Category: Education

On Friday, April 3, speech pathologist Katie Gildea ’03, pauses from a round of home visits on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to discuss her work during the pandemic, as she continues to travel the streets and subways of New York, an essential worker in a city on lockdown. Eight-and-a-half months pregnant, Gildea takes all the pre-cautions — “and then some” — to keep herself and the people she visits safe. Motivation in the difficult circumstances comes from her commitment to patients in this neighborhood she has served for the past eleven years and solidarity with colleagues facing the same challenge. Sharing a line voiced often these days by those in healthcare and helping professions, Gildea says, “This is what we signed up for.” 

As a medical speech pathologist meeting patients in their homes, Gildea takes a role in easing the burden on over-taxed hospitals and their staffs. People recovering from strokes, often dealing with swallowing disorders, are among those she helps. In the midst of the crisis, these patients are being sent home earlier, leaving them susceptible to other health issues, particularly pneumonia. Seeing the patients in person, being sure they are following proper rehab and diet protocols, Gildea and fellow speech pathologists are helping make sure these patients aren’t re-hospitalized. 

A native of Westfield, NJ, when it came time for college she followed her brother Jim ’92 and sister Cristin ’95 in heading north to Vermont. Looking back to her days at UVM, Gildea says she found mentors in professors such as Rebecca McCauley, Barry Guitar and Patty Prelock. “I’ve always loved my work and I know that’s hard to come by,” she says. “I feel my education at UVM, and later in grad school, helped me achieve that. I’m so grateful for it.” 

That gratitude abides, even as Gildea leaves her husband, now working from home, and nearly three-year-old daughter behind in their Battery Park apartment in Lower Manhattan and heads to work in the pandemic red zone. She’s determined to keep working “until the baby makes her grand entrance,” Gildea says. And she adds, “We’ll tell her about this years from now and teach her about the importance of empathy and unity during difficult times.”

Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont has given nursing students the option of early graduation so they can enter the nursing workforce and provide support to overstressed healthcare workers during the height of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

All 94 members of the class opted to graduate on May 1 rather than in the third week of the month when other students at the university will earn their degrees.

UVM is among the first colleges in the country to allow nurses to graduate early.

Vermont’s State Board of Nursing will offer students temporary permits so they can begin staffing hospitals and other healthcare facilities in the state immediately after they graduate. Nursing school graduates normally begin work in early August, after they’ve taken a licensure exam and become registered nurses.  

Typically about half of UVM’s graduating nurses work in Vermont, with the others working at out-of-state healthcare facilities. Most states issue temporary permits to nursing school graduates. Students who choose to work immediately will be able to take the exam and become RN’s after the immediate crisis has passed.

“The timing is what is so important,” said Rosemary Dale, chair of the Department of Nursing in UVM’s College of Nursing and Health Sciences. “Healthcare workers need support now, when the pandemic is at full force. Our students will be able to make a difference.” 

“Our graduating nurses deserve great credit,” said Scott Thomas, interim dean of UVM’s College of Nursing and Health Sciences. “These are challenging times, and they have careers to begin. But many are stepping up the plate and looking for ways to help now. I couldn’t be more proud of them.”  

Senior nursing student  Kathryn Calisti, of Yarmouth, Mass., will begin work in early May on a general surgery floor at the UVM Medical Center, where she worked as a student intern and has been offered a job.

The decision to begin work during the pandemic was a difficult one; she called her parents to talk it through. But in the end, she decided that going to work now was the right thing to do.

“If you can get into the hospital a little earlier, and help out, that’s what you want to do,” said Calisti.

The pandemic is taxing what was already a severely stressed nursing workforce.

Economists at Georgetown University estimate that 200,000 nursing positions are projected to go unfilled at hospitals across the country this year. In all, one-in-eight nursing positions will go unstaffed.

Nursing students like those at the University of Vermont could help ease the pressure. About 155,000 registered nurses graduate each year in the United States.

