FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                                                                                   Contact: J. Page Jolly
May 4, 2015                                                                                                                                                     Telephone: (850) 606-8190
(850) 321-3213

NAACP, FAMU, DOH-LEON, & FSU COLLEGE OF MEDICINE PUT HEADS TOGETHER FOR GREATER FRENCHTOWN AND SOUTHSIDE AREA NEIGHBORS
--Community Advisory Council to be new voice for communities--

Tallahassee–The Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University’s College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Center For Health Equity, the Florida Department of Health in Leon County, the Tallahassee Branch National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and The Florida State University’s College of Medicine are launching their own version of a family kitchen table meeting to give voice to the residents of two neighborhoods traditionally overlooked. The Community Advisory Council kickoff will be on Saturday, May 9, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Two meals will be served for the residents who come to talk around the kitchen table at the Richardson-Lewis Clinic Building, at 872 West Orange Avenue, Tallahassee, Florida.

The first meeting will be an opportunity to meet the neighbors over coffee. The goals are to put into place the membership, discuss goals and talk about how to proceed. “We need people who have a mission, who say, ‘I want to be heard, I want to make progress, I want to make changes!’” said Cynthia Seaborn, Health Committee Chair, Tallahassee Branch of the NAACP.

“Leaders and citizens both agree that our agencies need to hear feedback from residents about life-altering issues, and we must work with them to find solutions,” said Claudia Blackburn, RN, MPH, Health Officer for DOH-Leon. “We must open our ears and help our residents make the changes they want and need to create a healthier place to live, work, play and pray.”

“This is the beginning of an era of self-determination and self-progress,” said Dale Landry, President, Tallahassee Branch NAACP. “Too often we have seen others try to define disparities in health impacting minorities, who are neither minority, nor have the best interest of the health of minorities in mind. This is the first step to provide an opportunity for minorities to take an active role in determining what health disparities are impacting them and to take a lead in defining how best to correct it.”

“We must not remain tone-deaf to our neighbors’ concerns. The Community Advisory Council is a very important step in changing the status quo,” said Dr. Michael Thompson, Dean of the FAMU College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. “We will do whatever we can to support current leaders and help grow new leaders.”

“Gone are the days when doing what’s best for a group of people precludes their input,” said Dr. Les Beitsch, Chair, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine, Center for Medicine and Public Health, FSU College of Medicine. “The sponsoring groups of CAC will be a sounding board and technical advisor for the voices of Greater Frenchtown and the Southside area. Good ideas don’t just come from afar. Good ideas come from kitchen table talks with friends, family and neighbors over cups of coffee and glasses of tea.”

“Custom has it that the kitchen is the heart of the home—where nurture is natural and nature is shaped, where talk and ideas flow freely and where every member of the family has a say in the running of their everyday lives. The heart of the home is where leaders grow and goals are born. That’s what we hope for, for CAC,” said Claudia Blackburn.

Invitation

Who: Residents of Greater Frenchtown and Southside areas are cordially invited to attend and help launch the Community Advisory Council. A free breakfast and lunch will be served.

What: Free breakfast, lunch and good conversation with neighbors who want to make progress on the health of the Greater Frenchtown and Southside area communities.

When: Saturday, May 9, from 9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Where: The Richardson-Lewis Clinic Building
872 West Orange Avenue
Tallahassee, Florida 32303 

Call to Register: 850-606-8153.

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CONTACT: Ron Hartung, FSU College of Medicine
(850) 645-9205; ronald.hartung@med.fsu.edu

May 5, 2015

COLLEGE OF MEDICINE IN TOP 10
FOR PRODUCING FAMILY PHYSICIANS

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida State University College of Medicine is ranked seventh on a just-released list of the nation’s top 10 producers of family physicians.

The American Academy of Family Physicians compiled the ranking based on a three-year average reflecting the 2012, 2013 and 2014 classes. Of the FSU College of Medicine’s graduates, 16.2 percent pursued family medicine residencies.

