UAB Magazine Online Features
No Boundaries
Medical Student Enrichment Program Opens Doors and Minds
By Jo Lynn Orr
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Frank B. "Will" Williams examines a patient in a two-room clinic in Peru. Williams says participating in MSEP helped shape his views on poverty. |
Becoming a physician involves accepting challenges. For some UAB School of Medicine students, however, the Medical Student Enrichment Program (MSEP) enables them to go thousands of miles beyond their comfort zone—to Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
Supported by the Medical Alumni Association and the Caduceus Club, the MSEP fosters humanitarian attitudes and cross-cultural understanding among future physicians through international research or patient interactions. Kathleen Nelson, M.D., senior associate dean of faculty development, founded the summer program in 1995 to encourage students to take an interest in underserved populations, learn about global medicine, be resourceful, and hone their problem-solving, observation, and communication skills.
Frozen in Time
UAB Student Reveals Hockey’s History
By Charles Buchanan
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Chicago native and hockey fan Rebecca Dobrinski is staying close to the sport she loves by researching hockey's expansion into the South as part of her graduate studies in the UAB Department of History and Anthropology. |
Life can be tough for an ice-hockey fan in sunny, football-focused Alabama. Rebecca Dobrinski, a Chicago native and follower of several teams, relies on cable television to keep up with most games, and she has season tickets to the Nashville Predators, a three-hour drive away. Now she has found another way to follow her favorite sport—by tracking it through time.
A master’s student in the UAB Department of History, Dobrinski has researched the expansion of the sport into the South over the past 70 years. She will present her recent paper on the arrival of hockey in Nashville at the annual conference of the North American Society for Sport History at the end of May.
Flying South
Minor league teams expanding from cities in the northern United States and Canada brought hockey to the South as early as the 1940s, Dobrinski explains. “The National Hockey League consisted of only six teams from the 1920s to the 1960s, so many players had to rely on the minor leagues if they wanted to continue playing after college/juniors.” The new teams faced the challenge of introducing their sport to potential audiences, however. Nashville’s Dixie Flyers, debuting in 1962, got help from newspaper reporters, who wrote articles profiling the mostly Canadian players, detailing team practices, and explaining the unique vocabulary of the game. One story even featured a diagram of a rink to indicate the importance of lines and circles on the ice. Hockey practices and coaches often were compared to their football counterparts, and the sports writers made a point of mentioning the possibility of player fights on the ice—an added incentive for some curious ticket-buyers.
Even today, teams in nontraditional markets such as the South must educate the public about hockey, Dobrinski says. “It’s difficult for minor league teams to keep a fan base going and revenue coming in. It’s also interesting to see how many of the Southern NHL teams adopt some of the strategies that have proven successful in the minor leagues.”
Renaissance 2.0
New UAB Program Trains Artist-Engineers for the 3-D Future
By Caperton Gillett
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Bharat Soni, left, and Christopher Lowther are trying to build a bridge between their respective scientific and artistic disciplines in order to develop students "equally at home in the left and right brain." |
Artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci never had access to three-dimensional modeling software or advanced computer simulation suites. That’s a shame, because with the help of a new UAB graduate program that bears his name, he might have managed to get his human-powered ornithopter and other futuristic visions off the ground.
The Leonardo Art & Engineering Certificate Program—affectionately known as “Leonardo” to developers Bharat Soni, Ph.D., and Christopher Lowther, marries the concrete aspects of engineering (Soni) with the creative aspects of art (Lowther). The program, which begins this fall, aims to mold students into well-rounded “Renaissance kind of people” capable of taking advantages of the many opportunities in a hot new field, Lowther says.
UAB faculty already have extensive expertise in designing and building immersive virtual-reality environments, says Soni, chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the UAB School of Engineering. The school’s summer institute for high-school students has given faculty experience in teaching computer simulation techniques to the mathematically disinclined. And Lowther’s time-based media class in the Department of Art and Art History, which makes heavy use of 3-D modeling and animation software, presented a near-perfect bridge between the two disciplines.
Storm Surge
Help and Hope in the Tornadoes’ Wake
Although UAB’s Southside campus was spared, the deadly outbreak of tornadoes on April 27 touched lives across the UAB community. As that Wednesday evening progressed, victims poured into the emergency department at UAB Hospital. In all, 134 patients were treated, including 40 with major trauma injuries and 23 who were admitted to the intensive-care unit. Staff added 14 beds to manage the influx by creating an auxiliary ICU.
“The injuries were remarkable,” said Loring Rue, M.D., chief of trauma surgery at UAB Hospital. Debris tossed through the air by the devastating winds created wounds consistent with high-speed car crashes, Rue explained. But despite the severity of the injuries, there were no fatalities among patients transported to UAB. (Rue discusses UAB Hospital’s response to the tornado disaster in this live interview with CNN.)
“Widespread Destruction”
Other UAB medical personnel were at work out in the field. Emergency medicine physician Sarah Nafziger, M.D., headed for Birmingham’s shattered Pratt City neighborhood as soon as the tornadoes passed through. Joining first responders from around the region, she worked all night to triage patients. Nafziger, who trains UAB medical students in emergency medicine and is the medical director for several EMS units in Birmingham, was amazed at the “widespread destruction” she saw. She told the Wall Street Journal that it reminded her of her experiences in New York City on September 11, 2001.
While Nafziger looked for victims on city streets, UAB faculty and staff were racing to track down students and colleagues to make sure they were safe. The UAB School of Medicine, which has campuses in Tuscaloosa and Huntsville in addition to Birmingham, was particularly vulnerable. There was no major property damage at any of those locations and no serious injuries among the school’s hundreds of students. But the Medical Student Services group, led by Laura Kezar, M.D., quickly identified several students who lost homes, vehicles, and other significant items. As School of Medicine dean Ray L. Watts, M.D., explains in a recent blog post, those students will receive emergency financial help from the existing Medical Student Assistance Fund of the University of Alabama Medical Alumni Association.
