Publications

Nov 13, 2017

 

FSU colleges collaborate to pave smoother pathway into health professions

Jun 23, 2016

 Alumna and student w patient - Copy1Every year, thousands of new students arrive at Florida State hoping to enter a career in health care. For a variety of reasons, most of these would-be physicians, nurses, pharmacists and others wind up in different careers — and communities lose out on the health care they could have provided.

In an effort to turn that trend around, fully half of FSU’s colleges are working together to create a student-friendly pathway into the health professions. Called the Interdisciplinary Medical Sciences Program (IMS for short), it’s unlike anything else in the country — and with the provost’s blessing it’s on a super-fast track.

Students are taking part in orientation sessions this summer. The curriculum is being fine-tuned for the fall semester. And hopes are running high.

“It’s an exciting moment for Florida State,” said Provost Sally McRorie. “We will vigorously pursue this innovative approach to preparing students and helping them find jobs in medical fields. I predict we will become the destination for students from Florida who want access to the full range of health professions.”

Most of the program’s courses already exist, though some are being revised with pre-health students in mind. The biggest change is in the way the students are guided along the pathway – and in the sense that the participating colleges are all working together as program partners.

Some universities have premed programs, College of Medicine Senior Associate Dean Myra Hurt said, but they’re not as flexible, all-encompassing or student-centered as this one.

“There’s no straightforward path to figure out, ‘Do I really want to go into the health professions?’” said Hurt, who conceived this idea in 2012. “Eventually we’ll see such a difference in how students feel about the path they’re on.”

Representatives from seven colleges served on a taskforce charged with getting IMS off the ground: Arts & Sciences (Departments of Biological Science, Chemistry and Psychology); Communication and Information; Human Sciences; Medicine; Nursing; Social Sciences and Public Policy; and Social Work. In addition, students from the College of Business will be conducting case studies to determine the best way to recruit the right students as well as employers.

Universities everywhere are wrestling with the same challenge. Four years ago, Hurt helped lead a Harvard Macy Institute session where participants from around the world focused on creating an interdisciplinary path to medical school. Hurt, the driving force behind the creation of FSU’s medical school, is no stranger to big ideas. She immediately started wondering how she could adapt this one for FSU. She ran her ideas past several people but got nowhere — until McRorie became provost. “We’re going to do this,” McRorie said.

The timing was good. FSU needed to boost its total number of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) graduates; cut the time to graduation; and increase the number of graduates getting jobs with good salaries.

Here’s a sampling of what IMS offers students:

Choice of three majors. The pathway has three branches: Pre-Professionals, including physicians, nurses, physician assistants and pharmacists; Patient Care in the Community, including social workers, patient navigators and health advocates; and Health Policy and Technology, including social scientists and health informaticists.
Core sciences for everyone. During the first two years, every IMS student will take the core sciences. “When you finish this,” said Associate Dean Helen Livingston, Hurt’s go-to curriculum planner, “you have a fundamental basis for any field in health care, wherever you go.”
Real-world experiences. Science is important, but it’s only part of the picture. So every student will have regular contact with health professionals in the community, through shadowing and seminars. They’ll get answers to key career questions: “What professions are available?” “Could I see myself doing this job?” “Hours? Income? Training required?” “What are the social and psychological components of being in health professions?”
Flexibility. In the past, students sometimes chose a narrowly defined major without all the information they needed — then wasted time and money changing their major. Sometimes they ended up with a degree but no profession. The interdisciplinary approach provides new opportunities to take electives and explore options. “For example, there are a number of College of Human Sciences courses, like child development, that someone interested in pediatrics could take,” Hurt said. “That really wasn’t an option before.”
Continual advising. Students don’t come to college equally prepared. Some get poor advising along the way. Some don’t cope well with life’s surprises. “So we hope to provide lots of guidance,” Livingston said. “Not just in an academic sense, but in terms of how they’re growing personally and professionally and helping them determine a career path.”
Team-based approach. These future health professionals will work side by side, mirroring the real world’s increasing demand for collaboration.
Hurt predicts as many as 140 students will sign up this first year. One of those pioneers is Emilie Miller. Right now she hopes to become a physician assistant focused on pediatrics, but she appreciates IMS’ array of options.

“I had planned to major in nursing as a bridge to the career path I wanted,” said Miller, who graduated in May from Tallahassee’s St. John Paul II Catholic High School, but then her mom learned about IMS. “After reading the description, it was exactly what I was looking for. I am beyond excited to be a part of something so new and creative.”

In some cases, IMS has been an opportunity for departments to carry out changes they’d already been considering.

