Salud y Saludos
Salud y SaludosMarch 2013
In This Issue
From the Dean's Desk
Bowl Competition
The Cutting Edge
Hispanic Drug Abuse
PHS's HEART
Miner Strong Team
Faculty Corner
New Building 
Calendar of events

Friday & Saturday,
April 12-13, 2013
Welcome Scholars Days (events held at various locations on campus)

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Campus Office of Undergraduate Research Initiatives (COURI) 

12:30 - 2:20 pm  Careers in STEM forum, Undergraduate Learning Center (UGLC)

2:30 - 4:50 pm Undergraduate Poster Presentations, UGLC Lobby


Sunday, April 21, 2013
2:00 PM  2013 UTEP Annual Honors Convocation, Magoffin Auditorium

Saturday, May 18, 2013

3:30 PM  College of Health Sciences Pre-Commencement and Hooding Ceremony, Magoffin Auditorium

7:00 PM University Commencement Ceremony, Don Haskins Center


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From the Dean's Desk 
Dean Curtis

As we pass the mid-point of the Spring semester, we are in active planning mode for Summer 2013. There are many exciting opportunities for our students to be involved in research and to explore various career options. Among those are several international training experiences in Latin America. We have now selected the 12 outstanding undergraduate and graduate students who will participate in the University of Texas at El Paso Minority Health International Research Training Program (MHIRT) in Summer 2013. Funded by the National Institutes of Health-National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), the program develops and establishes a collaborative relationship between the University of Texas at El Paso and international universities and research institutions for the conduct of project activities.  Currently collaborating with institutions in Costa Rica, Ecuador and Panama, the program supports both undergraduate and graduate trainees in basic science, clinical, biomedical, health, and behavioral sciences research focused in Hispanic health disparities. Students are involved in a three month paid summer program, involving 6-weeks of study at UTEP and culminating with a 6-week assignment in an international location.

 

A total of 79 trainees have participated in the program between 2006 and present. In the eighth year of the program, the MHIRT experience has clearly changed the lives of program participants, both opening their eyes to the world of research as well as expanding career aspirations to include broadened perspectives on Hispanic health disparities, both locally and globally. Program graduates have gone on to pursue opportunities in graduate professional education in the health sciences, including public health, nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy, social work, and medicine; others are engaged in doctoral level graduate education in the biomedical science fields. Program alumni are also employed in a variety of positions in governmental agencies, health and social services sectors, both regionally and nationally. They are working clinical settings as physicians, nurses and social workers, in medical laboratories and emergency departments, research settings and as teachers in the STEM fields.

  

2013 MHIRT Students
SUMMER 2013 MHIRT PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS
TOP ROW Left to Right: Samer Hadrous, Jasmine Guerra, Ricardo Parra, Alexandra Hernandez, Viridiana Sigala, Alejandra Escareno, and Munir Buhaya. BOTTOM ROW Left to Right: Melisa Cardenas, Areli Guajardo, Esmirna Corona and Elizabeth Preza. Not pictured: Angie Betancourt

The Summer 2013

MHIRT trainees (pictured left) will be engaged in projects under the supervision of international mentors studying tropical diseases, water quality, environmental health, older adult health and quality of life, planning and evaluating health education programs and doing community health assessments. You can "like" and follow the progress of these "MHIRTees" on the UTEP-MHIRT program Facebook page. The Minority Health and Health
Disparities International Research Training (MHIRT) program is funded by Grant Number 2T37MD001376-05 from the National Institute on Minority Health & Health Disparities (NIMHD), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

We look forward to hearing great things from our Miners!
                                                               
