UNMC for the record

On Monday, Sept. 22, Jeff Snell, Ph.D., from Quality Living, Inc. presented “Under Construction: The Human Brain” at the Lincoln Science Cafe. Around 40 people attended the event at a new location, VEGA. Afterwards, the venue hosted a pub quiz featuring five questions from the science cafe presentation. The next Lincoln Cafe, sponsored by UNMC and the Nebraska Coalition for Lifesaving Cures, will be held in the winter. Check out the Facebook page for additional photos by Margaret Cain of UNMC’s College of Dentistry.

The Interdisciplinary Center for Program Evaluation, in the Education and Child Development Department at the Munroe-Meyer Institute, recently completed an evaluation of the Nebraska Early Childhood Pyramid Model. The Pyramid Model, a framework of evidence-based practices that promote social-emotional competence in young children and prevent and address challenging behaviors, was implemented in 10 early childhood programs in Nebraska, under the leadership of the Nebraska Department of Education. An external coach worked with each program’s leadership team and provided onsite training and preschool classroom coaching throughout the year. Evaluation results found that programs made significant improvements in implementing Pyramid Model practices. The pre-school teachers made significant improvements in utilizing practices that support the children’s social-emotional development. On average, teacher practices improved 41 percent as a result of the classroom coaching, training, and the support of the site leadership. By spring, 91 percent of the 3- and 4-year olds in the Pyramid Model classrooms met or exceeded widely held expectations for social-emotional skills.

Ted Mikuls, M.D., professor of rheumatology and immunology, is the principal investigator on a VA Merit Grant, “Environmental factors and Autoantibody Expression in Rheumatoid Arthritis” that has been funded for $600,000 starting in 2014 and continuing through 2017.

The recently redesigned UNMC website was honored recently with a Best New Site award at an Atlanta conference hosted by Cascade Server, makers of UNMC’s new content management system. The joint redesign/CMS project was managed by a team of public relations and information technology services (ITS) staff. Special recognition goes to web designer Ryan Shaw of public relations and web developer Todd Ashmore of ITS. Special thanks to programmer/analyst Anne Faylor of ITS for many hours training web content developers on the new CMS. The redesign was created based on input, feedback and priorities set by a Web Advisory Group, whose members represent units across campus. Team leaders and co-chairs of the Web Advisory Group are Dan Moser of ITS and Stacie Hamel of public relations. The site’s nomination read, in part: “UNMC redesigned its site entirely in-house, creating a clean, elegant responsive web site. The redesign project was the result of two years of work seeking feedback and input from stakeholders across campus. Once fully migrated, this far reaching refresh will change the look and feel of all internal and external content pages, news stories, and blog posts.”

Darlene Carritt, a dental hygiene instructor in the UNMC College of Dentistry, has been elected vice president of the Central
Regional Dental Testing Service Executive Board. The CRDTS is a testing service made up of 20 state Boards of Dentistry.

Wayne Fisher, Ph.D., was awarded a National Institutes of Health grant in the amount of $434,549 for the project, “Stimulus control refinements of FCT interventions for destructive behavior in ID.” The NIH recommended funding the project at the same level through 2018, subject to availability of funds and the progress of the project.

Swati Surkar, a Ph.D. candidate in MSIA, received an AAUW International Doctoral Fellowship award to support her full-time study in the United States. Recipients are selected for academic achievement and demonstrated commitment to women and girls, and who plan to return to their home countries to become leaders in their field. She declined a UNMC Graduate Studies Assistantship in order to accept the AAUW fellowship. She also was awarded grants from the Margaret McNamara Memorial Fund and from the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport & Physical Activity (NASPSPA) to help support her research on “Early identification and intervention for action planning deficits in infants with hemiplegic cerebral palsy.” Surkar enrolled at UNMC in fall of 2012 and has been pursuing her research under the mentorship of Regina Harbourne, Ph.D., and Max J. Kurz, Ph.D., both in MMI Physical Therapy.