“Chemistry is called the ‘Central Science’ because it is so strongly tied to all of the physical and biological sciences, and students in each of these majors require a solid grounding in the basic principles of chemical structure and reactivity,” said Tim Logan, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “These topics are currently taught in a framework that has worked well for generations. However, there is increasing awareness that the full traditional chemistry curriculum is not necessarily needed by non-chemistry students and, in particular, by premedical students. We are trying to accommodate changes in the education needs of premedical/pre-professional students by designing these new courses.”

Judith McFetridge-Durdle, dean of the College of Nursing, particularly likes the options IMS offers her students.

“As a limited-access major, the College of Nursing must turn away hundreds of qualified applicants each year,” she said. “The IMS program will allow students who are not accepted into the Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program at the end of their sophomore year to continue on and graduate with a degree from Florida State that will prepare them for a career in another health-related field.”

Late last month, Florida Gov. Rick Scott hosted a two-day Degrees to Jobs Summit. College of Medicine Dean John P. Fogarty thinks the IMS program fits right in.

“We want our graduates to be fully prepared to get jobs in this economy,” Fogarty said. “Even during the lowest part of the recent recession, health care was still a dependable career for employment. With this program, we can make sure that our students get a great education while meeting the health-care needs of our state and nation.”

IMS is based in the College of Medicine, and Hurt and Livingston will direct it. Hurt predicts that in five years, if things go well, there may be 800 IMS students. “Eventually,” she said, “it could be a lot. It could be a whole lot.”

Learn More

FSU Departments Collaborate To Identify ‘Master Regulator’ In Cell Division

Mar 20, 2015

raed.rizkallahTALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Three years after discovering that a single, unidentified mechanism was modifying about 800 proteins simultaneously during cell division, Florida State University researchers have identified that mystery enzyme.

It’s TOPK, an enzyme that belongs to the family of protein kinases — which orchestrate much of the networking and signaling in cells. The discovery, led by College of Medicine researcher Raed Rizkallah in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, is significant because it advances our understanding of cell division and could lead to therapies that pinpoint cancerous cells without destroying healthy ones.

“This is a very promising target for cancer treatment,” said Myra Hurt, senior associate dean of the College of Medicine. “Some of the new generation of cancer drugs are kinase inhibitors.”

Rizkallah, who works with Hurt, also collaborated with the medical school’s Translational Science Laboratory and FSU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The paper appeared in the online edition of Oncotarget, a specialized journal that publishes cancer-related research.

Other researchers had detected TOPK at high levels in many types of cancer, but Rizkallah is the first to identify its functional significance to dividing cells.

Proteins are the workhorses in cells, according to Rizkallah.

“Some continuously interact with the DNA, but not during that stage where cells are dividing. Something makes them back off — an enzyme or enzymes,” he said. “The shutting down of gene expression during cell division has been known for a long time, but people haven’t fully understood all its underlying mechanisms.”

So it was a challenge to learn the identity of this “master mitotic regulator” that can modify such a large family of proteins at the same time. Rizkallah used a fishing analogy to describe his work.

“We had the fish: Enzyme X,” he said. “We had the bait” — a molecule that the Hurt lab had found to attract the enzyme. “But it wasn’t on a hook, so we couldn’t pull out Enzyme X to examine and identify it. A chemical modification by chemistry Associate Professor Greg Dudley and his graduate student helped us put a hook in it.”

Next, he needed the cutting-edge help of the mass spectrometer in the Translational Science Lab, which analyzed exactly what was in the purified complexes. Then Rizkallah went down a list of 40 to 50 candidate proteins, comparing each one with what he knew about Enzyme X. Finally, he concluded that Enzyme X was actually TOPK. Now he’s following up on how TOPK is activated and how it’s regulated in cancer cells.

“Working with Raed has been extremely satisfying for graduate student Paratchata Batsomboon and me,” Dudley said. “It's one thing to think that the chemistry we develop can impact biomedical research in due course. It’s quite another to know that the fruits of our chemistry labor are going directly into biomedical experiments across campus. Intercollege collaboration adds value to both programs.”

### 

Picking up the pace in genomics research

Mar 09, 2015

small spotlight photo for genomics center1Scientists have come a long way since creating the first map of the human genome in 2003. Technological advances have accelerated DNA sequencing of the human genome – a process that once took a decade or more to complete – to the point that it can be done in a matter of days, even while yielding more information.

At Florida State, researchers are sequencing and mapping genomes for everything from fruit flies to humans, producing information that has led to numerous discoveries about the molecular basis of disease and sex differences, to give two examples.