The early graduation is pending approval of UVM’s Faculty Senate on April 20. The Faculty Senate’s president, Thomas Chittenden, said he saw no reason why the senate wouldn’t approve.

Source: UVM News

Three trailblazing University of Vermont professors were named Fellows of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) today for outstanding contributions to the science of ecology. 

UVM’s trio of new ESA Fellows are: Aimée Classen and Taylor Ricketts (Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources), and Nicholas Gotelli (College of Arts and Sciences). All are Fellows of UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment.

UVM had more faculty honored as ESA Fellows today than any other institution. The Catamounts join a distinguished group of 22 new ESA fellows from Columbia University, University of California, and other leading institutions.  

“Today’s national recognition of these outstanding University of Vermont professors shows yet again how the environment is a core strength of this great university,” said Patty Prelock, University of Vermont provost. “We couldn’t be more proud of these pioneering teacher-scholars for their contributions to real-world problems in ecology.”

Aimée Classen, Professor, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, Gund Institute for Environment

From soil microbes to GHG emissions, Aimée Classen investigates diverse ecosystems (forests, meadows, bogs, tropics, boreal, temperate) to inform predictions of how global change will alter ecosystems. In one project, Classen is measuring global warming’s impacts on mountain landscapes in 10 nations and 5 continents with international collaborators. She recently received a Gund Institute Catalyst Award to develop innovative low-cost, flexible sensors with a CEMS colleague to better study biogeochemical responses to global climate change in extreme environments. Classen is editor-in-chief of the ESA journal Ecological Monographs.

Classen was recognized by the ESA for: “creative leadership and vision for international research collaborations using mountain ecosystems as models for climate change research… and for stellar research contributions to the ecology of global environmental change, including how soil microbial diversity shapes ecosystems, and environmental controls on soil nutrient cycling and carbon storage.”

Nicholas Gotelli, Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Biology, Gund Institute for Environment

Through his research, Nick Gotelli addresses basic questions about the organization of animal, plant and nutrient communities. What forces determine species composition and abundance? How does competition affect community structure? What factors control population growth and the risk of extinction? His recent research explores the collapse of aquatic food webs, species interactions of ants and their responses to experimental warming, and the measurement, analysis and simulation modeling of species richness, biodiversity, and ecosystem function. Gotelli is the co-creator of EcoSimR, the R modelling software package.

Gotelli was recognized by the ESA for: “contributing outstanding intellectual leadership in ecology and ecological methodology to the fields of biodiversity science, community assembly, climate change, demography, and species distributions, as well as through his service to the ESA.”

Taylor Ricketts, Professor, Rubenstein School for Environment and Natural Resources, Fellow, Gund Institute for Environment

As a teacher and scholar, Taylor Ricketts explores a critical question: How can we meet the needs of people and nature in an increasingly crowded, changing world? He is a pioneer in the field of ecosystem services, which quantifies the benefits that nature provides to people. Consistently among the world’s most cited researchers, Ricketts’ over 130 scientific publications range from investigations of climate impacts on global crop pollination to analyses of the economic and health benefits provided to humans by forests, urban parks, wetlands, reefs, and other natural areas. He has co-authored and co-edited two UN-sponsored efforts to assess global ecosystems and their contributions to human wellbeing. 

Ricketts, who leads the Gund Institute for Environment, was recognized by the ESA for: “His contributions to understanding ecosystems and the services they provide for human well-being; his discoveries related to pollination services for crops; and his unique ability to bridge the science and decision-making worlds, ensuring that new knowledge about ecosystems services is used by decision makers in conservation communities and beyond.” 

With today’s announcement, UVM and the Gund Institute now have four ESA Fellows. Classen, Gotelli and Ricketts join Nathan Sanders (RSENR), who was named an ESA Fellow in 2018. 

The Ecological Society of America was founded in 1915 and is the world’s largest community of professional ecologists.

Learn more about the Gund Institute’s annual fellowships for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers.

 

Source: UVM News

Over the last three weeks, a team of scientists, engineers and doctors at the University of Vermont have developed a new design—and built a working model—for a simple, inexpensive ventilator.

