A reception earlier this year at UAMS honored M. Joycelyn Elders, M.D. The event marked efforts to establish the M. Joycelyn Elders, M.D., Chair in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and the opening of the UAMS exhibit, “A Life of Courage and Leadership, about Dr. Elders and her remarkable career. The exhibit includes photos, artifacts, and honors from her childhood and her role as a lifelong, national healthcare leader. The exhibit is in the UAMS History Display in the Central Building.

Video of remarks made at the reception by former Governor Mike Beebe, Dr. Elders, and others

If you would like to contribute to the M. Joycelyn Elders Chair in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention you can do so by going to the following link:  M. Joycelyn Elders, M.D. UAMS Chair in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention

Please welcome Susan Bell León to the College of Public Health. She will be joining the College on October 1 as Assistant Dean for Finance and Administration.

Ms. León has more than 20 years’ experience at the UAMS College of Medicine (COM), where she has managed finance and administration. In 1993, she joined COM as its Director of Finance and most recently has served as the COM’s Executive Associate Dean for Finance and Administration.

Ms. León is also a professional musician and is the principal bassoon player for the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. She is married to ASO cellist Rafael León. She is the founding director of Pinnacle Players, Inc., a local musician-governed chamber orchestra and is its former executive director. She also worked for Entergy as a financial analyst.

Ms. León is a native of Little Rock. She earned a bachelor of music degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia and a master’s degree in music from Yale University. She spent five years in Latin America where she performed with the Mexico City Philharmonic and the National Symphony of Mexico. She is fluent in Spanish. Ms. León holds a bachelor’s equivalency in accounting from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and has been licensed as a certified public accountant.

Please take a moment to stop by the Dean’s suite to say hello to this multi-talented addition to the College of Public Health!

Richard J. Ault, MHSA, was recently appointed as Director of the COPH Master’s in Health Administration (MHA) program. Mr. Ault has been Associate Director of the COPH MHA program since 2013. He joined COPH HPM in 2013, serving as an Instructor of courses in the management of health care organizations, and as the Placement Coordinator for the MHA program.

Mr. Ault has 15 years’ experience working in health administration that includes serving as the Regional Director of Clinics for the St. Vincent Health System in Little Rock and as the administrator of large physician group practices, one in St. Louis and one in Little Rock. He also was senior administrator for a large insurance company for 15 years prior to beginning his career in health care.

Mr. Ault holds an MHSA degree from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a bachelor of arts degree in political science from University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Brooke E.E. Montgomery, Ph.D., MPH, Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education (HBHE) at the UAMS Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health (COPH), is the new Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at the College, effective August 1.

Dr. Montgomery is the founding president of the UAMS Minority Faculty Development Caucus and a member of the UAMS Chancellor’s Minority Recruitment and Retention Committee.

Diversity of the College’s faculty will be Dr. Montgomery’s first priority in the coming months. Reinvigorating the COPH Diversity Committee and junior faculty development – on the college as well as UAMS level – are among her longer term goals for her new role.

“The first order of business is strengthening the diversity of our faculty,” Dr. Montgomery said. “Our faculty is relatively diverse, but it definitely could be better. It is important that we attract and retain a diverse faculty that feel supported and want to stay in Arkansas to help address health issues in our state.”

Efforts to increase faculty diversity will focus on racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, as well as regional differences, rural origin in particular.

According to Dr. Montgomery, those “health issues in Arkansas” include health inequities and disparities disproportionately experienced by minority and impoverished groups, who in general have poorer health status, as well as poorer healthcare access and quality, than their mainstream counterparts.

Dr. Montgomery also sees the “broader definition of diversity” as encompassing other minorities, including persons with a disability and military veterans, and as essential to the College’s three-pronged mission of research, teaching and service.

For now, she is in a “learning phase” focused on faculty diversity. In particular, she wants to meet with chairs to learn how faculty searches are currently done. She envisions serving as a resource for search committees on best practices for identifying qualified candidates with diverse talents, expertise and perspectives to bring to public health.

“I would like to provide search committees with effective tools and strategic steps to enable them to cast a broader net for attracting well-qualified diverse applicants and eventually hiring the applicant who will best serve the College and the state,” Dr. Montgomery said.