With advances in the technology, however, come problems.

“It’s just the middle part—getting a large sequence file into something intelligible. Most people don’t have that skill set,” said Michelle Arbeitman, associate professor of biomedical sciences at the College of Medicine.

Help is on the way in the form of a new Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Florida State. The center, approved in December, is a joint effort of the College of Medicine and the College of Arts and Sciences and will be available for use by other university departments.

The center is expected to quicken the pace of genomics research at FSU, relieving a current backlog of information that needs analysis.

“Researchers will be able to take large sequence data files and work with the center to perform all downstream computational and statistical analyses,” Arbeitman said. “Currently one of the major bottlenecks is that once they have the data the individual researchers don’t necessarily have the expertise to know how to move forward with it. The center provides those services.”

Planning has taken two years, spurred through weekly meetings involving the center’s founder, Gary Tyson (computer sciences), David Gilbert (biology), Arbeitman and Biological Sciences Associate Professor Jonathan Dennis. Daniel Vera (formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Dennis’s lab) has been selected as the center’s director.

While it is operational, the center has not yet identified a location on campus for its central office. A great deal of the genome sequencing takes place in the College of Medicine’s Translational Science Laboratory, which has an automated sequencer that can map an entire genome in a few days.

“Our lab produces approximately 16 trillion base pairs of sequence data annually for researchers at FSU and all over the world,” said Roger Mercer, director of the Translational Science Laboratory. “That’s the equivalent of about a hundred genomes, though much of our work is done in species other than humans.”

The ‘personalized medicine’ aspect of the center meshes with the development of the College of Medicine’s Clinical Research Network (CRN). The CRN potentially will harness information from more than 2 million patients treated by more than 2,400 community physicians who teach FSU medical students throughout Florida.

For now, there’s a lot to be deciphered.

“For most researchers, what comes out during genome sequencing is like having a library filled with classical literature written in Italian – if you don’t speak Italian,” said Myra Hurt, senior associate dean for research and graduate programs at the College of Medicine.

“You know all the letters, but you need a translator to know the words. The new genomics center will translate the ‘letters’ into meaningful genetic information, leading to new discoveries.”

FSU MED Spring 2015

Research Outside the Lab

Nov 01, 2011

research outside lab1For most people, the word “research” conjures up images of serious-looking scientists in white coats, beakers filled with colorful liquids, microscopes and cluttered laboratories.

But consider this image: A mother takes her daughter to the pediatrician after her child bangs her head in a collision during a youth soccer game. The physician is concerned that the child has suffered a concussion, and there’s a question about what course of action to take.

When will it be safe for this little girl to resume her normal activities? She wants to play in tomorrow’s big game, but should the doctor say it’s OK?

Diagnosing head injuries, unfortunately, is an inexact science. The same blow to the head might cause drastically different outcomes in two people who otherwise appear very similar. Also, there is not enough good research about what happens inside the brain when it’s exposed to a concussive blow.

That’s where the College of Medicine’s unique educational model and burgeoning research program intersect.

Yes, there is plenty of groundbreaking research taking place in traditional research laboratories at the main campus. Soon, though, there will be groundbreaking College of Medicine research taking place outside the lab, too, in communities across Florida.

To educate and train its third- and fourth-year medical students, Florida State employs more than 1,700 physicians statewide. The idea is to send students out into Florida’s communities, where they will get one-on-one training and will see the kinds of cases, and patients, they will most often encounter once they become practicing physicians.

Sounds simple enough, but it’s a drastic departure from conventional medical education. The community-based approach is producing remarkable outcomes and there’s no reason to think a community-oriented research initiative won’t do the same.

Altogether, physicians who teach our medical students take care of more than 2.5 million patients. Their participation in the new FSU Clinical Research Network will provide opportunities for including data from healthy patients, as well as those suffering from disease or injury.

For example, researchers will have the opportunity to collect baseline data that will allow a pediatrician to quickly compare how a child’s brain functions in performing basic tasks both before and after suffering a concussion. That will facilitate a more informed diagnosis.

“The relationships we’ve built with physicians across the state through our education program will be invaluable toward establishing the FSU Clinical Research Network,” said Dr. Michael Muszynski, dean of the Orlando campus and regional campus dean for research at the College of Medicine.

At the main campus, a new clinical translational research laboratory has just been completed. The lab will serve as the central collecting point for analysis, storage and sharing of information.

The college recently welcomed Roger Mercer, Ph.D., as director of the translational science laboratory, and Jessica De Leon, Ph.D., as clinical research projects director.