“We think these could be rolled out very quickly and be effective on an emergency basis,” says University of Vermont lung expert Jason Bates who is leading the new effort in response to the burgeoning global coronavirus epidemic—and the huge shortage of ventilators that may be needed to treat people.

Affectionately called the “Vermontilator,” preliminary calculations suggest the UVM Ventilator “can be produced quickly and in large numbers for a few hundred dollars per unit in parts and materials,” Bates says.

Alternative approach

Unlike other improvised emergency ventilator designs, now being worked on around the world, the UVM team’s approach uses an alternative mode of helping critically ill patients breathe. It’s called “airway pressure release ventilation” or APRV.

This APRV approach may be particularly useful for patients suffering with the new virus. “One of the main complications from COVID-19 is called acute respiratory distress syndrome, a disease where the lungs fill up with an inflammatory fluid,” explains Dr. Anne Dixon, director of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at the University of Vermont Medical Center and Larner College of Medicine. “Many of these patients end up being dependent on a ventilator for fairly prolonged periods.”

The new ventilator could help these patients by inflating their lungs using long inspirations of air, which are held inflated at a constant and relatively high pressure, Bates explains. Then “at regular intervals, short expirations are allowed during which the lungs expel carbon dioxide,” he says.

This APRV approach is the opposite of a normal breathing pattern—and may allow patients with COVID-19 to avoid, or reduce, the lung damage associated with the disease and with extended periods on a ventilator.

For more than fifteen years, Jason Bates— a professor in both UVM’s Larner College of Medicine and College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences—has been researching the kind of lung damage that occurs during illnesses like doctors are now seeing in COVID-19 patients. A traditional fear is that a ventilator can cause injury from overinflation of the lungs. But Bates’ research is part of a growing body of evidence showing nearly the opposite: that the major risk to many patients comes when regions of the lung collapse. Then, the damaged and delicate lining of the lung comes together, sticks, and then is peeled apart—over and over.

“This peeling apart process is extremely injurious to the lining itself and can damage it to the point of allowing fluid to leak into the lungs from the capillaries that course through it,” Bates says. “Once this starts happening, the damage from peeling becomes worse, causing ventilator-induced lung injury to progress in a way that is difficult to reverse.”

APRV may avoid this trouble. “This mode of ventilation is thought to be particularly safe and non-injurious for patients with acute respiratory distress,” says Dr. Dixon who has been supporting the project.

A peak approaches

The APRV approach is also helpful to the engineers designing the new ventilator. Using this simpler breathing pattern allowed the team at UVM’s IMF Labs to build the prototype Vermontilator with a simple mechanism. Unlike a traditional ventilator—a very complex piece of equipment that can cost more that $25,000—the Vermont-built machine was quickly assembled out of a commercially available motor that drives a rotating disk, conventional medical hoses, and other relatively simple parts. The team’s prototype was built using a 3-D printer and machining equipment, with pieces that could be easily milled or cast, and assembled.  Bates credits the extraordinary skill of UVM engineers Jake Kittel, Mike Lane, Carl Silver and Guy Kennedy as being critical to the project’s rapid progress.

“We’ve diverted resources from our other projects to work on this and the guys are working all weekend,” says Lane, the director of UVM’s IMF Labs. “We know we have a very limited window to be successful, maybe just weeks before this [epidemic] peaks in Vermont.”

Dr. Dixon agrees. “They’re facing a catastrophic shortage of ventilators in New York. We’re hearing from our colleagues there that they’re trying to use machines we use for patients with obstructive sleep apnea and trying to ventilate people by hooking two patients up to one ventilator. Just crazy stuff that I’ve never heard of in my lifetime,” she says. “This new ventilator has amazing potential to help quickly. It’s not just simple—it’s innovative and elegant.”

The design is about to be submitted to the FDA for emergency review, and the team is working with the Vermont Manufacturing Extension Center, UVM Health Network, UVM Foundation, the state of Vermont, and other partners to secure funding, and engage qualified manufacturers. They’re also collaborating with UVM Innovations to develop an intellectual property strategy and business model to produce a large number of the devices.