Kinesiology Students Win Regional Bowl Competition   
 

On February 28, 2013 in Austin Texas, as part of the Texas Regional Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine (TACSM) annual conference, UTEP Kinesiology students John Moreno, Logan Petry, and Heather Wincapaw earned first place, while Brandon Dougherty, Michael Gallegos, and Marco Suriano gave a strong performance in the 4th Annual TACSM Student Bowl competition. The coaches for this year's teams are Kinesiology graduate students Justin Porta and Dominic Ramos. The Student Bowl is an academic competition for undergraduate students presented in a "Jeopardy" game show format and includes questions from multiple categories that span the entire Exercise Science curriculum and general undergraduate knowledge. This year's exciting competition included twenty-nine total teams from fifteen universities across the state. At the end of the first round, UTEP sat in 4th place behind 1st Mary Hardin-Baylor, 2nd Texas A&M, and 3rd UT-Austin. At the end of round two, the two teams from Texas A&M were in 1st and 2nd place with Mary Hardin-Baylor in 3rd, UT-Austin in 4th, and our UTEP Kinesiology students positioned in 5th place. As each team answered the final question in reverse order of ranking, UTEP bet all 9,500 points and answered the question correctly for a final score of 19,000. Having done everything possible, UTEP nervously waited as UT-Austin and Mary Hardin-Baylor both missed the final question taking them out of the competition. The 2nd place Texas A&M team entered the final round with 10,800 points and answered the final question correctly finishing with a final score of 11,800. The 1st place Texas A&M team had 11,300 points to wager in the final round and were positioned to win the competition when they gave the correct answer to the final questions. The tension in the room was palpable as Texas A&M showed their overly conservative wager of only 500 points giving them a final score of 11,800 and making UTEP the 2013 Student Bowl Champions.  UTEP's victory is celebrated by everyone as they will now continue preparations for the National Student Bowl Competition to be held on May 29, 2013 at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Department of Kinesiology, the College of Health Sciences, and everyone at UTEP are very proud of our Student Bowl Team members along with our coaches Justin Porta and Dominic Ramos.

10 UTEP students and 2 faculty attended the Texas Regional Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine (TACSM) annual conference in Austin Texas, February 28-March 1, 2013. CHS IHS-PhD student Chandra Bulusa presented his research during a poster session at the TACSM meeting.

 

 

 

The Cutting Edge 

Venkata Naga Pradeep Ambati is finishing his 2nd year as a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Health Science (IHS) PhD Program. Mr. Ambati is mentored by Dr. Rebecca Reed-Jones, Assistant Professor in the College of Health Sciences, Department of Kinesiology. Mr. Ambati earned a Bachelor's of Science degree in 2007 from Osmania University College of Engineering, Hyderabad, India, and a Master's of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2009 from the University of South Florida. Mr. Ambati was interviewed on March 6th, shortly after his first manuscript was accepted for publication. In the following interview, he discusses the findings and the importance of the research for public health.  Christina Sobin, Ph.D. is the interdisciplinary Health Sciences Ph.D. Program Director.

 

Ambati, V. N. P., Murray, N., Saucedo, F., Powell, D., & Reed-Jones, R. (2013). Constraining eye movement when redirecting walking trajectories alters turning control in healthy young adults. Experimental Brain Research (in press). DOI 10.1007/s00221-013-3466-8

 

Christina Sobin: First, I want to say, congratulations on your paper! What did you think when it was accepted?

Pradeep Ambati: This is my first publication. When I joined this PhD program this was one of my main goals, to be a published author, so it was unbelievable. It was months of hard work and it finally paid off, so it felt pretty good.

CS: What was the process like for you?

PA: I was aware of the whole process even though I was never published. I worked closely with people who were publishing a lot during my Master's degree; it's just that I never got actively involved with publishing because I didn't know how important it was. When I got close to finishing my Master's, when I was applying for PhD programs and positions, that is what people were asking for, they wanted to look at my research, and that's when I realized that getting published is very important, as important as acquiring knowledge.

CS: So Pradeep, what are you studying, and why are you interested in this area?

PA: Let me talk about the article that just got published. There were two things we were looking at in this study. The first thing was free gaze and body segment coordination in healthy young adults when walking and turning. The second part of the study was to see the effects of constraining the eye movement in healthy young adults when walking and turning. So basically we studied two conditions and we were trying to see how the healthy young adults coordinate their body and eye movements when walking and turning in these two different situations.

