KUMC

I'm so proud of the fact that some of the most talented educators, clinicians and researchers in the country are working at KU Medical Center. With the launch last week of our Meet the Experts web-based database, we now have a valuable new tool that will allow visitors to our website to learn more about our outstanding faculty. 

Meet the Experts is the brainchild of A.R. Dykes Library Director Karen Cole and her team of biomedical librarians. The librarians realized they could use a software program called BibApp to develop a tool that would showcase the research, teaching and clinical scholarship of the KUMC faculty. The tool will give people an easy way to identify experts in a field or potential collaborators for grant-funded projects.

Each person's profile on Meet the Experts includes his or her name, photo, e-mail address, group affiliations, research focus, collaborations, publications included in the major databases, and other items submitted to the library by the faculty or staff.

Getting the Meet the Experts service up and running has been a major feat, but this is just the first phase of the project. In the next phase, Dr. Cole's team will be working with faculty and staff to add additional content, including information on our Wichita faculty, and to develop a regular schedule for updating profiles and publications.

The Dykes Library staff continues to work on gathering the latest and most accurate information on our faculty. If you are a faculty member, please click on Meet Our Experts to review your profile. If you have any additional information you want included, you can send any updates or corrections to dspace@kumc.edu and include "Meet Our Experts" in the subject field.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Meet the Experts yet, I hope you do so soon.  It is easily accessible on the KUMC home page, on the left side under the Research tab – or just click here.

Our congratulations to Russell Scheffer, MD, chair and professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the KU School of Medicine–Wichita. Dr. Scheffer has been awarded an $800,000 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study the use of lithium with children. The research could help create guidelines on use, determine possible side effects and establish dosing instructions for children who take the drug. You can read more about Dr. Scheffer's work here.

Campus News

The KU Medical Center Alumni Association is seeking nominations for the 2011 Alumni Awards. These are the highest honors the KUMC Alumni Association bestows upon graduates of the KU Schools of Allied Health, Medicine, Nursing and those who have made outstanding contributions to the health care professions. The awards will be presented during the Alumni and Community Awards Gala on Saturday, Oct. 8, 2011. Click here to download a nomination form.

The votes are in, and we now have a list of charities for KUMC faculty and staff to support this holiday season. The five charities are Cross-Lines Cooperative Council, Harvesters, Ray of Hope, Reach Out and Read, and Silver City Health Center. Employees can bring their donations to the 'Tis The Season holiday celebration on Thursday, Dec. 9 in the Francisco Lounge. Before the event, we will let you know the needs each charity has during this holiday season.

About 60 area high school juniors and seniors from Kansas got to experience what it’s like to be a physician during the KU School of Medicine–Wichita's Doctor for a Day program on Nov. 6. The students worked with 3rd- and 4th-year School of Medicine students
to learn about the process of becoming a doctor as well as some basic medical procedures. This is the ninth year for the event, which is sponsored by the Family
Medicine Interest Group, a medical specialty interest group that is made up of 3rd- and 4th-year medical students.

In the News

State university presidents in Kansas Wednesday endorsed KU's proposal to create a School of Public Health. The recommendation will next go to the Kansas Board of Regents at its meeting on Dec. 16-17. Read more.

Kudos

Trigger Points, the official magazine of the Kansas Physical Therapy Association, recently published an article on the JayDoc Free Clinic. The article was written by Suzie Xue, a second-year student in the KU Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science department's DPT program. You can read the article here.

The School of Medicine continues to garner positive publicity about our primary care and rural medicine programs. K. James Kallail, PhD, a professor of internal medicine at the School of Medicine–Wichita and Sandra McCurdy, associate dean of admissions, have an article on the Scholars in Primary Care/Scholars in Rural Health program featured in the current issue of Family Medicine. Read the article here.

Two senior students at the School of Nursing were presented with Delta Chapter, Sigma Theta Tau International Awards on Monday. The students are Kevin Conard and Brooke Blurton.You can see the complete list of nursing student award winners here.