HSC Newsletter, January 22, 2004

In this issue:

January 22 , 2004

1. Preparing for a terrorist attack.

2. Biostat professor Clifford Blair retires to mountains of Tennessee.

3. Cardiac lab work keeps research director in tune with USF research needs

4. Dr. Michael Alberts named ACCP president.

5. In the News.

6. Attention students: HSC Service Fair is Feb. 2.

Preparing for a terrorist attack

Third-year medical students assumed the roles of treating physicians, ambulance drivers, security personnel, disaster volunteers, reporters and victims/patients for a mass casualty exercise staged as part of their recent colloquium, “Medical Consequences of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Attack.” The colloquium, directed for the second year by Roy Soto, MD, assistant professor of anesthesiology and former U.S. Air Force flight surgeon (background, far right), teaches the students about triage and emergency treatment and transportation of large numbers of casualties. The exercise starts with a simulated explosion and release of an unspecified gas during half-time at the Super Bowl. Pictured above, triage captain Brooke Shepard (third from right) prepares to tag a patient, fellow medical student Joshua Elliott, being transported for “delayed care” at the hospital triage site. The Mass Casualty exercise concluded the day-long colloquium that included lectures on triage and on chemical, biological and nuclear warfare. Photo by Eric Younghans. Return to top

Biostat professor Clifford Blair retires to mountains of Tennessee

By Anne DeLotto Baier

Distinguished biostatistician and teacher Clifford Blair, PhD, will retire Feb. 6 following a 30-year career at USF — the last 15 years at the College of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. The Tampa native, who taught his final class in December, has already moved to Butler, TN, where his family owns a cabin on a mountainside lake and his wife Cathy teaches second grade at the Little Milligan Schoolhouse.

He plans to continue his research, start work on a new biostatistics textbook, and brush up on his short story writing and storytelling skills.

"Butler is a very small town. The local restaurant doubles as a gas station," Dr. Blair quipped. "It’s also a great place for bluegrass music fans like me."
With humor, patience and down-to-earth examples, Dr. Blair taught the introductory Biostatistics I course required of all graduate students at the college. He also sometimes taught advanced students in Biostatistics II. Dr. Blair also held a joint appointment in the College of Medicine for several years, teaching biostatistics to medical students.

"It’s always been challenging and a lot of fun to move the knowledge from my head to the students’ heads in a way that is understandable," Dr. Blair said. "When you’d see the light go on after a student had been studying hard and coming to all the help sessions – that made everything worthwhile."

Dr. Clifford Blair
Photo by Eric Younghans

A two-time recipient of the College of Public Health’s Distinguished Teacher Award, Dr. Blair earned a reputation for making complex information palatable – even entertaining. He eased students through a subject that many anxiously refer to as "sadistics" instead of statistics. There were often waiting lists for his course, and it wasn’t unusual for grateful students to leave moon pies and RC colas, favorite treats of Dr. Blair’s, in his mailbox or outside his office door. Some graduates have sent him T-shirts covered with equations.

"I used to drop into his classes just to hear his lectures, even after I completed my biostatistics courses," said Richard Taylor, PhD, an epidemiology postdoctoral fellow who served as Dr. Blair’s teaching assistant. "He believes 100 percent that the real reason we’re here at the university is to teach, guide and mentor – to help create future health scientists and leaders."

Another of Dr. Blair’s teaching assistants, Shlomo Sawilowsky, PhD, (now professor and chair of Educational Evaluation and Research at Wayne State University) recently interviewed Dr. Blair for an article on his contributions to the field of biostatistics. The article is scheduled to appear in the May 2004 issue of the Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods. Dr. Blair earned his PhD degree in educational research from USF in 1979. He worked his way up to a professorship in the USF College of Education and completed a one-year stint as coordinator of measurement, research and statistics at Johns Hopkins before joining COPH’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in 1988. From 2001 to 2002, he served as interim chair of the department. Dr. Blair has contributed to more than 50 journal articles, including study group reports in the New England Journal of Medicine and Neurology. A textbook he co-authored with former teaching assistant Dr. Taylor, "Biostatistics for the Health Sciences," will be published this fall.

Faculty, staff and students are invited to send notes of farewell to Dr. Blair to be included in a "journal" being compiled by Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Signed comments can be e-mailed to jlundh@hsc.usf.edu, sent by campus mail to the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, MDC 56, or faxed to 813-974-4719. The deadline for the notes is Feb. 28.

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Cardiac lab work keeps research director in tune with USF research needs

Dr. Ian Phillips

By Anne DeLotto Baier

USF Vice President for Research M. Ian Phillips, PhD, DSc, continues to investigate novel ways of treating heart disease and diabetes with gene therapy even as he deals with the day-to-day details of administering the university’s growing research program.

Dr. Phillips presides over a laboratory at the Children’s Research Institute in St. Petersburg, where he works with researchers Clare Zhang, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics, and Yao Liang Tang, research fellow. When he joined USF from the University of Florida in January 2003, Dr. Phillips brought not only a research team, but more than $2 million in research equipment and National Institutes of Health grants. Recently Dr. Phillips and Robert W. Engelman, DVM, PhD, director of Comparative Medicine, obtained a $698,000 equipment grant from the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources to improve the air handling in the College of Medicine’s animal facility housing genetically engineered mice.

"Maintaining an active research program keeps me in touch with the kinds of issues and concerns facing our faculty researchers," said Dr. Phillips, a professor in the College of Medicine’s Department of Physiology who holds a joint appointment in the Division of Cardiovascular Disease. "It takes a great deal of sophistication to operate a laboratory — everything from buying the right equipment and getting the right services to knowing where you can and can’t spend grant money."