“The FSU College of Medicine has only 10 graduating classes to date, and we are just beginning to demonstrate our excellent outcomes in producing the kinds of doctors that Florida needs,” said Dean John P. Fogarty, a family physician. “We have great graduates matching at wonderful programs throughout the country and a true commitment to primary care and patient-centered, community-based care. Recognition as one of the top 10 schools for producing family physicians is a great affirmation that our focus is working.”

The United States is facing a shortage of primary-care physicians, according to AAFP President Robert Wergin.

“Although we’ve seen incremental growth in student interest in family medicine, those increases will not meet the skyrocketing demand for family physicians,” Wergin said in an AAFP press release. “These top schools are outstanding examples of the commitment to building the nation’s family physician workforce.”

The AAFP tracks the success of U.S. allopathic (M.D.) and osteopathic (D.O.) medical schools in producing doctors who select family medicine residencies, and the journal Family Medicine publishes the results annually.

The FSU College of Medicine was also in the top 10 in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

“This reflects a commitment by the entire school to meet the legislative mandate that created our school with a focus on primary care and our mission of meeting the needs of communities, especially the underserved populations, across the state,” said Daniel Van Durme, also a family physician, and chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Rural Health. “From outreach programs in rural areas that begin before college, through admissions policies that focus on characteristics likely to produce family doctors through our innovative curriculum, this award reflects positively on the entire College of Medicine.”

According to the AAFP, in addition to providing preventive and first-encounter care, family physicians diagnose and treat patients with conditions ranging from a sore throat to multiple, complex conditions such as diabetes combined with congestive heart failure. Research has shown family physicians are the usual source of care for more than six in 10 patients with anxiety, depression or diabetes; six in 10 patients with cancer; and nearly six in 10 patients with heart disease.

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Contact: Erica Huffman
Escambia County Medical Society Foundation
(850) 478-0706 ext. 2; director@escambiacms.org

-or-

Doug Carlson
Florida State University College of Medicine
(850) 694-3735; doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu

FLORIDA STATE AND ESCAMBIA COUNTY MEDICAL SOCIETY FOUNDATION TO ANNOUNCE GIFT SUPPORTING MEDICAL EDUCATION IN PENSACOLA

On Wednesday the Escambia County Medical Society Foundation will present a major gift to the Florida State University College of Medicine. The gift will establish the Escambia/Santa Rosa County Medical Society Scholarship Endowment Fund in support of medical education in the Pensacola area.

The FSU College of Medicine’s Pensacola Regional Campus is in its 12th year of operation. Third- and fourth-year medical students assigned to the Pensacola campus work in one-on-one apprenticeship style rotations alongside experienced and distinguished physicians throughout Pensacola, including numerous physicians who are members of the Escambia County Medical Society.

The College of Medicine’s unique, community-based approach to medical education supports the college’s mission to focus on producing more primary care physicians. The Escambia County Medical Society Foundation gift is in support of the college’s mission and its effort in the Pensacola area. That effort has helped to produce numerous College of Medicine alumni physicians who now practice in the area.

Participating in the announcement will be members of the Escambia County Medical Society Foundation board, FSU College of Medicine Dean John P. Fogarty and Paul McLeod, dean of the College of Medicine’s Pensacola Regional Campus.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6
6:30 P.M.
HILTON GARDEN INN
1144 AIRPORT BOULEVARD
PENSACOLA

CONTACTS: Heather Flynn
(850) 645-7367; heather.flynn@med.fsu.edu

Doug Carlson
(850) 694-3735; doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu

May 8, 2015

FSU COLLEGE OF MEDICINE JOINS NATIONAL EFFORT
TO UNDERSTAND AND TREAT DEPRESSION

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida State University College of Medicine will join the National Network of Depression Centers to continue its work on the diagnosis, treatment and scientific discovery in depression and bipolar illness.

