Page 6 - IBP In Focus Newsletter

6 IN FOCUS t ISSUE 2021-2022
t EDUCATION PROGRAM UPDATES
Dr. Lisa Carney Anderson
Director of Education
This was the year of the big pivot to on-line education and we successfully met our mission in IBP because of the teamwork of our teaching faculty in Anatomy and Physiology. Together we taught 40 courses to a combined enrollment of 3100 undergraduate, graduate and professional students.
Through our efforts we brought $6.2 million of tuition to the University. Our 6 fulltime teaching faculty are Drs. Anderson, Barnett, Cook, Knigge, Olson, Weinhaus and Wu. In addition, the IBP research faculty all contribute to our teaching excel- lence as well as about a dozen part time faculty and over 50 teaching assistants!
The Physiology and Anatomy faculty continue to educate phy- siology majors, biomedical engineering students, allied health and pre-allied health students through our undergraduate and professional programs. Physiology in Medicine. Directed
by Dr. Barnett and Physiology of Immunology in Disease, direct- ed by Dr. Xavier Revelo are new courses that were very well received by our students. Dr. Eric Batchelor, Dr. Julia Liu and Dr. Yuk Sham are preparing a new course, Systems and Computational Physiology which will be offered this coming Spring 2022.
The Medical Gross Anatomy/Embryology course was a shining star in a teaching landscape severely impacted by the pan- demic. Dr. Weinhaus and his team developed safety proce- dures that enabled students to take the gross anatomy in person. Students showed their appreciation for this in-person course by rating the value of Gross Anatomy/Embryology 4.9 on a scale of 5. Medical Physiology under the Direction of Dr. Anderson also received great evaluations from the students; they rated the value of physiology for their medical education 4.6 out of 5.
Thank you to all our teachers. On average our undergraduate courses are rated as a 5.0 on a scale of 6. Our graduate courses are rated 5.2 on a scale of 6. Because of our teachers, we are meeting the Dean’s excellence metrics!
Undergraduate Physiology 2020-2021
Vincent A. Barnett
Director of Undergraduate Education
Diversity and Equity. Over the past few years we have be- come aware that our Human Physiology major can boast one of the most diverse student populations in the basic scienc- es. Our enrollment is consistently >40% students of color and >60% female. While our diversity is worthy of acknow- ledgement, our service to students who are underrepre- sented in science and medicine has been largely passive. After reflection on the summer’s unrest, Dr. Metzger charged a faculty committee to design a paid research internship program to encourage students who are underrepresented in research and/or medicine to join our research enterprise. For our purposes, underrepresented is broadly defined and includes a variety of criteria such as being the first genera- tion in college, an underrepresented minority, students with financial hardships and other personal challenges to being a full-time student. It is our hope that our new program, INtegrative biology and Physiology Undergraduate Training (INPUT) will eliminate the need for off campus employment and provide research and academic support to increase the chances of professional success in science for the students who participate.
While we were in the planning
phases for the INPUT program,
we became aware of an Ameri-
can Heart Association intern-
ship program for undergraduate
juniors and seniors. The depart-
ment applied for this program
and won a three-year grant to supportresearchinternshipsfor
upper-level students. We reviewed applications at the end of the spring term and inducted our first cohort of students the summer of 2021. Dr. Wu coined the term Undergraduate Physiology Research In Medicine and Education UPRIME to describe the program and we enrolled Alisha Zhu – men- tored by Jesse Williams, Peyton Nelson – mentored by Julia Liu, Brianna Clifton – mentored by Emilyn Alejandro, Jeffy Jeffy–mentoredbyYukShamandChrisTadros–mentored by Tim O’Connell. The students were excellent and in addition to their research, they had weekly meetings with Drs. Anderson, Barnett and Wu to discuss their work and the weekly graduate student seminars. One of our goals will be to provide research experience to students via INPUT that would make them strong candidates for UPRIME later in their undergraduate career.
Dr. Barnett