Dr. Phillips helped reorganize the Research Office, so that the grant proposal and financial management staff now work together under the same roof. "They can more readily talk to one another and help expedite details of the grant process. We hope this makes life a little easier for our researchers."

He also sent a research coordinator from main campus to the HSC Research Office two days each week to help faculty prepare grant and contract proposals and budgets. Nearly half of the university’s $254 million in grants and contracts is generated by faculty from the Colleges of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health. A vital Health Sciences Center is "extremely important" to USF’s effort to build excellence in research, Dr. Phillips said, particularly as USF President Judy Genshaft advances her vision for a biotechnology and life sciences research park that capitalizes on the university’s strengths in medicine, engineering and the basic sciences. USF will break ground Jan. 28 on two buildings that will anchor the research park, adding more than 230,000 square feet for interdisciplinary laboratories and offices for corporate partners and start-up biotech companies. The $40-million project will house an expanded business incubator and the Center for Biological Defense. It’s all part of a strategic plan that calls for boosting the infrastructure needed to attract nationally prominent faculty, promoting interdisciplinary research, and strengthening community business partnerships that will help transfer research to commercial use.

"We’re working on developing equipment and space for shared use, like a genomics and proteomics core lab at the Health Sciences Center," Dr. Phillips said.

Dr. Phillips holds three patents on research focusing on gene therapy and the recruitment of stem cells for repair of cardiac function. His research team developed an "oxygen-sensitive regulator" — a kind of gene switch that turns on protective genes when oxygen deprivation leads to a heart attack and turns them off once oxygen levels are restored. The researchers have shown that this regulator-based gene therapy protects heart muscle cells in mice from further heart attack damage. Furthermore, at the November 2003 scientific session of the American Heart Association, they presented preliminary evidence that the gene therapy actually repaired heart muscle cells following an attack by attracting injected bone marrow stem cells specifically to the site of heart tissue injury. Several groups have reported implanted stem cells help restore cardiac function, but few cells survive more than 24 hours.

"This is a big obstacle to a viable cell therapy for heart attacks," Dr. Phillips said. "Our next step will be to test whether our modified genes added to purified bone marrow stem cells might increase the survival of transplanted stem cells."

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Dr. Michael Alberts named ACCP president

Michael Alberts, MD,MBA, FACP, FCCP, interim chair for the Department of Interdisciplinary Oncology and associate center director for Moffitt Cancer Center, was recently selected president of the American College of Chest Physicians, one of the major professional societies for pulmonologists, intensivists, and cardiothoracic surgeons. He will begin his term as president elect in October 2004 and as president in October 2005.

With more than 16,000 members in the United States, the ACCP works to promote prevention and treatment of diseases of the chest through leadership, education, research and communication. Dr. Alberts has been active in the ACCP, having served as Governor for Florida, Chair of the Council of Governors, Chair of the Continuing Education Committee, and as Regent-at-Large for the past three years. He recently chaired and served as editor of the ACCP’s Evidence-Based Guidelines on the Diagnosis and Management of Lung Cancer.

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In the News

On Jan. 20, Tom Thomas, MD, PhD, voluntary professor of anatomy, and Johannes Rhodin, MD, PhD, professor of anatomy, appeared on WTVT Fox 13 to explain their research on how synthetic progestin damages the brain. This story also ran in the Jan. 9 issue of The Oracle.

Eric Coris, MD, USF family medicine physician, shared his sports medicine expertise about children’s participation in strength training exercises with Ivanhoe Broadcast News, a subscription news service that is broadcast in 250 markets, reaching 80 million U.S. households. Ivanhoe released the story Jan. 5. WPTV-NBC in West Palm Beach aired the story that day.

A Jan. 3 Tampa Tribune story explains the differences between boutique and traditional medical practices. The story profiles College of Medicine alumni Brent Agin, MD, and Michael O’Neal, MD, voluntary clinical professor of family medicine, who started The Center for Family Health and Prevention. Daniel Van Durme, MD, associate professor of family medicine; Fred Paola, MD, JD, assistant professor of medical ethics and humanities; and Bryan Bognar, MD, professor of internal medicine, all commented on the differences in types of practice and the significance of a physician’s time in relation to receiving quality care.

Catherine Lynch, MD, director of the Division of Obstetrics and Gynecology, told the Tampa Tribune about Tampa General’s first births of 2004 in the Jan. 2 issue.

Daniel Van Durme, MD, associate professor of family medicine, commented on the Food & Drug Administration’s ban on ephedra in the Dec. 31 St. Petersburg Times.

A Dec. 31 St. Petersburg Times story about HIV and AIDS testing and treatment features Jeffrey Nadler, MD, professor of infectious diseases.

The Dec. 30 front page of the Tampa Tribune featured the cardiac rehab study being conducted by Theresa Beckie, PhD, assistant professor of nursing. Dr. Beckie explained the women’s only study that began recruiting patients Jan. 1.

By Marissa Emerson

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Attention students: HSC Service Fair is Feb. 2

You are invited to the HSC Service Fair Feb. 2, from noon to 2 p.m. in the College of Nursing courtyard.
Bring children’s books to donate to the Reach Out and Read program and bring used cell phones to donate to The Spring.

To find out more, go to the downloadable flyer at www.hsc.usf.edu/ahec/flyerupdate_e.pdf

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