The NNDC invited the College of Medicine to become an associate member in recognition of the college’s efforts to expand the expertise for these illnesses.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for FSU to join a national collaborative effort to tackle depression and related mental health disorders,” said Heather Flynn, associate professor and vice chair for research in the medical school’s Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine.

“Progress in eliminating one of the world’s most disabling conditions has been very slow over several decades, mostly due to people working on the problem independently. By joining forces in a growing network of centers across the country we can bring something unique to the effort to accelerate the pace of eradicating this disease.”

The NNDC’s mission is to develop and foster connections among members to use the power of a network to advance scientific discovery and to provide stigma-free, evidence-based care to patients with depressive and bipolar illnesses.

The NNDC brings together experts from across the nation who:

• Actively pursue initiatives in education, research, clinical care delivery and community outreach
• Engage in interdisciplinary collaborations both within their home institution and across the network
• Identify opportunities for multi-site studies and emerging partnerships

“By uniting in a collaborative network, we bring the best minds together, regardless of their location, to advance the state of the science in the field of mood disorders,” said John Greden, founding chair of the NNDC. “To best leverage the expertise of our growing network, we are about to launch our new Mood Outcomes program. It combines both a clinical care program with research programs addressing depressions and bipolar illnesses. Only by doing both will we simultaneously help people while generating the data needed to develop personalized treatment breakthroughs. Florida State University will greatly contribute to both efforts.”

The FSU College of Medicine uses a community-based medical education program with regional campuses and clinical training sites throughout Florida. Nearly 2,500 community physicians are part of the clerkship faculty and a number of those have expressed interest in the college’s Clinical Research Network (CRN).

The CRN has the potential to include a diverse mix of patients from all socioeconomic backgrounds that is representative of Florida’s population.

“With our primary care focus and distributed model of education, we will be able to expand this national network into rural and underserved areas and promote a much more integrated approach between primary care and mental health services,” said John P. Fogarty, dean of the FSU College of Medicine. “We are excited to be part of this program and look forward to highly productive research collaborations.”

“To date, research on causes and treatments for mood disorders has mostly included specialty-care patients at single centers and sites, which has limited its impact,” Flynn said. “Access to such a broad and diverse patient population is vital in order to develop a better understanding of mental health and other health issues that can be relevant to many different kinds of people.”

Flynn and the FSU College of Medicine have been involved in developing new models of clinical health research collaboration by creating the capacity for researchers to share data and to use standard tools for mental health measurement across diverse sites.

Specific projects that are planned and underway focus on improving care for perinatal mental health, sex differences in depression, as well as factors related to suicide. The College of Medicine also will be collaborating with university departments, community organizations and other Florida universities to strengthen the potential and impact of the NNDC affiliation.

The FSU College of Medicine joins a network that includes centers of excellence affiliated with Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Duke University, Emory University, Johns Hopkins Medical School, Mayo Clinic, Medical University of South Carolina, Menninger Clinic and Baylor College of Medicine, Stanford University, Weill Cornell Medical College, Massachusetts Medical School and the universities of California-San Francisco, Cincinnati & Lindner, Colorado-Denver, Illinois at Chicago, Iowa, Louisville, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas Southwestern.

###

CONTACT: Ron Hartung, FSU College of Medicine
(850) 645-9205; ronald.hartung@med.fsu.edu

May 14, 2015

RESEARCHER EXPLORING WHY OBESITY STRIKES SO HARD
AMONG MEXICAN-AMERICAN BOYS

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Fifteen percent of non-Hispanic white children in the United States are obese, but among Mexican-American boys the figure is a much more troubling 23 percent. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, Angelina Sutin, a researcher in the Florida State University College of Medicine, will spend the next three years untangling the roots of that disparity.

She’ll need loads of data on children’s and parents’ health, height, weight, personality, family dynamics, economic history, social history and more. The good news is that the information already exists: California Family Project researchers have gathered eight years’ worth on nearly 700 adolescents of Mexican origin and their parents. Originally collected to study substance abuse, now it’s available to Sutin.

