Professional Notes: September 2022

09/16/2022

Professional Notes is a round-up of awards, presentations, papers, and the other professional achievements of SLU faculty, staff members, and students.

Faculty and Staff

Saint Louis University’s School of Education recently received a $1.3 million grant for three additional years of external funding from the Walton Family Foundation to support its PRiME (Policy Research in Missouri Education) Center through 2025. The additional funding will allow continued growth and outreach activities of the center. Members of the PRiME team conduct and share research on best practices in education, helping lawmakers, educators and families in the state of Missouri make decisions about education policy and practice.

Their mission is to ensure that the people making decisions and building policies about education have the data they need to build the best and most equitable educational systems possible. The center provides publicly available data in an easy-to-navigate format, in-depth exploration into education topics, and strives to put results in context to show where Missouri stands and how Missouri’s schools and students are being affected.

Martin Schoen M.D. (Oncology) was awarded a $520,721 grant from the Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Research Program to study veterans with prostate cancer. The goal of the research is to use patient data from over 1 million veterans with prostate cancer to understand and predict outcomes of treatment based on both features of the patients and characteristics of the disease. Importantly, many men with prostate cancer die from diseases other than prostate cancer and Schoen will study the interaction between comorbid medical diseases and survival in prostate cancer. Schoen also will study treatment outcomes and survival based on race, as the Veterans Affairs treats a diverse population of men with prostate cancer.

Sofia Origanti, Ph.D. (Biology) was awarded $1.6 million NIH grant to study the deregulation of protein synthesis in Cancers and Shwachman-Diamond syndrome.

Julie Birkenmaier, Ph.D. (Social Work) and Jin Huang, Ph.D. (Social Work), along with their colleague Steven Rigdon, Ph.D. (Public Health and Social Justice), have secured a $295,000 research grant from the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE). The three-year grant, entitled “Developing a Valid Measure of Financial Access: From Conceptualization to Empirical Testing,” will result in the first individual financial access scale for use in practice and research. To compliment available scales that measure other influences on financial wellbeing, such as financial knowledge, skill, attitudes, and behaviors, the new scale will measure the opportunity, ability, and/or choice to open and use beneficial financial products and services from formal financial institutions. This tool will enable practitioners and researchers to account for the financial environment’s influence on financial wellbeing.

NIH/NCI awards a five-year $2,334,549 RO1 to PIs Daniela Salvemini, Ph.D. (of Pharmacology and Physiology) and Susan Farr, Ph.D. (Internal Medicine). The grant, "Fingolimod and Ozanimod for the treatment and prevention of chemobrain," is the result of a fruitful four-year collaboration between the PIs and the Henry and Amelia Nasrallah Center for Neuroscience. The objectives of the research are to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms within the central nervous system whereby chemotherapy (specifically platinum based drugs and taxanes) engage signaling at the S1PR1 receptor that culminates in the development of cognitive impairment, a major neurotoxicity of widely used chemotherapeutics for which there are no FDA approved drugs. The outcome of the work is anticipated to provide foundational support to repurpose already FDA approved S1PR1 antagonists to treat and prevent chemo-related cognitive deficits.

A Saint Louis University team, led by Oleg Kisselev, Ph.D. (Ophthalmology and of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), found that a major protein involved in signal transduction in retinal rod photoreceptor cells, also regulates how these cells adopt to background illumination.The discovery, supported by the grant from the National Eye Institute, sheds light on how the strength of G-protein subunit interactions controls the ability of photoreceptor cells to adopt under changing light conditions. The findings, “Regulation of Rod Photoreceptor Function by Farnesylated G-protein gamma-subunits” were published online on August 8 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Christine Werner Ph.D. (Clinical Health Sciences) and Elaina Osterbur Ph.D. (Clinical Health Sciences) published a review on “Decoding Plant-Based and Other Popular Diets: Ensuring Patients Are Meeting Their Nutrient Needs” in Physician Assistant Clinics. The article examines various vegetarian diets and other popular diets such as the Mediterranean diet, Paleo diet and intermittent fasting and their effects on health.

Oluwatoyosi Owoeye, Ph.D. (Physical Therapy and Athletic Training) recently published a peer-reviewed editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine: Moving the needle: a call to action for sports injury and illness prevention researchers to embrace knowledge translation principles.

Researchers from SLU CPHSJ, and other colleagues, recently published an article titled "Understanding factors that promote uptake of HIV self-testing among young people in Nigeria: Framing youth narratives using the PEN-3 cultural model." As part of the Innovative Tools to Expand Youth-Friendly HIV Self-Testing (I-TEST) study, known locally as 4 Youth by Youth (4YBY), in Lagos, Nigeria, this study used a culture-centered model to understand the narratives of HIV self-testing (HIVST) preferences among young people in Nigeria.

Findings from this study suggest that increased awareness around HIVST, particularly youth-friendly strategies to increase such awareness around HIVST for young people in Nigeria, will be beneficial for HIVST scale-up measures.