 

As far as why I am interested in gait, I've been interested in gait ever since I started my Master's degree 5 years back. I was working in a "Falls" clinic during my Master's and I wanted to pursue my PhD in this area. I looked up different researchers who were working in this area and I came across Dr. Reed's research and I found it extremely interesting. She mainly investigates the role of vision in locomotion. So being someone who's interested in injury prevention and locomotion I read her research work. I wanted to be a part of it and that's how I became a part of this PhD program and her project.

CS: What do you think gait tells us about a person?

PA: It tells a lot about people with different (medical) conditions. A healthy person's gait is very different from the gait of persons from a clinical population. You can look at the step length or the frequency of steps, which is called cadence, and you can tell a lot by looking at these simple factors. It is a very important diagnostic measure that people in physical therapy look at when they're diagnosing people with different diseases.

CS: How is your research" interdisciplinary?"

PA: We have a very unique partnership in our lab. My mentor Dr. Reed-Jones is an expert in motor control and motor learning, with interests in biomechanics. I come from a biomedical engineering background with interests in biomechanics. And then there's Nic (Murray) and Fabricio (Saucedo) who are from Kinesiology backgrounds, and they're interested in biomechanics as well. So we have a mishmash of people from different disciplines who work in our lab. Whenever we start a project, regardless of who the main investigator is, we all sit together, we brainstorm and then we refine our research questions together. That's what makes our lab and work interdisciplinary in nature.

CS: What were your findings in your study?

PA: The first part of the study showed us that healthy young adults had an articulated and coordinated whole body turning strategy with the eyes moving in the direction of travel first, followed by the head and trunk. So this was not surprising to us because this was what our first hypothesis predicted. We expected this based on the past research though no one had tested this hypothesis in a real-world walking and turning situation. That's what makes our study innovative and unique. In the second part of the study when we constrained the eye movement of healthy young adults, their body coordination was disrupted and they used what is called an en-bloc technique to turn in the new travel direction. In simple words they moved all the body segments together in the new travel direction. Now if you look at the past research, the en-bloc technique is used by people with movement disorders in real-world situations. So we were able to simulate that en-bloc technique in healthy young adults by constraining their eye movement.

CS: Right, very interesting, so you were able to simulate and manipulate the clinical condition in healthy young adults, for experimental purposes.

PA: Yes.

CS: And why or how do you think your findings are important for the field?

PA: Falling in America is a big issue with older adults and people with clinical conditions like Parkinson's, and stroke, for example. Also, people who experience falls tend to have a fear of falling, which might cause social restriction. People who experience falls and fractures, people who have been treated for falls, usually do not recover well. Others have reported that people over the age of 65 who have hip fractures die within two years because of other complications that follow the fracture. So it is very important to understand the different possible causes of falls. People who are at risk of falls have an increased risk of falling during turning, and that risk of falling during turning actually increases by 8 times in people with Parkinson's disease. So for all these reasons, it is very important for us to study factors that are increasing this risk of falling. That's the reason we are interested in studying turning and the link between vision and body segment coordination. We want to see what exactly is going wrong and causes people to not use the safe turning technique that is used by healthy young adults.

CS: So it sounds like what you are saying is that in some of these clinical conditions, maybe even normal aging, vision restriction might be one of the causes of falling.

PA: So that exactly is what we concluded in our research. When the visual information is cut off to the brain, the brain relies on other sensory modalities to navigate through the world. Now the other sensory modalities like the somatosensory system and the vestibular system, cannot be our first line of defense. Vision helps us identify the different obstacles in the environment and helps us plan our actions well in advance. The other sensory systems are very important but they come into play only when you trip or fall. So imagine that the motions of tripping or falling are the only way you have of accommodating obstacles in the environment. That is not safe at all. So that's why understanding vision in locomotion is very important, and that's what we are doing.

CS: And what will you study next Pradeep?