“It was a great opportunity to look at the interrelations between all these risk factors for obesity in the context of adolescent development,” said Sutin, an assistant professor in the college’s Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine.

The NIH awarded Sutin a three-year grant totaling more than $450,000 to analyze and interpret the information. It was collected in California, which, like Florida, has a large population of Hispanic Americans.

“We will have an advisory committee in Immokalee,” said Sutin, referring to the Southwest Florida community that’s home to thousands of Hispanic farmworkers. The focus on Hispanic health is directly relevant to the College of Medicine’s mission to serve minority and underserved communities. “To what extent do we find things in the population in California similar to the population in Immokalee? What can we take from that to develop more effective interventions?”

Part of what researchers look at is environment. Economic environment includes family income and financial stresses. Social environment includes neighborhood safety and discrimination. Then there’s the “built” environment.

“When we talk about obesity, you hear a lot about aspects of the built environment — access to greenspace and parks, access to fast food vs. healthy food. But that is generally talked about devoid of the individual’s psychological functioning,” Sutin said. “In this study, instead of just saying ‘It’s the environment’ or ‘It’s the individual,’ we can look at the interplay between how the individual’s interacting with the environment.”

Her research will address global questions about obesity but will also have a particular focus on Mexican Americans, especially first- and second-generation immigrant children.

“There’s one very consistent finding — and this seems to be true of all immigrant groups — that the more generations your family is in the U.S., the heavier you get,” Sutin said. “Are there any protective factors that we can identify from the home culture?”

It’s an important question. Mexican Americans are a rapidly growing segment of the U.S. population. And, as Sutin notes, childhood obesity often leads to severe adult obesity. Obesity in adulthood costs the country an estimated total of $147 billion (in 2008 dollars) because it increases the risk of coronary heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, certain cancers and other conditions, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

“There’s such a great need for a better understanding, particularly in adolescence, which is a really critical period that sets the child’s weight trajectory for the rest of their life,” she said. “We know that just telling people ‘Eat less and exercise more’ doesn’t work. There are deeper factors, and that’s what this project will investigate.”

Sutin is the principal investigator. Two of her team members are faculty colleagues from the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine: Suzanne Johnson, an expert in childhood obesity, and Henry Carretta, an expert in geographic information systems. Teaming up with her from Immokalee is Clinical Assistant Professor Javier Rosado, who has worked for several years to reduce obesity among Immokalee children and their parents.

The project also has a training component.

“I will be teaching undergraduates and master’s students in our Bridge program how to evaluate the literature, how to do research,” Sutin said. “Even if they don’t go on to do research, they will have a much better understanding of the needs in our community.”

###

CONTACT: Doug Carlson, FSU College of Medicine
(850) 645-1255; doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu

July 17, 2015

FSU COLLEGE OF MEDICINE STRIVING TO ENHANCE WORKFORCE
TO CARE FOR AGING FLORIDIANS

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida is home to a larger percentage of older residents than any other state, and the number of those 65 and older is expected to more than double over the next 15 years to nearly 8 million.

To help address the challenges this poses for Florida’s health-care system, the federal Health Resources and Services Administration will give the Florida State University College of Medicine a three-year, $2.25 million grant as part of the national Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program.

“The ultimate goal is to enhance the workforce — nurses, social workers, primary-care physicians and the public,” said geriatrician Paul Katz, chair of the College of Medicine’s Department of Geriatrics and past president of the American Medical Directors Association. “We’re not going to be adequately prepared to meet the needs of our older patients in Florida with anything less than a comprehensive approach.”

Florida State was one of 44 organizations in 29 states — including two in Florida — announced as grant recipients at the White House Conference on Aging in July.

