
Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, Ph.D. (Theological Studies) was elected President of La Comunidad of Hispanic Scholars of Religion at the 2022 annual meeting of the AAR in Denver. La Comunidad was founded in 1989 and works to advance the interests and scholarship of Latinas and Latinos in biblical, theological, and religious studies. They are a scholarly organization officially related to both the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).
Farzana Hoque, M.D. (Internal Medicine), achieved the Lean Six Sigma Executive Green Belt Certification. She will implement this newly acquired expertise for operational management as the Inaugural Medical Director of Bordley Tower of SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital.
Judy Gibbons, Ph.D. (Psychology emerita) won the 2022 Fukuhara Award for International Research and Service by the International Council of Psychologists. This award is given to a senior or mid-career level psychologist with distinguished contributions to international psychology in research and service. The International Council of Psychologists (ICP) as an organization is, in practice, a community of psychologists from all parts of the world who are focused on using psychological science and expertise to promote human rights, dignity, justice, and peace.
Jeffrey Bishop, M.D., Ph.D. (Health Care Ethics) was interviewed about his book, "The Anticipatory Corpse," for the podcast "Searching for Medicine's Soul", by Aaron Rothstein, M.D.
Darrin Speegle, Ph.D. (Mathematics and Statistics), Sai Shreyas Bhavanasi (Undergraduate) and other recent graduates were featured on TidyTuesday, an international community that discusses and solves data science problems. From Jan. 2021 to Feb. 2022, the group examined weather forecasts and observed temperatures to determine how often there was a discrepancy between forecasted and observed temperatures, what caused the difference between the two and how can that gap be closed. Throughout the year-long process, distance to coast and latitude were the greatest indicator of forecasting errors, while wind and elevation had the least significance. Overall, forecasts errors improved over time, especially so when the timing of forecasts grew closer to the time of the observed temperatures.
Students
Stella Hoft, an M.D./Ph.D. student in the laboratory of Rich DiPaolo, Ph.D.,(Molecular Microbiology and Immunology), has been awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Fellowship (F30) Grant through the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. The four-year grant totals $207,008 and will support her research and training to become a productive, independent physician/clinician-scientist. The research is expected to generate critical insight into how inflammation promotes the development of stomach cancer, which could lead to better screening, prevention, and treatments for this deadly disease.
Andrea Pinto, a Ph.D. student in Department of Computer Science, won Best Student Paper award at IEEE conference with a paper on Localization using 5G. In summer 2022, thanks to an NSF award managed by Flavio Esposito, Ph.D., Pinto was a visiting scholar at the IMDEA networks institute, in Madrid, Spain (near the SLU Madrid campus). He worked with some collaborators on a 5G localization system. The work lead to a publication in the IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN 2022). The work presented by Pinto received the best student paper award, and the title is: "Characterizing Location Management Function Performances in 5G Core Networks." The full author list is Andrea Pinto (SLU), Giuseppe Santaromita, Claudio Fiandrino, Domenico Giustiniano (IMDEA Networks), and Flavio Esposito.
Samantha Price, DPT, (Physical Therapy and Athletic Training) has received a Graduate and Medical Student Preceptorship Award from the Rheumatology Research Foundation. Her preceptors are Patrick Corrigan, Ph.D., DPT, and Gretchen Salsich, Ph.D., at SLU, Joshua Stefanik, Ph.D., at Northeastern University, and David Felson, M.D., at Boston University. This award will partially support Price's research training in biomechanics, osteoarthritis, and statistics.
A Saint Louis University team, consisting of Kieran Favazza, Aiden Rohrbach, and Ben Schneiderheinze, competed in the 83rd annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022. The Putnam Competition is administered by the Mathematical Association of America and is considered the premier mathematics contest among colleges and universities throughout North America. An estimated 3,000 undergraduates from 430 institutions throughout the United States and Canada competed this year. The top five competitors will be designated as Putnam Fellows and awarded cash prizes. In the past, Putnam Fellows have gone on to win two Nobel Prizes in Physics and three Fields Medals in Mathematics. Greg Marks, Ph.D., is the faculty supervisor of the SLU Putnam Competition team.
Jemma Kim (Physical Therapy and Athletic Training) presented this past semester at the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM) Annual Conference. ACRM is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences focused on rehabilitation in the country, bringing together physicians, nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists, music therapists, basic scientists, and others to share the most cutting-edge advances in rehabilitation and related fields. Kim presented her research on dual task gait asymmetry in individuals with Parkinson’s Disease. Her presentation looked at the relationship between dual task gait parameters and the predictability of future cognitive decline in individuals with PD. This presentation/paper is one of Kim's projects in her independent study with Jason Longhurst, Ph.D., (Physical Therapy and Athletic Training) this fall semester.