PA: Well after finishing this research we want to extend the research question to clinical populations, which we have already started doing. We have been able to recruit 8 patients with Parkinson's disease and we are looking at their performance in both of the conditions that I described, and we are in the process of analyzing those results. I'm hoping to present those results at our summer conference and eventually get that published.

CS: Wonderful. Thank you for talking with me today.

PA: Thank you so much for this opportunity. It feels good to get published and be interviewed.

CS: Keep us posted on your progress and whenever you publish, let us know.

PA: I will, thank you.

 

 

Faculty Accepted to Hispanic Drug Abuse Training Program 

Dr. Oralia Loza, Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences was accepted to participate in the Interdisciplinary Research Training Institute (IRTI) on Hispanic Drug Abuse Summer Training Program at University of Southern California (USC) School of Social Work in June 2013. This is an intensive and rigorous training program that promotes the career development of scientists interested in conducting interdisciplinary research on drug abuse among Hispanics through formal training, mentoring, and networking. She is very excited and grateful for this opportunity. The program is coordinated by the National Hispanic Science Network (NHSN) and funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).  

 

 

Public Health Sciences' HEART Project
The Department of Public Health Sciences has partnered with the community based organization YWCA El Paso del Norte Region since 2008 to conduct an NIH/NIH-funded community based participatory research project entitled Health Education Awareness Research Team (HEART). The purpose of the HEART project is to reduce cardiovascular disease factors in the Hispanic population. More than 700 participants have benefited from the HEART project activities, which include a menu of nutrition education and fitness programs offered by our program partners, YWCA El Paso del Norte Region and City of El Paso Parks and Recreation. YWCA El Paso del Norte Region is an agYWCAency that is dedicated to eliminating racism, empowering women and promoting peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all. Every year the YWCA impacts the lives of more than 80,000 people in 17 counties of west Texas and southern New Mexico through the variety of programs offered at their facilities across the region. Some of those programs include licensed child care at their Early Learning Centers, accredited after-school care at elementary school campuses across the region, Independence House residential facility for victims of domestic abuse, Transitional Living Center for homeless women and children, Summer Camp and Summer Care programs, Teen Leadership Program for high school students across the region. Dr. Maria Duarte, principal investigator for the HEART project is grateful for the support received by CEO Dr. Sandra Braham and their staff members to conduct an ambitious community based participatory research project.  

 

 

Leadership, Innovation, Vision and Engagement 2012 LIVE Conference
Social Work Students In 2012 Patricia Carrete, BA graduate and Daniel Silvadoray, MSW graduate student worked with Social Work scholars Dr. Eva Moya and  Dr. Silvia Chavez Baray, advocates, community leaders and survivors of intimate partner violence, in the Voices and Images of Domestic Violence project. In this project we use the Photovoice method with 22 community participants. Women in the project took photographs and developed stories using the critical consciousness and feminist theory principles. A gallery of their photographs and stories was first exhibited at UTEP during the XII Binational Health Week Closing event. Since its first exhibit the gallery has traveled to Oaxaca, Chicago, Austin for public exhibit display and dialog.  
 
Their presentation  Art to Engender Social Action, was highlighted at the 2013 UTEP L.I.V.E. Conference and addressed the methods and procedures. Personal stories of isolation, fear, embarrassment, empowerment, resilience were discussed. In addition, a bilingual documentary ("Every 90 seconds") was presented highlighting salient stories to educate other women and men on the subject of intimate partner violence. Our perspectives as students on the lessons learned, challenges encountered, the liberating structures used, the role of participatory action research, and the integration of these experiences to our personal and professional lives using an interactive and participatory format was presented. A bilingual documentary produced by Daniel Silvadoray presenting six stories of survivor's empowerment was presented in the conference.  Lessons learned include:  the power of liberating structures in Photovoice; learned how to design and conduct community-based research in a border context; performed service-learning activities (inside and outside campus) in the area of intimate partner violence; and exercised leadership skills. 