“The workforce caring for this population is not only aging itself but also lacks many of the basic geriatric competencies to practice effectively,” Katz said. “This grant will assist us in developing a health-care workforce that maximizes patient and family engagement and improves health outcomes for older adults by integrating primary care and geriatrics.”

The College of Medicine will partner with Florida State’s colleges of Nursing and Social Work, along with regional affiliates involved with the medical school’s community-based medical education program and others. Together they will form the North and Central Florida Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Partnership.

“These partnerships will address health-care gaps through individual, system, community and population-level changes,” said Ken Brummel-Smith, professor of geriatrics at the College of Medicine and past president of the American Geriatrics Society. “We will be developing six innovative projects that will allow for the creation of new service delivery models in addition to novel opportunities for interprofessional and interdisciplinary training and patient and caregiver education.”

The partnership will seek to address some of the significant health-care issues presented by an aging population:

• One-third of the nursing workforce and 40 percent of the physician workforce nationwide is over age 50. Geriatric-specific curricula for the vast majority of these health-care professionals were either sparse or non-existent during their training.
• Florida ranks 47th nationally in the number of geriatricians per capita.
• Fewer than 1 percent of registered nurses are certified in gerontology, and the vast majority of nursing schools have no faculty with expertise in it.
• In 2009, there were 2.8 million family members serving as caregivers to an older adult in Florida. They provided 2.7 million hours of unpaid care worth an estimated $29 billion. But the ratio of available caregivers to recipients with multiple chronic health problems is rapidly shrinking.
• In rural areas, access to health-care professionals with training in gerontology is even more severely limited.

The partnership extends to 22 counties and closely follows the footprint of the College of Medicine’s community-based medical education program. In Naples, the program will bring the care of older patients into focus at a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), the Health Care Network of Southwest Florida.

“Most FQHCs don’t have a strong orientation toward geriatrics,” Brummel-Smith said. “With the Affordable Care Act, these centers are providing care for more older patients, and they need a model for how to do that well.”

In addition to providing dementia caregiver training to the public, the partnership will bring training in geriatrics to medical residents and to rural health-care providers in coordination with the Alzheimer’s Project of Tallahassee. At primary-care residency programs in Tallahassee, Orlando and Daytona Beach, young physicians in training will be taught the principles of geriatric-focused care as a basis for working with older patients throughout their medical career.

Westminster Communities of Florida will invest resources and provide settings at locations throughout the state for caregiver workshops to be directed by specially trained social workers and community members.

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 July 21, 2015

Contact: Doug Carlson
(850) 645-1255
Doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu

FSU COLLEGE OF MEDICINE TO RECEIVE FUNDING FOR FLORIDA HEALTH RESEARCH NETWORK

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. –Working with partners statewide, the Florida State University College of Medicine is preparing to significantly expand the body of knowledge physicians have available in caring for their patients, including more than a million residents of the Big Bend region and South Georgia.

The College of Medicine on Tuesday received notice of $1.5 million in funding to help establish a statewide research network of community-based health-care providers and their patients in order to conduct comparative effectiveness research. The funding represents a portion of $7.9 million awarded to the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), an independent non-profit, nongovernmental organization located in Washington, D.C.

“This type of research is designed to help health-care providers make better treatment and care decisions for their patients by providing scientific evidence on the effectiveness and benefits of various interventions,” said Myra Hurt, senior associate dean for research and graduate programs at the College of Medicine. “That includes things like medical tests, administration of pharmaceutical drugs, treatment devices and ways to deliver health care.”

The OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium includes grant authors the University of Florida Clinical Translational Science Institute and UF Health, University of Miami Health, Health Choice Network-Florida Regional Extension Centers, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Department of Health.

The three-year grant will help the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium establish a network that will include 914 clinic/practice settings, 4,100 physicians, 22 hospitals and 13 million patients, or 68 percent of all Floridians.

The FSU College of Medicine’s partners include the FSU College of Communication and Information, Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, Capital Health Plan, Florida Hospital in Orlando and Orlando Health. In addition, the College of Medicine will be able to involve the majority of the 2,500 physicians statewide who teach FSU medical students.

