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By Kate Hunger When Vicky Smith arrived for her first shift as an EMT paramedic, she didn’t even have time to put down her gear before heading to the scene of an accident on a foggy coastal road. Smith and her team arrived to find four teenagers dead and another critically injured. The trauma of that first shift briefly caused Smith to question her decision to pursue a career as an emergency…
By Kate Hunger Tabatha Dragonberry, DHSc, MBA, MEd, RRT-NPS, RRT-ACCS, AE-C, CPFT, C-NPT, assistant professor and director of online education for the Division of Respiratory Care, is keenly aware of both the potential and the pitfalls of distance education. After all, Dr. Dragonberry has earned five online degrees. “I’ve been a student of the good, the bad, and the ugly of online,” she said…
By Kate Hunger Faculty and students of the Department of Physician Assistant Studies administered vaccinations during the on-campus COVID-19 vaccination effort that rolled out in mid-December, while Emergency Health Sciences faculty worked to schedule vaccinations set aside for area medical responders. Meredith Quinine, DHSc, MPAS, PA-C, assistant professor, and academic coordinator, noted that…
By Kate Hunger When the Department of Physician Assistant Studies held its first virtual commencement via Zoom on Dec. 4, the audience logged in from around the country and the world. About 200 of Kavita Jaiswal’s friends and family—many of whom live in India—were able to share her special moment. “I am the first person to graduate in medicine in my family and extended family,” she said. “They…
By Kate Hunger Tiffany Roerich Wafford, MLS, SBB (ASCP), a Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences instructor, noticed something when she was typing donor blood in her previous role as supervisor of an immunohematology reference laboratory. “I started noticing that the frequency of the antigens didn’t match up with what you see in the Caucasian population and saw some matched up with the…
By Kate Hunger Department of Physical Therapy Assistant Professor Gustavo Almeida, PT, Ph.D., is exploring how blood flow restriction exercises during rehabilitation can help people with knee osteoarthritis strengthen their muscles with less physical exertion—and less pain. His research recently received a major boost with his selection as an RL5 Scholar by the San Antonio Claude D. Pepper Older…
By Kate Hunger Assistant Professor of Occupational Therapy Ana Allegretti, Ph.D., ATP, OTR, has been appointed as an associate editor for two assistive technology journals. Allegretti learned this fall that she has been invited to be an associate editor for the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA) Assistive Technology Journal. In September,…
By Kate Hunger When it appeared COVID-19 could jeopardize the graduation timeline for the Department of Physical Therapy Class of 2021, students came up with a solution. “Our Class of 2021 was supposed to go out on clinical rotations in May this year, but obviously that was a time when things were bad and a lot of our clinical rotations were canceled,” said Department Chair and Associate…
By Kate Hunger First-semester respiratory care students had the opportunity in November to perform their first examination of a living, breathing patient during standardized patient encounters. “This is a hands on with a real live person—no mannequins,” said Assistant Professor–Clinical Thomas Stokes, M.A., RRT. “It’s preclinical. This is their first semester in the program. They are in labs and…
By Kate Hunger Speech-language pathology Assistant Professor Rocío Norman, Ph.D., never thought she would be donning personal protective gear to conduct a study of mild traumatic brain injury. Yet despite the challenges, Norman and Tara Flaugher, the UTSA neurobiology doctoral student she is working with on the study, have been able to collect data from human subjects during the COVID-19…