 UTEP L.I.V.E. (Leadership, Innovation, Vision, Engagement) is a university-wide student leadership experience designed to provide students multiple opportunities to take ownership over their personal leadership development and create their own leadership experience by picking and choosing the programs they want to attend.  Through exposure to the programs offered students will be able to explore their understanding of leadership, develop a stronger network of peers, interact with influential members of the campus and surrounding communities, and find ways to strengthen their portfolio so they are more well-rounded students and more marketable when they graduate. The conference empowers students to be more proactive about creating the kind of future they want and having the tools they need to make their efforts a success.

 
   
Outstanding UTEP MPH Grad Employed as Harm Reduction Consultant, NCHRC 

Leilani Attilio started the Masters of Public Health degree program with a focus in Hispanic and border health at the University of Texas at El Paso in 2010. Prior to starting her MPH, she served as an Army Nurse Corp Officer for five years and completed two deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as a critical care nurse. She is originally from Philadelphia, PA.

 

She completed her thesis on "Correlates of Hepatitis C Virus among Injection Drug Users and their Sex Partners in Ciudad Juarez" in May 2012 working with Dr. Oralia Loza. To achieve this, she received funding from several UTEP sources including the CHS Research and Travel Committee Research Award, the Graduate School Master's Research Grant, and the CHS Community-Academic Partnership Capacity-Building

Program (CAP2) Award along with the Community and Academic Partnerships for Health Science Research (CAPHSR) HIV, HCV, Substance Abuse Team.  She received additional research training through her participation in the Community and Academic Partnerships for Health Science Research (CAPHSR) meetings and as a Vulnerability Issues in Drug Abuse (VIDA) Grant Trainee.

 

Her commitment to her MPH work gained her the honor of receiving the College of Health Sciences Nomination for the UTEP 2013 Outstanding Thesis Award and was 2012 CHS Honors Reception Public Health Sciences Honoree.

 

Ms. Attilio is now a Harm Reduction Consultant at the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition (NCHRC). She was hired on as a consultant after being a summer session intern during her MPH practicum. Harm reduction was an interest she developed as a direct result of her thesis work guided by Dr. Loza. Specifically, she is working on drug overdose prevention and advocacy as well as syringe decriminalization advocacy. She is working on changing overdose policy in North Carolina and has been presenting overdose rates to policy makers and several media sources to educate the public.

 

Congratulations to Leilani on her success! 

 

 

Miner Strong Team  

The UTEP College of Health Sciences Miner Strong team was out in full force at the Muscular Dystrophy Association Muscle Walk on March 19, 2013.  Over 80 faculty, staff, and students participated in the community walk at Sunland Park Mall having exceeded its fund raising pledge of $500.00.  Thanks to all who participated and especially to Ms. Nancy Torres, Kinesiology Lecturer for organizing the team. 

Miner Strong Team

 

Faculty Corner 

Dr. Rolf Kretschmann came on board in January 2013 as Assistant Professor and the PETE (Physical Education Teacher Education) Director in the Kinesiology Department. He studied Physical Education, Philosophy, English, and Educational Technology at the University of Dortmund in Germany where he also received his B.A. and M.A. In addition, he earned a M.A.-equivalent certificate in Health Education at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He previously worked as Assistant Professor for Sport Pedagogy at the University of Stuttgart in Germany where he also earned his Ph.D.

 

His research interests include Physical and Health Education, Educational Technology, and Sport Ethics. He investigates various aspects of Physical Education with an emphasis on teaching quality. He is an expert in physical activity assessment and planning interventions for health promotion. In the field of educational technology he develops and evaluates approaches of integrating technology into physical education (in higher education). He also applies moral reasoning and contemplation to physical and value education, and the realm of sports.

 

Dr. Kretschmann promotes a physically active and healthy life style for lifelong learning. He refers to himself as pedagogue, philosopher, educational researcher, digital native, and cosmopolitan. He is excited to join the UTEP family and being part of an aspiring supportive community.