“The relationships the College of Medicine has established through our community-based medical education program have created a foundation that will bring patients in those communities into this network,” Hurt said.

In Florida, a small and traditionally homogeneous portion of the 20 million residents is represented in research studies that occur in academic health centers. By developing a broad and inclusive network, the College of Medicine will be able to help physicians gain access to data more representative of the state’s population.

An example is the patient population served by Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare.

“TMH’s service area includes rural and urban communities, characterized by racial and ethnic diversity, wide variations in socioeconomic status and a range of health-care needs,” said TMH President and CEO Mark O’Bryant. “The diversity of TMH patient populations and their health-care needs is an excellent fit with research focusing on, for example, hypertension, obesity and rare diseases. Obesity and the co-occurring problems of diabetes and cardiovascular disease are particularly prevalent in our rural communities.”

The PCORI funding focuses on helping the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium harness patient data from a wide variety of locations. Collecting, de-identifying, organizing, storing and utilizing those data is an expensive and complicated process.

“But it’s also an invaluable process,” said Paula Fortunas, president and CEO of the TMH Foundation. “We are dedicated to contributing to research that improves the quality and outcomes of care for patients.”

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CONTACT: Doug Carlson, FSU College of Medicine
(850) 645-1255; doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu

Aug. 13, 2015

COLLEGE OF MEDICINE TO HOLD WHITE COAT CEREMONY

Members of the Florida State University College of Medicine Class of 2019 will receive white coats this week in a traditional ceremony symbolizing the importance of compassionate care for patients and the scientific proficiency expected of physicians.

The featured speaker will be Zita Magloire, M.D., a 2011 graduate of the FSU College of Medicine. She completed the Family Medicine Residency Program at the University of Kansas School of Medicine last year and now practices medicine with Cairo (Ga.) Primary Care Physicians.

The ceremony will be held:

FRIDAY, AUG. 14

6 P.M.

RUBY DIAMOND CONCERT HALL

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

TALLAHASSEE, FLA.

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CONTACT: Ron Hartung, FSU College of Medicine
(850) 645-9205; ronald.hartung@med.fsu.edu

Aug. 24, 2015

FSU RESEARCHER IDENTIFIES PROTEIN WITH PROMISE FOR CANCER THERAPY

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In the second part of his lab’s recent one-two punch, Florida State University researcher Daniel Kaplan said he has solved a cell division mystery in a way that will intrigue the makers of cancer-fighting drugs.

The key, said Kaplan, a Department of Biomedical Sciences researcher, is a protein called Treslin.

“It can target cancer cells,” he said. “Most chemotherapy also targets rapidly dividing normal cells, but this seems to have promise for not doing that. Drug companies are going to be excited.”

Before cells can divide, their DNA must be copied. In addition, the strands of the DNA’s famous double helix must be unwound, via a protein called helicase. One strand needs to be inside the helicase ring, the other outside. As Kaplan’s lab reported last year in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, a kinase — that is, a protein that chemically modifies other proteins — called Cdc7 opens up the helicase ring to let one strand out.

But not until this summer, in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, did Kaplan and Research Faculty Irina Bruck figure out that Treslin was also a key ingredient — in two ways.

“We had tried to reconstitute the chemical modification step in our lab,” Kaplan said, “but we always had a weak reaction. Dozens of other labs published this kind of work, and it was always weak. Always in the back of my mind I was saying, ‘Maybe something’s missing.’ It occurred to me that there must be some kind of activator. So we started trying different proteins.”

Eventually they singled out Treslin. (It’s called Sld3 in budding yeast, which their lab and others often use because the cells are similar to humans’ but grow much faster.) Treslin not only stimulates the chemical modification of the helicase, thereby activating it, but also assembles the helicase in preparation for cell division. Since cancer is the unregulated division of cells, knowing how to stop the division process is crucial to halting cancer.

