Champion for Change!!!

Community Service Awards 

ECIC  

External Advisory Committee 

Dr. Sue Binder,

External Advisory Committee Chair 

Dean Jim Curran, Rollins School of Public Health

Sr. Vice Provost Claire Sterk, Rollins School of Public Health 

Provost Risa Palm, Georgia State University

Brian Castrucci, Director of Maternal & Child Health, Division of Public Health 

Symposium on Crime, Policy, and Research

Georgia State University

March 10th

3:30pm   

Presenters:

Dr. Philip J. Cook

Dr. Janet Lauritsen

Dr. Richard Rosenfeld 

Please contact  

Dr. Volkan Topalli if interested in attending. 

• Dr. Houry announced the Jackson Katz Lecture coming up March 23rd!

• Students were encouraged to apply to the Summer Scholarship Program to help support their injury work over the summer.   

• Ideas were shared about the development of ECIC's Injury Prevention Practitioner Training Program.

• The March 17th Brown Bag was announced: Elder Maltreatment, an Overview of Dr. Payne and Dr. Strasser's Research.  

• The ECIC Practicum Program matched MPH students with injury prevention organizations for a 10-week practical experience.   

• This year's Faculty Seed Grant winners were announced, congratulations!!

• The upcoming Dataset Workshop was discussed. Please contact us if you have specific data needs you want addressed at the workshop.

• The new ECIC External Advisory Committee members were announced.

Greetings Friends:

• We are off to a great start in 2011. Our first Brown Bag lecture was January 20th. Dean Randy Kamphaus and Dr. Bridget Dever from Georgia State University presented their work on school-based screening for behavioral and emotional risk. The lecture was well received, with more than 40 people in attendance! 

• The next Brown Bag on March 17th at 1:00pm will highlight our Mentor/Mentee pair Drs Brian Payne and Sheryl Strasser. As part of our goals for the mentor program, we will highlight the success and strategies used by an exemplary mentor/mentee partnership in Drs. Payne and Strasser.  One year after we began the mentorship program, we will celebrate and acknowledge the efforts in a reception following the lecture at 2pm.  If your schedule permits, please attend!!!

• Without a doubt 2011 will be a great year. We look forward to your continued support in our Education and Training initiatives.

We have been very busy over the last couple of months with several exciting research activities!

• We received 21 applications for the Faculty Seed Grant Program from faculty across Emory, GSU, UGA, CHOA and Clayton State. These proposals were full of innovative and exciting ideas across a wide range of injury topics. We wish we could fund more of these proposals, but our resources restricted us to only five. We look forward to learning the outcomes of these projects. As always, the success of this grant program relies on our enthusiastic grant reviewers who volunteer their time to help us determine which projects to fund. Thank you to all of you who took the time and participated in the review process and for providing constructive feedback to our grant applicants. Please join me in congratulating the 2011 Grantees:

Dr. Thomas Price - Emory

Elder Mistreatment Cases in DeKalb County, Georgia

Dr. Bryan Williams - GSU

Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Among Middle and Secondary School Football Players

Dr. Dean Dabney - GSU

Building Law Enforcement and Community-based Capacity to Combat Gang Violence

Dr. Shannon Self-Brown - GSU

Understanding Barriers to Enrollment and Completion of Evidence-based Interventions for Youth at Risk for Violence Perpetration and Victimization

Dr. Catherine Lynch - Emory

The Social Determinants and Clustering of Drowning in GA

• We are busy reviewing manuscripts submitted for our special issue in WestJEM with a policy and impact thematic focus. Thank you again to all who have been reviewing manuscripts for us. We are working diligently to complete the issue so that it is on track for dissemination by the end of the summer.

• We have received feedback from colleagues across research areas that they would like to know more about available data sources to use in grant proposals and other reports. We are looking into the best ways to organize a data workshop to showcase available data sources within Georgia. We are open to your suggestions and comments for topics or specific data sources. Please send me an email (mswahn@gsu.edu) if you have specific ideas.

• We are developing an evaluation plan for the Center and associated activities to measure our reach and impact in injury prevention. It is easy for us to keep track of the activities we do but at some point we will need to hear from you about the research and projects that you are working on that may have been facilitated by the ECIC. We are planning a brief online survey to capture some of the details of your accomplishments and successes in injury prevention so that we can better describe the activities underway by researchers affiliated with the Center. We will alert you when the survey has been developed and hope that you take a moment to complete it so that we have great data for our grant renewal.

• Metropolitan Atlanta Violence Prevention Partnership (MAVPP) members are working with representatives from Macon, GA to establish a new chapter of the Georgia Violence Prevention Partnership, Inc.

• MAVPP participants are in the process of developing an annual calendar which lists major events for members across the Atlanta region.  This information will be listed on a master calendar on the MAVPP web page.

• The partners are working together to see if they can develop a regional violence prevention tour in which separate school districts will deploy these activities on a staggered schedule.

• The members are working with political, legislative, and other stakeholders to develop a proclamation in support of the Regional Peace Plan.  Administration for Children and Families (ACF) officials are considerings using the Peace Plan's public health lifestage format to establish similar frameworks for related program areas for strengthening families and communities: teen pregnancy prevention, teen dropout, and economic development.

• MAVPP participants are considering traveling to Washington, DC in a chartered bus convoy in August, 2011.  The purpose will be to attend the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial on the national memorial mall.  If confirmed, this event will provide an opportunity to highlight the importance of the Peace Plan, and the bus tour will link back to tangible science-based violence prevention activities in the Atlanta area.  Member organizations will be able to raise the profile of their organizations through this event.

• Finally, prevention organizations across Atlanta will be joining together soon for the following event: Oneness in Prevention: A Day at the Capital. The date for the event is under review.  

• In the continuum of awareness about Injury Prevention and the effectiveness of the Georgia efforts and partners, congratulations to Safe Kids Georgia for an outstanding Leadership and Awards Breakfast.  Safe Kids extends the reach of Injury Prevention to business partners and the media in ways that government and academic organizations cannot.  We are fortunate to have the leadership of Bev Losman and her team.

• Regarding government organizations, specifically DCH and answering the question "Does our leadership know about us?", a nurse in Barrow County recruited her sister to learn about child safety seats. They were subsequently involved in a crash with their baby in the car. The sister came back to the program and said the baby's life was saved due to the Injury Prevention program. Dr. Pat O'Neal forwarded the note to the new Commissioner David Cook who responded that he was familiar with the program and aware of its effectiveness.

• Brian Castrucci, our Maternal and Child Health Director in Public Health attended the Women's Legislative Caucus breakfast this week and put Injury Prevention on their radar, " if you leave here with nothing else today - realize the number one reason children die is injury".

• Many thanks to our partners for reviewing our Core Capacity Grant applications and the truly wonderful letters of support.

• Please reference the ECIC website for legislation of interest in injury prevention: GA Policy News 

Dr. Linda Degutis, NCIPC Director, will be speaking at this Quarterly Meeting.