Source: UVM News

As the coronavirus pandemic loomed, shuttering his employer, Generator, along with countless other Burlington businesses, Jake Blend had an idea. What if the Burlington makerspace, which was full of high-end tools, could do what small manufacturers around the country were doing: help out during the crisis by suppling healthcare organizations with the personal protection equipment, or PPE, they so desperately needed? As one of Generator’s resident industrial designers, he could fabricate and produce the equipment himself.

Using an open-source design he found online, Blend began work on a prototype face shield, the clear plastic covering healthcare workers wear to protect themselves from the COVID-19 virus, which also significantly extends the useable life of scarce N95 face masks.

Across town at the University of Vermont Medical Center, an anesthesia resident named Vivek Chittineni, who sat on the hospital’s PPE committee, was approaching the same problem from the opposite direction. What if UVMMC could bolster its stressed supply chain with PPE produced by local companies?

Blend and Chittineni were active in the same networks, but it took UVM’s Dan Harvey ’84 — director of operations in the Office of the Vice President for Research and assistant dean of the Graduate College, who was also president of Generator’s board — to bring them together.

Blend, who had quarantined himself for safety, contacted Harvey and Generator’s executive director, Meg Hammond, and asked to re-enter the facility. “He pulled this crazy all-nighter,” Harvey says, and produced the prototype.

At about the same time, Harvey was scanning an email chain from Burlington entrepreneur and UVM alumnus Steve Arms ’81 and spotted a reply from Chittineni, who was obviously knowledgeable and clearly well-connected at the hospital. Harvey gave him a call and told him about Blend’s prototype.

“Vivek literally drove to Generator that night, picked up the prototype from Jake and took it to the hospital,” Harvey says.

Over the course of the next few days, Chittineni and his colleagues tested the prototype shields and made modification suggestions, which Blend incorporated. When the prototype shield came before the hospital’s PPE committee, it got rave reviews.

As momentum gathered for what looked like a very large order, Hammond and Elliott Katz, Generator’s designer and operation manager, confronted a challenge they’d never anticipated: how to turn a community makerspace geared to producing prototypes in small volume for budding entrepreneurs into what amounted to a manufacturing and distribution facility. The key was sourcing materials and building a supply chain, the team realized.

“We knew by then that Jake could laser cut the clear plastic face shields pretty easily,” Harvey says. But what about the flexible plastic headband, which required 3D printing, and the elastic piece that connected the headband and kept the face shield in place? For the headbands, Hammond and Katz enlisted Beta Technologies and its fleet of 3D printers. Queen City Dry Goods agreed to supply the disposable elastic piece. 

After jumping through the necessary hoops and being designated an approved UVMMC vendor, Generator began its new life on April 2 when a formal purchase order for 1,000 face shields landed in Harvey’s inbox. “It’s a day the Generator family will never forget,” says Harvey, who credits Generator’s board and staff for being supportive of the project.

Chittineni is thrilled — both with the face shields and the larger point the project has made. “I was hoping to prove to hospital administration that we have a massive group of talented, skilled designers and fabricators in our community who are able to make these things for us and help the medical establishment and the public in so many ways,” he says. “The Generator project proved that point and then some.”

Source: UVM News

As new COVID-19 cases multiply and the death tolls mount daily, uncertainties trigged by the pandemic ripple outward. A new online speaker series, developed by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Research on Vermont, addresses some of these implications, such as health policy, economics, human relationships, politics and international relations.  

“All of us have been deeply affected by this crisis,” says Richard Watts, director of the Center for Research on Vermont and organizer of the ExpertsLive series. “Arts and Sciences faculty have valuable perspectives about the human and social dimensions of COVID-19, so we’ve put together a series that draws on their expertise from a wide range of disciplines.”

The series kicked off the first week of April with the program “Pandemics in an Age of Resurgent Nationalism,” presented by Pablo Bose, director of UVM’s Global and Regional Studies program and a professor of geography. 

