Lisa Kitko, associate dean for graduate education and director of the PhD program at the Ross and Carol Nese College of Nursing at Penn State University, emerged as the leading candidate in a national search to replace Kathy Rideout and become the sixth dean of the School of Nursing. Rideout announced last year she was stepping down after 11 years as dean.

“Lisa has an outstanding academic record, and I believe that she has the ability to take our School of Nursing to the next level with regard to research, scholarship, and educational innovation. Lisa’s engaging and enthusiastic personality will be an ideal fit within the Medical Center,” says Mark Taubman, CEO of the Medical Center.

Kitko began her professional career in 1990 as an intensive care/trauma care nurse and spent more than a decade working as a clinician and hospital administrator. She developed the stroke program at Altoona Hospital while she pursued her master’s degree at Penn State, and later managed the hospital’s inpatient and outpatient neurovascular services.

Kitko also maintains an active and funded program of research focused on the palliative care needs of persons living with life-limiting illnesses and their family members, with a focus on serious illness conversations. Learn more.

In January of 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a ban on the sale of some flavored e-cigs. Shortly thereafter, sentiments about e-cigs seemed to sour on Twitter, according to a study led by researchers at the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI). While the researchers didn’t study behavior directly, they believe these results may suggest that the FDA policy impacted flavored e-cig use.

Vaping products – especially fruit or mint flavored products – are very popular among teens. While e-cigs can help some people quit smoking, they are generally harmful for young people and non-smokers, putting their health at risk and providing a gateway to tobacco smoking.

“The FDA flavor ban and state and local policies that followed all hope to address the current vaping epidemic in youth,” says study senior author Dongmei Li, associate professor of clinical and translational research, public health sciences, and obstetrics and gynecology.

The study, published in JMIR Health and Surveillance, mined millions of tweets from Twitter users in the U.S. from before and after the FDA policy was announced and went into effect. The proportion of tweets with a negative sentiment about e-cigs significantly increased after the FDA policy was announced, while tweets with a positive sentiment about the FDA policy also increased. Learn more.

Recent polls indicate that the American public’s trust in scientists has dropped significantly.

Adam Frank, the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, believes the public’s faith in science will make a comeback—but it will take time.

“Sowing distrust in science is a very dangerous and slippery slope,” Frank says in a Q&A with Peter Iglinski. “You can’t just point to one area of science and call it a hoax. It will spill over into other areas of science. And the problem with that is that science is a central pillar of this country’s success. Now all this misinformation and science denial is being spread for purely political ends, and we’re going to pay a real price for that if we don’t correct it.

“The nation that controls the scientific high ground controls the future.”

Photo by Vince Fleming/Unsplash

“Adolescents today are more stressed than ever, exhibiting record levels of stress-related internalizing symptoms, such as anxiety and depression,” says Jeremy Jamieson, an associate professor of psychology.

“For adolescents, social hierarchy, social comparisons, and peer evaluations have always been important, but now it’s there all the time,” he says. “People are receiving a daily stream of likes, dislikes, and comments via social media, which makes for a constant state of social evaluation. It’s one of the most damaging things we’ve seen for adolescents.”

Conventional thinking often equates stress with something “bad,” but as Jamieson says, “stress is a normal and even defining feature of adolescence” that allows teens to acquire a wide variety of complicated social and intellectual skills as they transition to adulthood and eventually join the labor market.

That basic concept—that how we respond to stress can weigh us down or help lift us up—informs a training module developed and tested successfully by Jamieson and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University, and the Google Empathy Lab. (The researchers caution that the tool is not suitable for those whose stressors are the result of trauma or abuse.)

As the researchers explain in the journal Nature, the 30-minute online training module teaches teenagers to channel their stress responses away from something “bad” that needs to be feared and tamped down toward recognizing those responses—sweaty palms, a racing heart, for example—as a positive driving force. Learn more.

The Graduate Writing Project is hosting a three-day Hybrid Writing Retreat from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. EDT daily August 2-4.

The retreat is designed for AS&E graduate students and postdocs who are working on graduate-level writing, such as dissertations, theses, proposals, publications, etc. This structured writing experience offers guidance, accountability, and community in addition to a quiet space, snacks, and the option to schedule an individual appointment with a Writing Consultant during the Writing Retreat.

Register online. If you have any questions or would like to be added to the Graduate Writing Project listserv, contact Liz at liz.tinelli@rochester.edu.

The Dean’s Lecture series continues with Huda Yahya Zoghbi, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, who will present “Molecular and Neurobiological Studies in Rett Syndrome and Other MECP2 Disorders” from 4 to 5 p.m. Aug. 8, in the Class of ’62 Auditorium. A reception will follow at the Forbes Mezzanine. Add to Outlook calendar

Mark Taubman, dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry, and Tufikameni Brima, research assistant professor in neuroscience, will introduce Zoghbi. She is the Ralph D. Feigin Professor at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital. Zoghbi received the 2022 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for the discovery of ATAXIN1, the gene underlying spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1).

The Dean’s Lecture Series is intended to showcase high caliber research and high impact topics in clinical medicine and related biomedical fields.  The presentations will be targeted to a broad audience of investigators and trainees from multiple areas of clinical medicine, public health, and life science research, as well as for interested members of the university community and the public at large. The George D. and Freida B. Abraham Foundation is sponsoring this series.

Now that the new OnCore clinical trial management system is up and running, the Office of Clinical Research (OCR) at the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI) has begun to build out several service lines to help researchers with various aspects of their clinical trials. From educational opportunities to study feasibility and financial services, the OCR is taking the Medical Center’s clinical research enterprise to the next level.

• Last year, the OCR supported unlimited institutional attendance of Advarra’s Onsemble conference for the first time. The conference, which is held annually in the spring and fall, covers a wide range of topics related to conducting clinical trials, including leveraging technologies to improve the conduct of clinical research.
• The Research Finance service line provides uniform and central services for both pre- and post-award clinical trial financials. At a rate of $50 per hour – which can be built into the study budget—clinical researchers can select from an extensive list of financial services: coverage analysis, study cost and timeline analysis, budget negotiation and creation, sponsor invoicing, revenue reconciliation, monthly research billing review and more.  Currently, the OCR provides financial services for more than half of URMC departments running clinical trials that have billable services.
• The OCR is also helping clinical research teams assess the feasibility of their proposed clinical studies and develop meaningful study metrics through its Study Feasibility service line. The assessments examine the feasibility of a study in terms of resources (staff, investigators, space, equipment, and patient population) as well as financial feasibility, and the timeline as it relates to start up and enrollment. Research teams can also get help with cohort discovery and with developing and submitting confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements. The Study Feasibility line also connects researchers with multisite clinical trial opportunities.
• OCR will supplement current self-guided OnCore training with additional live weekly trainings and workflow labs as well as OnCore consultations and one-on-one support.

Learn more.

The University is providing an opportunity for grant writing/consulting assistance to its researchers who are planning to partner with a small business to develop and submit a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) proposal.  Please visit: https://redcap.link/UR_SBIR_STTR

The initial application deadline is August 1 (followed by open/rolling review of applications, while funding is available).