UAB Magazine Online Features
Study in Success
Beckman Scholars Jumpstart Research Careers
By Matt Windsor
Tim Fernandez and Bliss Chang are studying the cancer-fighting powers of cell death receptors thanks to the Beckman Scholars Program, which gives undergraduates nearly $20,000 to support their research efforts.
Tim Fernandez has been fighting killers throughout his college career. As a UAB freshman, Fernandez began tracing the cell signaling pathways that allow the HIV virus to replicate. He eventually moved on to cancer, targeting the interactions of the cell death receptor known as Fas and the protein Calmodulin, which play a major role in cancer. By his senior year, Fernandez’s research journey produced more than a dozen conference presentations, four papers in professional journals, an acceptance letter from the UAB School of Medicine—and more than $19,000 in funding.
Opportunity of a Lifetime
President Ray Watts and the Future of UAB
By Matt Windsor
UAB president Ray Watts Somewhere outside Boston; Washington, D.C.; and Atlanta are homes with lovely gardens, lovingly tended by a physician with a flashlight.
At each stop on his path from a prestigious neurology residency to the presidency of UAB, Ray L. Watts, M.D., has spent his limited spare time coaxing the best out of his backyards. Any doctor can tell you that gardening is a great blend of exercise and stress relief. Most gardeners do their work while the sun shines, but Watts has rarely had that luxury. “I’ll look outside at night, and he’ll be out there,” says his wife, Nancy. “He has a vision, and then he just creates.”
“I like to grow beautiful things,” Watts says, simply. But those who know him best say this is less a hobby than the outgrowth of a lifetime habit—for Watts, beautiful results are just another example of the power of careful planning, hard work, and devotion to detail.
Flow of Ideas
Designing Solutions to Community Problems
By Charles Buchanan
UAB graphic design professor Doug Barrett, left, with design students Jennifer Waycaster, Samantha Gibbons, Amy Clark, and Daniel Twieg at the Cahaba River. Barrett's students have designed everything from brochures to apps to draw attention to the Cahaba and rural Bibb County as part of the Design for Good initiative.
Can graphic design save a river—and a region? Doug Barrett, M.F.A., UAB assistant professor of graphic design in the Department of Art and Art History, and his students have laid out a plan to do just that, creating logos, brochures, signage, and more to draw attention to the Cahaba River and surrounding communities. And it seems to be working. A campaign they created last summer in partnership with the economic-development organization >Alabama Engine won a 2013 Ideas That Matter grant from Sappi Fine Papers—one of only 13 awarded to designers nationwide to help them create and implement print projects for charitable causes.
“Graphic design is more than mere styling,” Barrett explains. “Good design is doing deep research and creating meaningful concepts and stories around products, ideas, and initiatives that connect with consumers on an emotional level.” That deep research, known as “design thinking,” is increasingly used as a tool to develop solutions to social issues, he adds. The American Institute of Graphic Arts has embraced design thinking in its “Design for Good” initiative, which has inspired the students’ projects.
Medical Home
Student-Run Equal Access Birmingham Opens Its Own Clinic
By Matt Windsor and Meghan Davis
Equal Access Birmingham is a student-run
organization that provides acute care to
medically underserved patients in several
locations in Jefferson County. In November
2012, the group opened its own clinic at the
Church of the Reconciler only a few blocks
from the UAB campus. Here, EAB leaders
prepare for the opening of the new clinic. Since 2007, Wednesday nights for many UAB medical students have meant a short drive to the M-POWER Ministries health clinic in Birmingham’s Avondale neighborhood. Under the supervision of faculty physicians, the doctors-in-training provide acute care for the medically underserved patients at M-POWER’s free walk-in clinic. But they wanted to do more.
Demand for slots had grown so strong that many students could only take part a few times per year. So the students, who have run their own organization, known as Equal Access Birmingham (EAB), since 2005, decided to open their own clinic, closer to campus.
In November 2012, with money earned from a School of Medicine variety night known as the Best Medicine Show, plus matching funds from then-dean Ray L. Watts, M.D., EAB completed its mission. The new student-run clinic, just a few blocks from campus at the Church of the Reconciler, provides long-term care to underserved patients in the Jefferson County Housing Authority Shelter Care Plus program. EAB also will continue to staff the M-POWER clinic.
