Touro Triumphs

Professional Triumphs by Touro's Own.

Touro's Nursing Students Rise Up to Help

At a time when nurses throughout the country remain at great personal risk because of COVID-19, the students in the School of Nursing (SON) are answering the call to help where they are needed most, acting lightning quick to help test the community.

“Solano County Public Health emailed us on a Friday, and after making several calls, by Tuesday students were working with them on the Fairgrounds,” said Margaret Pay, MSN, RN, CNL, Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing.

Although the School of Nursing has held community health projects with Solano County Public Health before, Ms. Pay stressed that assisting the COVID-19 testing has been integral for both the county and the community.

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Four Ways to Stay Grounded During Social Distancing

by WARM Coordinator Yvette Elizabeth Carillo

With Wellness, Academic Achievement, Resilience and Mindfulness (WARM) on the forefront of my mind, I wanted to share four things that I am doing to stay well remotely.

Find a routine that works. Mine is still getting up before everyone else in my household so that when everyone else is awake I am ready to go with the day. I start work at 8 am like I did before the isolation, just now I am at my desk at home.

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Great Things at Touro in Face of Covid-19

Faced with the challenge of quickly transforming classrooms to virtual learning environments and repositioning most of its workforce off campus, all across TUC, people are rising to the challenge.

With the aid of Zoom video conferencing and cell phones, the Joint MSPAS/MPH program is enabling remote exam proctoring to keep syllabi on schedule without the benefit of a shared classroom.

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Showing What Flashcards Can Really Do

Sean Lim, second year student in the College of Osteopathic Medicine, sees a better way to help student doctors like him navigate the mountain of information that they must learn before facing patients. And to do it, he is bringing together old and technologies.

Flashcards have been a common teaching tool since the education reform of the mid-1800s. But by developing an app, the flashcards that Mr. Lim thinks of as “the fundamental unit of teaching” could take the guesswork out of organizing a very complex set of material for medical students.

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CEHS Trains with Civil Rights Leaders in Atlanta

Last month, Dr. Lisa Norton, Dean of the College of Education and Health Sciences, and Desiree Miranda, MPH student and Social Justice Fellow, underwent a special 5-day training in Atlanta focused on a grant-supported partnership between Touro University California and Fighting Back Partnership through the Office of Childhood Abuse Prevention. The seminar, “Creating a Beloved Community: Family and the Road to Resilience”, provided these TUC leaders guidance on ethical leadership and cultural competency in support of the health and social services for pre/postnatal care.

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Summary of the Paper Isocaloric Fructose Restriction Reduces Serum D-Lactate Concentration in Children with Obesity and Metabolic Syndrome

Published in the March Issue of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism

Co-authors:Ayca Erkin-Cakmak, Yasmin Bains, Russell Caccavello, Susan M. Noworolski, Jean-Marc Schwarz, Kathleen Mulligan, Robert H. Lustig, Alejandro Gugliucci

Highlights inlcude:

• New method developed entirely in the Glycation, Oxidation and Disease lab, used first in a cross-sectional study and now on an intervention study
• The paper shows a new mechanism that explains how fructose leads to dyslipidemia and NAFLD, tying for the first time glycation and fructose metabolism in the liver

Summary Written by Co-first Author Yasmin Bains (OMSIII)

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Dr. Shin Murakami Named GSA Fellow

TUC’s Dr. Shin Murakami was named one of four new Gerontological Society of America Fellows for his research on pathways that regulate aging, stress resistance and cognitive function as well as his advocacy to increase access to important drugs that fight the diseases of aging like Alzehimer’s.

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Dr. Mark Teaford named named Fellow of the American Association of Anatomists.

"The rank of Fellow is designed to honor distinguished members who have demonstrated excellence in science and in their overall contributions to the anatomical sciences." 

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AAS and Touro University California Announce 2018 Fellows

Touro's Dr. Andrea Taylor is the 2018 Fellow for her work in Anthropology

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TUC’s Doctorate of Nursing Practice Accredited for the next Five Years

Touro University California (TUC)’s Doctorate of Nursing Practice is officially accredited through 2023 by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE). TUC received the maximum amount of years that can be accredited to a new program. The Doctorate Program designed for working nurses is delivered in a hybrid (half online, half in person) accelerated format that allows students to graduate in about a third of the time it takes to complete a traditional program. 

