Dr. Godfrey honored as UNMC’s Varner Educator Laureate

Maurice Godfrey, PhD, has taken his avocation and turned it into his vocation.

Dr. Godfrey, a professor at the UNMC Munroe-Meyer Institute, says he’s always seen working with young people as an avocation off to the side of his genetics research.

His genetics career alone has been significant — leading to important, award-winning studies into Marfan syndrome.

But in 2005, Dr. Godfrey turned his interest in youth education into his new focus. That is when he started UNMC’s outreach program to offer health science education to Native American communities in Nebraska and South Dakota.

Nearly 20 years later, the program has grown into a national model, thanks to continuous funding by Science Education Partnership Awards from the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Godfrey speaks proudly about how far the program has come over those years.

While lab research is extremely exciting when extraordinary discoveries happen, Dr. Godfrey said working with young students provides an immediate impact when the lessons make a difference.

By introducing youths to the health sciences, he said, “It opens up possibilities that weren’t there.”

For his work, Dr. Godfrey has been named UNMC’s Varner Educator Laureate for 2022-23. He, along with all the other recipients of the UNMC Impact in Education Awards, will be honored at a live ceremony today at 3 p.m. Add the event to your calendar to attend in person or watch the live stream.

Dr. Godfrey said he is honored and extremely gratified to earn the award. He thanked the award’s sponsor — Jerald Varner, PhD, a longtime educator at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Engineering — saying it speaks volumes that Dr. Varner took a love for education and directed it into supporting the educational work at UNMC.

The creation of the health science outreach program followed Dr. Godfrey’s return from a visiting professorship in Belgium.

At the time, UNMC had health science programs for eighth graders on campus, including a health science meet. He came to work with Roxanna Jokela, then director of the UNMC Rural Health Education Network, and they discussed the lack of representation from Native American communities in health professions, along with the need to interest students long before college.

“You have to engage students early,” Dr. Godfrey said. “You have to show them what’s possible, build their capacity, get them excited about learning and help that pathway develop over time.”

After starting to build connections with Nebraska tribes, UNMC and Dr. Godfrey applied for their first SEPA grant through the NIH to fund the outreach program. The grant reviews weren’t favorable, Dr. Godfrey said, because no one else was doing that kind of outreach.

But that early engagement ultimately made a difference in the grant review, and that initial five-year grant was funded.

Today, the program is a partnership among the Munroe-Meyer Institute, the Great Plains Area Tribal Chairmen’s Health Board and K-12 schools in Nebraska and South Dakota.

The program is known and respected for bringing the educational opportunities directly to Native American communities. Dr. Godfrey said it’s important to go out into the communities, bringing learning materials, conducting experiments that students can see and developing relationships.

Then, when students are invited to UNMC, he said, they can better imagine a path into higher education and the health sciences. They may have realized already about doctors and nurses, he said, but the program shows: “There are so many more things in the health sciences.”

A student’s spark of curiosity might not even be in the health sciences.

“If we can use science as the leverage at getting students excited about learning, then in the end, it doesn’t matter what excites them,” Dr. Godfrey said.

The program is in its fourth consecutive round of SEPA grants — and will be funded to 2026.

“You don’t expect and we never expected to change the world in just a few grant cycles. But if you slowly start building that capacity, the world will change because things will happen from the inside.”