Bose spoke about the re-emergence of figurative and literal boundaries between nations in the wake of a virus that doesn’t respect barriers. He said the promise of a borderless world where people, goods and services could move easily between nations has been made obsolete by the pandemic.

“There were claims that the Brexit movement in Britain would create a cascading domino effect–that other member of the EU would simply seek to leave,” Bose said. “In the face of this pandemic there are many in Europe who have questioned what this project of European common identity really means when Italy and Spain find themselves going it alone…where they reach out to other members for assistance and are essentially rebuffed.” 

Other live talks are scheduled on upcoming Thursdays at noon. Review the schedule and past programs on the ExpertsLive website. Each session lasts for about 20 minutes, followed by an online question-and-answer period.

Thursday, April 9: The Stimulus: Who Benefits
Stephanie Seguino, Professor of Economics

Thursday, April 16: Government Power in Times of Crisis
Lisa Homes, Professor of Political Science

Thursday, April 23: Impacts of Stay-at-Home Policies on Children and their Families

Betsy Hoza, Bishop Joyce Chair of Human Development, Professor of Psychology

Thursday, April 30: Latin America, the Mexico-US Border and COVID-19
Caroline Beer, Professor of Political Science

Thursday May 7: Weather, Climate and COVID-19:
Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, Professor of Geography (Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and President-elect of the American Association of State Climatologists)

Source: UVM News

For as quickly as coronavirus spread across the globe, so too did claims of snake oil “cures” and home remedies to the virus. While we can’t attest to the effectiveness of some makeshift treatments circulating around the internet, we can say with confidence that the emergence of a true medical solution “does not happen in a short amount of time; sometimes it can take three to five years,” says Estee Dilli ’15, a senior associate scientist at Pfizer. 

Right now, Dilli and a team of scientists in New York and Mains, Germany, are scrambling to develop a potential vaccine for COVID-19. But the admittedly long process is “on a very expedited track—things are able to progress at a much faster rate than I’ve ever seen anything move along,” she says. 

When it comes to creating a vaccine, Dilli explains that there are generally two sides from which it needs to be approached: “One side is dealing with the live virus, which has to be done in special labs. The other side — my side — is the blood side or serology side of things. That part isn’t dealing with live virus, it’s looking more at the body’s natural immune response.”

As an assay developer at Pfizer’s vaccine research development site, she is currently working with blood samples, plasma and sera at her benchtop to establish the specific controls that will be used during clinical trials to measure the body’s immune response to COVID-19 or a future vaccine.

“If you’re working on a meningitis study, for example, you can’t expose somebody to meningitis,” Dilli says. “With this, you can’t expose somebody to COVID-19. Once a vaccine is developed, you need a way to measure that it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. You want the vaccine to illicit the same immune response from the body as if it were fighting an infection. You want to be able to measure that your body’s responding the way it should.”

In the global dash to a vaccine, Dilli says it’s not uncommon for timelines and priorities to shift by the hour as they progress with their partners in Germany, as well as partners around the world. “It’s not just Pfizer; everyone is sharing what they know to work toward the same goal. Everybody is working on this as a compassion project in response to this global crisis. It’s an exciting time to be involved in this, but it’s a different way to work when there’s pressure behind it like that.”

Source: UVM News

Late Friday afternoon of spring break, the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) team realized they needed a new plan for the faculty trainings that were slated to start the following Monday morning. 

Barely a week before, CTL acting director, Professor Annie Murray-Close, and the rest of UVM’s faculty received notice that a shift to remote learning was possible, given the growing threat of the coronavirus. Charged with supporting faculty in the use of instructional technology, CTL focused on developing a resources portal to support faculty and to provide the trainings, mentors, and helpline assistance that would make this quick pivot to remote instruction not only possible, but successful.

The collaborations that ensued underscore the all-hands-on-deck moment that CTL—and the full university teaching and support community—were called to.