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Dr. Gail Feinberg, A 2018 Woman of the Year from Congressman John Garamendi

TUC’s very own Dr. Gail Feinberg has been named one of Congressman John Garamendi's 2018 Women of the Year for her service helping to improve the quality of life of California’s 3rd District, which includes Solano County.

Dr. Feinberg has served the community at many health fairs as well as on location at the Student-Run Free Clinic. In addition to serving the community at the Student-Run Free Clinic, Dr. Feinberg sees patients once a week at Solano Health Centers and is a supervising mentor at the Global Center for Success.

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Shane Desselle: Fulbright Scholar Heads to Kosovo

Dr. Shane Desselle, Professor of Social, Behavioral, and Administrative Sciences in the College of Pharmacy, will soon head to Kosovo to embark on a three-and-a-half-week Fulbright program to develop an assessment center at the University of Pristina’s Faculty of Medicine. There, he will help faculty assess student learning outcomes and the university’s mission to establish the pedagogical framework and accountability measures that will enable the university to have a greater impact on the formerly war-torn region.

“High-performing universities often have much to do and say about uplifting the entire area to make it more economically viable and culturally vibrant,” says Dr. Desselle.

Dr. Desselle’s work will be the first step for the University of Pristina to establish the means to find the real positive impact that their student physicians, pharmacists, and nurses have on the community. From that initial framework, they hope to identify what they are doing well to then leverage those strengths to achieve other positive outcomes.

Dr. Desselle’s own interests in unique pedagogy span from team-based learning and project-based learning. In one of his classes at TUC, he employs the learning theory of Connectivism by giving students the opportunity to construct their own learning environment by using Twitter.

“Twitter is a platform where one can get an extraordinary amount of additional news and info on various subjects, such as health policy,”” he explains, “Every state pharmacist society has a twitter account, and so does each scientific journal. Most of them are quite actively Tweeting.” Then in the course, we have students write reflection papers based on what they are seeing from these reputable sources.

It was Dr. Desselle’s own pharmacy journal, Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy, that first connected him to the University of Pristina. The university’s Dr. Kreshnik Hoti, serves on the journal’s editorial board, and he was happy to make the pairing through the prestigious Fulbright Scholar program.

“This kind of work is not accomplished in three-and-a-half weeks,” Dr. Desselle reflects, “but it’s the very beginning.”

Professor Andrea Taylor; Educating from San Diego to South Africa

On March 10, 2018, Andrea Taylor, Professor in the College of Osteopathic Medicine, delivered an international workshop at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, to 24 women, at all career stages, on mentoring, networking and work-life balance.  The conference had women attendees from the University of Cape Town, The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and the University of Botswana, and from as far away as Tuebingen University in Germany.

A few weeks later, on April 22, 2018, Dr. Taylor gave a presentation at the American Association of Anatomists in San Diego on , “Diversity in Myosin Heavy Chain Composition of the Papionin Masseter Muscle Indicates the Importance of Hybrid Phenotypes for Feeding.”

Dr. Taylor is a co-PI on an Elsevier Foundation New Scholars Grant that was funded to support mentoring and professional development programming for women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).

Both Sides of the Equation

By Shona Mookerjee, PhD
Assistant Professor & Curriculum Coordinator for the College of Pharmacy Department of Biological and Pharmaceutical Sciences

Dr. Shona Mookerjee's work with colleagues Akos Gerencser, David Nicholls, and Martin Brand was recently selected as the representative Bioenergetics article for The Journal of Biological Chemistry's "This year in JBC: 2017". Dr. Mookerjee's, Quantifying Intracellular Rates of Glycolytic and Oxidative ATP Production and Consumption Using Extracellular Flux Measurements, was chosen from the journal's nearly 2,000 papers published in 2017. Below she explains the role that ATP plays in the body and why it is important to view both sides of the ATP-producing machinery at the same time.

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Public Health Professor Sarah Sullivan Receives Fulbright Scholar Grant

Recently accoladed as a Fulbright Scholar, Sarah Sullivan, Associate Professor of the Public Health Program, explains her work in Bolivia and how she will be a resource at the country’s top universities for research ethics and methodology. Her goal is to support Bolivian health sciences researchers to help shape their findings for an international audience and establish an open exchange of ideas and information.

Could you explain in your own words the work you’ll be able to do as a Fulbright Scholar?