“We think this is really important,” Kaplan said, “because now we can take this purified Treslin and the helicase, put them in a tube and watch the chemical modification occur. Then we can add small molecule inhibitors to see if we can inhibit that. That should stop activation of the helicase. That should stop the cancer cells from dividing. You kill cancer cells but not normal cells.”

Florida State has filed a provisional patent. It has a year to find a drug company interested in partnering to develop a small molecule inhibitor.

“Dr. Kaplan continues to make important and innovative advances in our understanding of the mechanisms of DNA replication control,” said researcher Tim Megraw, also on the Biomedical Sciences faculty. “His new findings reveal the novel functions of Treslin to regulate the DNA helicase, a key macromolecular machine that controls DNA replication. This latest discovery is very exciting.”

Kaplan finds the work fascinating.

“Evolution has done such a good job of producing molecules to perform these exquisitely, highly regulated chemical reactions,” he said. “It’s just a big bucket of chemistry in a cell, and it’s very precisely regulated and orchestrated. We now know that Treslin is kind of a conductor.”

But how does that one DNA strand actually come outside the helicase ring before cell division? What stabilizes it once it’s out? What causes the ring to close again? For Kaplan and Bruck, seeking those answers is the next step.

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Sept. 4, 2015
Contact: Matthew Reese, Senior Manager of Association Services
FMDA – The Florida Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine
(561) 689-6321; mattr@fmda.org
www.fmda.org

FMDA and FSU College of Medicine Sponsor High-Level
Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Forums

West Palm Beach, Fla. – With a focus on “Developing a Long-Term Care Education Network,” Florida State University’s College of Medicine, Department of Geriatrics, and FMDA – The Florida Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine sponsored this invitation-only event for LTC stakeholders on Thursday, Aug. 27 in Tallahassee, Fla.

Representation included the faculty and leadership of both sponsoring organizations, as well as those from Florida Health Care Association, LeadingAge Florida, Florida Pioneer Network, Florida Assisted Living Federation of America, Florida Association Directors of Nursing Administration, and the University of South Florida. Discussions resulted in some innovative ideas to promote communication and PA/LTC education in Florida.

The following day, FMDA and FSU’s College of Medicine, Department of Geriatrics sponsored three (3) hours of educational programming titled, “Advances in Post-Acute and Long-Term Care,” featuring lectures from Kenneth Brummel-Smith, MD, Charlotte Edwards Maguire Professor of Geriatrics at FSU; Paul R. Katz, MD, CMD, Chair, Department of Geriatrics, FSU College of Medicine; and Polly Weaver, Assistant Deputy Secretary, Agency for Health Care Administration.

With more than 65 physicians, nurses, and nursing home administrators in attendance, some traveling as far as Fort Lauderdale, the lectures were very well received. Nursing home administrator, Katrina Fillyaw from Dowling Park said, “Presenters were clear and knowledgeable. I have had the opportunity to these hear presenters before and they never disappoint.”

Alice Pomidor, MD, professor, FSU College of Medicine, stated, “Excellent selection of presenters. Very clear presentations by highly qualified and knowledgeable people. Those traits are not always found together.”

Maria Rosaida Gonzalez, MD, added, “I found this to be an outstanding program.” FMDA thanks Dr. Chris Mulrooney, Asst. Dean for Graduate Medical Education at FSU’s College of Medicine, for helping to plan these programs in Tallahassee.

“We are delighted to have been given this opportunity to collaborate with FSU’s College of Medicine, Department of Geriatrics on both of these very successful meetings in Tallahassee,” said Dr. Robert Kaplan, president, FMDA. “FMDA is committed to supporting the efforts of developing educational networks and we look forward to expanding our collaborative partnerships across the state,” he added.

“We welcome one of our own to Florida. Dr. Paul Katz, is a past president of AMDA, FMDA’s national affiliate,” Kaplan concluded.