Dr. Montgomery’s passion for improving the health of diverse and marginalized populations is reflected in her scientific pursuits. She is a researcher in the areas of sexual risk reduction, sexually transmitted infection prevention, and determinants of risk behavior in vulnerable populations such as minority women, illicit drug users, and survivors of violence. Her work in this area began while she was a graduate assistant at the COPH, working for Katharine E. Stewart, Ph.D., MPH, who at the time was a Professor in HBHE and the COPH Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

As a student and now as faculty, Dr. Montgomery has been the recipient of a number of awards supporting her research, including a predoctoral award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and an HIV Prevention Trials Network Scholar Award, focusing on HIV prevention among impoverished women. She was also a KL2 Scholar of the UAMS Translational Research Institute in sexual health promotion among women who have experienced violence.

Dr. Montgomery joined the COPH HBHE faculty as an Instructor in 2011 and was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2012. She is a graduate of UAMS COPH, earning an MPH with honors in 2007 and a Ph.D. in Health Promotion and Prevention in 2011.

A new course has been added to the curriculum of the Department of Health Behavior and Education (HBHE) and will taught for the first time this fall. The course was developed by and will be taught by Nickolas Zaller, Ph.D., Associate Professor for HBHE. The course has been approved for the MPH core, as well as the Ph.D. Health Promotion and Prevention Research and DrPH Public Health Leadership programs.

According to the course syllabus, the course will review the major classes of psychoactive drugs of abuse and misuse and will explore the complex relationships between psychoactive drug use and the social response to such drug use in the United States. Students will develop an understanding of evidence-based principles of substance use prevention, treatment and recovery as well as theories and principles related to reducing drug-related harms, both individual and societal.

Jeannette Lee, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, presented at Jan. 13 Public Health Seminar. Her talk was entitled, “Risk Cancer among HIV-infected Adults.” Her interest in this area stems from her leadership of the AIDS-Associated Malignancies Clinical Trials Consortium Statistical Center, for which she wrote the original grant application 20 years ago and has been involved in ever since. In her talk, she described the shifts in cancer incidence rates among HIV-infected individuals, as that population has responded to drug therapies for HIV.

The incidence rates for three cancers commonly associated with AIDS and known as “AIDS-defining cancers” – Kaposi’s sarcoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and invasive cervical cancer – have declined dramatically since the introduction of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) in 1995. However, as individuals with AIDS are now living longer, the incidence of some non-AIDS-defining cancers is on the rise. HIV-infected individuals remain at higher risk of cancer than the general population, mostly due to higher rates of lung cancer, anal cancer and Hodgkins lymphoma.

J. Mick Tilford, Ph.D., and Nalin Payakachat, BPharm, MSc, Ph.D., collaborated on an expert review entitled “Progress in measuring family spillover effects for economic evaluations,” which appeared this month in Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research. Dr. Tilford is a health economist who serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health at UAMS. Dr. Payakachat is an Associate Professor in the Division of Pharmaceutical Evaluation and Policy at UAMS.

Their article reviews research on how to measure quality of life effects on family members in economic terms associated with patient health conditions or health services. For example, treatment for prostate cancer may create health outcomes that adversely affect a partner’s quality of life. The authors point out that failure to include such “spillover” effects lead to inaccurate assessment of the costs and benefits of treatments.

The article also reviews current policy positions on the national level about whether or not to include spillover effects in economic evaluations of health services, including pharmaceutical drugs. These policy positions are currently being debated by a federal panel overseeing guidelines for conducting cost-effectiveness analysis in health and medicine.

COPH faculty and staff presentations at the 2014 APHA annual meeting

Yeary KH, Bryant K, Haynes T, Turner J, Smith J, Kuo D, Stewart MK, Ounpraseuth S, Williams SR, Harris K, Hudson B, Sullivan G. Community exchange of “best practices” to conduct a multi-level, mixed methods health assessment across two countries: Faith-Academic Initiative for Transforming Health (FAITH) in the Delta.

Turner J, Smith J, Bryant K, Haynes T, Kuo D, Stewart MK, Harris K, Williams SR, Huff A, Sullivan G, Yeary KH. Community Building Community: The distinct benefits of community partners building other communities’ capacity to conduct health research.