Farzana Hoque, M.D. (Internal Medicine) was installed as the President of the Society of Hospital Medicine St. Louis Chapter for three-year term.

Melissa Ochoa,  Ph.D. (Women's and Gender Studies) Fellowship Award to complete her research on women's experiences with everyday forms of sexism at Saint Louis University. It's AAUW's largest and oldest funding program that has supported female scholars since 1888.

Tobias Winright, Ph.D. (Health Care Ethics and Theological Studies) was quoted in a story on "New abortion restrictions threaten immunocompromised patients' access to lifesaving drug" in the National Catholic Reporter. Winright was quoted regarding the Dobbs ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court and how it is being interpreted by politicians and pharmacists as prohibiting methotrexate even for female patients who are not pregnant and need it for chronic conditions. 

Laura Tedesco, Ph.D. (Political Science - SLU-Madrid), along with co-author Rut Diamont, published an opinion/editorial in Spain's national newspaper El Pais entitled "Es tiempo de democratizar Cuba" (It's time to democratize Cuba)." 

Jalil Kianfar, Ph.D. (Civil Engineering) was quoted in a WalletHub.com article about "What to Do After a Car Accident". 

Terri Rebmann, Ph.D. (Epidemiology and Biostatistics) was featured as a special guest on the APIC's '5 Second Rule' podcast in an episode focused on the "Between a Rock and Hard Place: APIC's White Paper and Call to Action."

Annie Garner, Ph.D. (Psychology) was interviewed by the American Psychological Association's publication, Monitor on Psychology September issue, on her research on teen drivers with ADHD.

Enbal Shacham, Ph.D. (Public Health and Social Justice) recently participated on a panel discussion discussing “Informatics and Data Science in addressing Global Health, Climate, and Ecological Challenges” at the 11th Annual Missouri Data Science and Informatics Symposium.

Maria Romo-Palafox, Ph.D. (Nutrition and Dietetics),  student Mohammed Ashkar (College for Public Health and Social Justice) and the entire La Salud es Sabrosa team won best poster at the Cambio de Colores conference. The program provided nutrition education and recipe ingredients to primarily Spanish speaking families in St. Louis to promote healthy habits. 

Amanda Barton, Ph.D. (Dean of Students office) presented at the 22nd Biennial New Chaucer Society Congress Conference at University of Durham (UK) on July 13. She presented on a portion of her dissertation entitled, "Women and Woes: Sensing Eve's Legacy" on a panel for Medieval Literature & the Humanities.

Students

Sahiti Kuppa, a graduate student in Edwin Antony's, Ph.D.,  group in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department has been awarded a F99/K00 grant from the National Cancer Institute. This prestigious national award is the first for a SLU student and supports her research on genomic instability and associated cancers. The award supports Kuppa's Ph.D research in addition to four years of postdoctoral research.

Social Work Ph.D. student, Ebow Nketsiah, MSW, was recently selected as a Fellow for the 11th cohort of the Association for Gerontology Education in Social Work’s (AGESW) Gerontological Social Work Pre-Dissertation Fellows Program. This honor recognizes Ph.D. students with the potential for advancing the field of academic gerontological social work, and he is the first Saint Louis University student to receive such an honor. In the program, Nketsiah will receive training from nationally recognized faculty experts in gerontological social work on navigating the dissertation process, working with quantitative and qualitative methods, writing for publication, and ongoing mentorship from AGESW members.

In his second year of the doctoral program, Nketsiah's research interest focus primarily on dementia. In addition to engaging in dementia-related research, he hopes to develop a “Dementia Clinic and Aging Research Center” in his home county of Ghana to raise awareness of and older adults needs throughout Africa.

Kyli Patterson (Public Health and Social Justice) was recently named to the ASPPH 2022-2023 'This Is Public Health (TIPH) Ambassador' cohort. This opportunity will allow Patterson to network with graduate students from other universities, meet with prospective students to discuss what a graduate program is like, and share her passion for public health. Patterson also will be taking over the This Is Public Health social media pages in March to highlight diarrheal diseases & World Water Day.

Farzana Hoque, M.D. (Internal Medicine) was the recipient of the "2022 Clinical Awards - Physician of the Year." Hoque is the only physician who received this award from the St. Louis region at the 2022 SSM Health Annual Clinical Symposium.  

Ariella Teater, a doctoral candidate in Nursing and Clinical Outcomes Manager for SLUCare Physician Group, was interviewed on Sigma Theta Tau's "A Nurse First" podcast about nurses and grief.

Amelia Flood, a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, presented a virtual lecture for the Caribbean Genealogy Library at Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, titled, "An Imperial Stranding: The Case of Leander Hassell Holder." The lecture considered the case of a former Danish West Indian woman whose interrupted travels reveal the complex intersections between U.S. imperial expansion, restrictive immigration regimes, and imperial transitions in the early 20th Century. Flood's lecture was covered by the Source newspapers, a local Virgin Islands media outlet.