In November, the College of Medicine and the University of Florida jointly received a $600,000 grant from the Board of Governors of the State University System to strengthen research, education and service efforts in public health and to boost economic growth.

The funds will support the UF-FSU Community Research Collaborative Program, with initial efforts involving the assessment and monitoring of mild traumatic brain injury and of health risk behaviors among youngsters in Florida.

“This project, and our broader initiative to engage physicians statewide in research that takes us directly into the community, will serve to improve health care outcomes for patients,” said Myra Hurt, senior associate dean for research and graduate programs at the College of Medicine.

“Ultimately our aim is to perform patient-oriented research services that help us better understand root causes of disease, while becoming more effective in prevention, diagnosis and treatment.”

So while scientists (some of them in white coats) will continue to diligently pursue answers in the laboratory, taking research out to the doctor’s office will offer a promising new approach.

It doesn’t guarantee that children with head injuries will get back to playing soccer any sooner. But it raises hope that the doctors who treat them will be better equipped to make decisions that lead to the best possible health-care outcomes.

Download the FSU MED Magazine Winter 2011

Mercer named director of Translational Science Laboratory

Sep 12, 2010

mercerarticleDr. Roger Mercer has been named director of the College of Medicine Translational Science Laboratory. Dr. Mercer will be responsible for the ongoing development, overall operation and coordination of daily technical activities of a new state-of-the-art facility for the identification of biomarkers taken from biological samples and for high end proteomic and metabolomic analyses.  With more than 25 years experience in academia and in the biotech industry, Dr Mercer will play a leadership role in the College of Medicine’s Translational Science Initiative within its multi-site clinical research network.

Services will be available for a fee, and will include all aspects from sample processing to molecule identification, including posttranslational modifications, and will be open to potential college and university users at FSU, as well as users from other universities or entities. As a “hands-on” scientist and teacher with experience in biological mass spectrometry and analytical chemistry, Dr. Mercer’s addition to the College of Medicine will be invaluable to our forward movement in research. Dr. Mercer earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1990.

Visitors Flock to Translational Lab

Aug 29, 2011

Trans Lab tour w Kate Calvin (cropped)2An ordinarily quiet corner of the College of Medicine’s Research Building was teeming with science-minded sightseers Aug. 25 for the open house of the Translational Science Laboratory.

As many as 150 visitors, many from the other science centers at Florida State, came to see this new collection of cutting-edge research equipment all housed in one space.

“We were joined by colleagues from across campus who have research interests that will be complemented by the new lab,” said Myra Hurt, senior associate dean for research and graduate programs. “A lot of research energy was generated.”

Hurt conducted some of the tours herself, as did lab director Roger Mercer and several others. One of the first visitors in line was retired state Sen. Durell Peaden, who was instrumental in the legislative effort to create the College of Medicine in 2000. Also among those touring the lab were Tom Jennings, FSU vice president for university advancement; Ross Ellington, FSU associate vice president for research; Janet Kistner, chair of the FSU Department of Psychology; Rick Hyson, director of Psychology’s Neuroscience Program; Bryant Chase, chair of the FSU Department of Biological Science; Andy Jhanji, executive vice president of the FSU Foundation; John Fogarty, dean of the College of Medicine; four College of Medicine department heads, Janine Edwards (Medical Humanities and Social Sciences), Ric Gonzalez-Rothi (Clinical Sciences), Richard Nowakowski (Biomedical Sciences) and Daniel Van Durme (Family Medicine and Rural Health); and numerous faculty members, staff members and students.

“Our hope is that the lab will help build interdisciplinary research in the college, across the university and elsewhere,” Hurt said. “There are exciting research opportunities ahead for all of us.”

Youth Health Leadership Group workshop

Apr 02, 2014

The Center for Underrepresented Minorities in Academic Medicine held a workshop for the Youth Health Leadership Group associated with the Center on Better Health and Life for Underserved Populations, directed by Dr. Penny Ralston.

“Margin/Mission: Mission Creep in Academic Medical Centers" workshop

Feb 04, 2014

The Center for Underrepresented Minorities in Academic Medicine hosted a workshop for SNMA February 2014 titled “Margin/Mission: Mission Creep in Academic Medical Centers".

 

Drs. Johnson, Rodriguez and Campbell presented at the 40th Annual Society of Teachers of Family Medicine meeting

Apr 18, 2014

Dr. Lisa Johnson presented along with Drs. Rodriguez and Campbell at the 40th Annual Society of Teachers of Family Medicine meeting in May 2014 in San Antonio Texas on “Developing mentoring programs for underrepresented minority faculty”.

Subscribe to