Jim Bakken
| This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.jimb@uab.edu • (205) 934-3887
Chief Communications Officer, Public Relations
Chief Communications Officer, Public Relations
As chief communications officer for the University of Alabama at Birmingham and UAB Medicine, Bakken leads teams that set and execute internal and external communications strategy. Prior to joining UAB in 2012, Bakken spent a decade working with a diverse client base at two full-service communications firms. Bakken spent eight years in Nashville at McNeely Pigott and Fox – one of the largest PR firms in the Southeast – prior to launching Peritus Public Relations in Birmingham in 2010. Bakken has served on the board of the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations, is accredited by the Public Relations Society of America and has been a Birmingham Business Journal Top 40 Under 40 honoree.
Given the choice of a single instrument and a single 19th century composer on a Sunday afternoon, an all-Chopin recital would be hard to resist. That's what Marietta, Ga.-based pianist Robert Henry offered to close the 2013-14 UAB Piano Series at the Alys Stephens Center's Reynolds-Kirschbaum Recital Hall.
Artist George Ferrandi, whose site-specific works have garnered attention from coast to coast, will be in residence at UAB beginning Tuesday, March 11, to create a multimedia project that will culminate in a one-act play.
Innovative methods of drug discovery don’t always take place in an academic laboratory. They may start there, but they can also happen in orbit aboard the International Space Station, as protein crystallization research from UAB is about to demonstrate once again. 
UAB is home to Alabama’s largest and oldest heart valve disease treatment program and is one of just a few in the state trained to offer the Edwards Lifesciences TAVR — the only transcatheter aortic valve replacement therapy approved for commercial use in the United States. UAB performs more valve procedures annually than anyone in the state and has since the inception of its program.
Findings of an early phase clinical trial at the University of Alabama at Birmingham suggest that a possible new method of protecting women from the transmission of HIV is safe.
Research exploring several new diagnostic strategies to find the earliest changes in the eye to detect glaucoma is underway at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Optometry. One optometrist says awareness of this eye disorder is just as important as continuing to study it.
Administrators at UAB hope that a recent vote by the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees to make the Department of Biomedical Engineering a joint department of the schools of Engineering and Medicine will help faculty and students in both areas to work more effectively and better integrate research, education and patient care.
UAB will celebrate Women's History Month in March with a series of 15 events, including films, lectures, performances, panel discussions and community service opportunities.
The Young Writers in Birmingham project continues this week at Inglenook Elementary. This is week three of a four-week workshop that brings UAB English students to Inglenook to help close to 100 third and fourth graders write stories that will be published.
Pianist Robert Henry, an internationally known pianist who has performed solo recitals at Carnegie Hall in New York, Wigmore Hall in London and the Kennedy Center in Washington, will perform Sunday, March 9, at the Alys Stephens Center, part of the UAB Piano Series.