I will be working with 3 different public universities in Bolivia. During 3 months each year for 3 years, I will support research ethics classes and committees in the health science universities in the medical school, nursing school, nutrition programs, etc. Some of the universities are also interested in assistance in supporting hospital ethics committees which are linked to their medical schools. Research Ethics relates to protecting human subjects (or participants) in research. The now famous Tuskegee study, where standard medical treatment was withheld to research participants and they were also not offered "informed consent" to participate in the study, is an egregious example of a study where research ethics protocols were violated. The Bolivian universities have requested assistance in setting up their research ethics committees which are similar to Institutional Review Boards (or IRB committees) in universities in the USA.

What collaboration you have between these three universities?

This research ethics work is something that I have been working on in Bolivia for many years. Dr. Annette Aalborg from the Touro University California (TUC) Public Health program and I applied for several National Institutes of Health (NIH) research ethics grants with Bolivia over the last 5 years. In 2014, we were awarded a research ethics planning grant which allowed Bolivian academic researchers and community members from several regions to come together and participate in a face to face and online training. TUC Public Health faculty and students participated in this Training the Trainers (ToT) course. We have ongoing collaborations with the Bolivian universities supporting their research ethics committees, collaborating on research projects and student field studies. Several of our partners at the Bolivian universities are Adjunct Faculty in the TUC Public Health program.

What sort of research ethics issues will you be delving into?

After the ToT, we authored several papers on the innovative research ethics training course and results. The Bolivians are very engaged with the research ethics topics and hope to be involved with ongoing continuation courses to improve their knowledge and skills. Related Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) topics that I will also be discussing are authorship, conflicts of interest, data management, plagiarism and research conduct. I hope to use a case study approach (using case studies from WHO in English and Spanish) to engage the students in the topics.

The Fulbright Program is the US government’s flagship international educational exchange program and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Congratulations to Ms. Sullivan for her achievement, which recognizes and supports her work to improve relations abroad to create lasting international relationships in the health sciences.

CEHS Dean and Professor, Jim O'Connor, contributes chapter on Invitational Education in Higher Education

O’Connor, Jim.  Touro University California.  ”One Educator’s Invitational Journey in Higher Education and Beyond”. Invitational Education and Practice in Higher Education: An International Perspective, eds. Sheila T. Gregory and Jenny Edwards. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD,  pp.227-248 (March, 2016).

Read the first few pages of the chapter.

Learn more about the book on Google Books.

100 Fellows and Counting!

For over five years, NapaLearns has provided tuition support for teachers to earn their Master’s degree in Educational Technology from Touro University.  Teachers learn the latest practices related to project-based learning, personalized digital curriculum and assessment, and use of digital tools and resources. They also complete a capstone project based on applied research in their schools and share their results with fellow educators.

NapaLearns is proud to announce that since launching the Fellows Program in 2011, over 100 educators have entered the program and 80 have graduated!

NapaLearns thanks their funders, Touro Graduate School of Education Program Chair, Dr. Pamela Redmond, and Touro University leadership for helping NapaLearns meet this monumental milestone!

To learn more about the Fellows Program, visit NapaLearns.org.

COM Awarded $393,250 NIH Grant

Touro University California congratulations Dr. Miriam Gochin, along with her research team of Guangyan Zhou, Shidong Chu, and Ariana Nemati, for receiving an R21 grant titled "Mechanism of indole compounds as HIV fusion inhibitors" in the amount of $393,250 from the National Institutes of Health.  To read more, click here.

TUC - A Hub for Specialized Research on Human Metabolism

Two National Institute of Health (NIH) grants were awarded to Touro University California (TUC) in the span of just one week, driving TUC as a leading center for research.  To read more, click here.

Study on Cholesterol Makes Top Ten Global List

There’s a reason why Dr. Alejandro Gugliucci's first article for 2013 holds a spot in the top 10 list of articles written globally on the specialty of describing a new method to study the good cholesterol – it’s a hot and relevant topic in today’s medical setting.  To read more, click here.

CEHS Co-Sponsors International Conference on Water Quality

Touro University California’s (TUC) College of Education and Health Sciences co-sponsored Sias International Water Conference's "Leveraging Factors for our Planetary Future" in late May 2013, which gathered dedicated environmentalists, international scholars, and other contributors responding to the global challenge of radical climate change.  To read more, click here.