UAB Magazine Online Features

Native American dreamcatcher with article title

By Anna Claire Conrad

Sometimes an internship provides a unique cultural encounter as well as career experience. Just ask Susan Gay, a native of the Caribbean island of Barbados and 2013 UAB alumna, who has spent five months working with Native American tribes in Oklahoma.

Gay, who received a master’s in community health education from the UAB School of Education, recently completed a substance-abuse prevention internship with the Tribal Epidemiology Center at the Oklahoma City Area Inter-Tribal Health Board, which serves the 43 federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. Gay’s work was funded by a federal Strategic Prevention Framework–Tribal Incentive Grant (SPF–TIG), provided to state and tribal organizations to address substance abuse with a focus on underage drinking and prescription drug abuse in Native American communities.

Illustration of boy with article title and words

Building a Game to Fight the Rural AIDS Epidemic

By Matt Windsor

Comfort Enah, Ph.D., a researcher in the UAB School of Nursing, can't build a time machine to help teens avoid making bad decisions in the future. So she's creating the next best thing: a video game.

Working with a team from the UAB School of Engineering, Enah is crafting a simulation of the challenges of modern teen life—including social media shaming, drug and alcohol use, dating boundaries, and the wildfire spread of misinformation on the Internet. The goal is to slow the HIV epidemic among adolescents in the rural South. Enah's dream, if the game proves effective, is to take it to the even more hard-hit communities of sub-Saharan Africa, where she grew up.

0814 coachclark

Leading an Evolution

Coach Bill Clark Challenges the Blazers

By Cary Estes • Photo by Steve Wood

Among the items on display in the office of new UAB head football coach Bill Clark is a quote given to him by his father, longtime Alabama high-school coach Ragan Clark, who had received it from his own father: “What a man learns after he thinks he knows it all is what counts.”

Bill Clark says the quote sums up his attitude throughout his nearly 25-year coaching career. “We never arrive. We’re constantly trying to get better,” he says. “That’s the thing we’re trying to teach our guys. Keep learning. Keep evolving. Keep getting better.”

Animated gif of bubbling beer and steaming coffee

The Flavorful Science Behind Beer and Coffee

By Clair McLafferty • Illustration by Jessica Huffstutler

If you’ve never heard of zymurgy, you aren’t alone. But if you’ve ever tasted a beer, you’ve experienced it: Zymurgy is the science of fermentation. For Tracy Hamilton, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, zymurgy is also a passion—and the topic of lectures he presents around the country for the American Chemical Society (ACS).