Many faculty sidelined their spring break plans to spend the week learning to migrate their classes online. Continuing and Distance Education stepped in to assist with CTL’s email inquiries, Enterprise Technology Services joined CTL in responding to faculty requests for help and served as technological support during the now-remote CTL workshops, and the UVM Tech Team stood at the ready to assist faculty and students with technical difficulties. Writing in the Disciplines director Susanmarie Harrington joined forces with the CTL team to develop a full suite of workshops. And faculty from across disciplines with experience in online teaching volunteered at the CTL help-desk to assist their colleagues. 

“What continues to be impressive in such a challenging time is watching people who are already strained by moving their own classes online volunteering to help us assist their colleagues all across campus,” says Murray-Close. 

That Friday of spring break—in the now routine end-of-afternoon CTL meeting to discuss questions that came up that day—it became apparent that continuing to work on campus would push CTL past the university’s 25-person gathering limit many times during the day. In a move now familiar across the workplace, the CTL team made an immediate pivot to fully online programs. CTL staff spent the weekend redesigning the Monday workshops, developing remote learning materials for online teaching using Screencast-O-Matic, Blackboard, and Microsoft Teams, and answering the steady stream of individual support requests.

It was a busy weekend for spring break, but a productive one. That first suite of workshops for effectively migrating to online teaching has now morphed into an ongoing series of trainings. More importantly, they created space for faculty to discuss emerging issues, like how to best support students with flexibility and compassion. While the university community looks forward to the eventual return to residential learning, the UVM spirit remains in full force behind the student academic experience, whether on campus or online. 

Source: UVM News

Jim Gildea ’92 began his work as town administrator in Westfield, N.J., two months before September 11, 2001. A community of 31,000 just a 20-mile drive from the twin towers of the World Trade Center, Westfield lost twelve citizens that day. In his leadership role, Gildea has also helped the community cope and move forward in other times of crisis, from the economic freefall of 2008 to Hurricane Sandy. 

Today, Westfield is in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic’s Metro New York red zone. Speaking to the challenge of the current situation, Gildea says, “In reality, this is almost a combination of all of those things we dealt with in the past. But with those previous events, you knew that in a number of days it would be solved. Roads would be cleared, the power would be back on after the storm. But with this, the main difference is there is no clear end in sight.” 

Gildea’s roots run deep in Westfield, his hometown where his parents still live. His first job for the city was as a lifeguard in high school. After college at UVM, he returned to first work in recreation, then move into the town administrator role. (His roots also run deep at the University of Vermont, where he majored in small business management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. His sisters Katie ’03 and Cristin ’95 are also graduates, and he admits to hoping his daughter, a junior in high school, might become a next-generation Catamount.) 

The police chief, fire chief, and town health officer are among the unit heads who report to Gildea. He praises their heroic efforts on the front lines, mentioning with pride that Westfield assisted in establishing the first coronavirus testing site serving the 21 towns in Union County. Gildea continues to work from the town’s city hall daily. Offices such as the town clerk and tax collector have employees working solo in shifts to protect their health. “We’re making sure the gears of government can still work,” Gildea says. “During times like this we need the government to work better than ever.”

Before the pandemic hit, Gildea was poised to present the town budget, approximately $50 million, for the next fiscal year. But as civic revenue streams shut down, it’s a shifting outlook. Gildea is reassessing, considering next steps and hard decisions to help the town emerge strong on the other side of the pandemic. Those Westfield roots keep him focused and positive. “One of the benefits of serving in the town where you live is you get to see and make changes where you live, in the places you care about,” Gildea says. “Together with the people I work with, that’s what keeps me going every day.” 

Source: UVM News

A message from President Suresh Garimella to the UVM Community:

Without a doubt, these are challenging and unusual times. But I continue to be very impressed—and proud—of the strength, understanding, and connection that define our university.

Please take a few moments to view this video, and thank you for the many ways you keep UVM strong.

 

Warm wishes,
Suresh Garimella

 

See the latest information and updates surrounding UVM’s response to COVID-19.

Source: UVM News