AA Learn more about in-home care options for your loved ones

Dr. Joseph J. Pancrazio, associate provost and professor of bioengineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, has been named vice president for research for the University.

Effective June 1, the appointment was made after a national search that attracted exceptional candidates, said UT Dallas President Richard C. Benson.

“Dr. Pancrazio has a deep understanding of the issues and opportunities that are critical to maintain and expand a dynamic university research program,” Benson said. “His expertise is especially pertinent when it comes to conducting and overseeing interdisciplinary collaboration, which is one of the hallmarks of the UT Dallas research enterprise. I look forward to working with Dr. Pancrazio as we continue to attract top faculty members into our ranks, graduate highly skilled doctoral students and increase extramural research funding.”

Pancrazio succeeds Dr. Bruce Gnade, who served as vice president for research from 2006 to 2017.

The Office of Research oversees research funding, grants and contracts; campus research facilities and information systems; technology commercialization and licensing; compliance and safety; and the institutional review board, which approves research involving human subjects.

“The Office of Research has a terrific group of people who are strongly committed to the University and aim to offer the highest caliber research infrastructure. I’d like to thank Rafael Martín for his outstanding leadership as the interim vice president,” Pancrazio said. “We have an opportunity to engage in research development, such as fostering interdepartmental, interschool and even cross-institution collaborations. Collaborative research is an important approach to catalyze our efforts going forward.”

Pancrazio’s research focuses on the development of novel neural interface technology, which is used to understand and influence the brain and nervous system for the purposes of improving human health. His work leverages advances in materials science and microscale fabrication to create new devices capable of neural stimulation and recording, such as real-time imaging of neuronal activity in the brain.

At UT Dallas, for example, he has partnered with neuroscientists and biologists on an interdisciplinary project that uses innovative measurements of neural activity for screening novel pain therapeutics.

Funding sources for Pancrazio’s research include the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research.

“We have an opportunity to engage in research development, such as fostering interdepartmental, interschool and even cross-institution collaborations. Collaborative research is an important approach to catalyze our efforts going forward.”

Dr. Joseph J. Pancrazio, vice president for research

Before joining the faculty of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas in 2015, Pancrazio was a professor and founding chair of the Department of Bioengineering at George Mason University. Prior to that, from 2009 to 2011, he was a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the bioengineering program at the university’s Volgenau School of Engineering.

From 2004 to 2009, Pancrazio was program director for the neural engineering and neural prosthesis program at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which is part of the NIH.

He also was an assistant professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, working at the Center for Bio/Molecular Science and Engineering at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Pancrazio earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984, and his master’s and doctorate in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1988 and 1990, respectively. He completed postdoctoral training in pharmacology in the Department of Anesthesiology at Virginia and served as an assistant professor of research there with a joint appointment in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Engineering.

In 2011, Pancrazio was elected to the College of Fellows in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, a distinction reserved for the top 2 percent of professionals in the field. Since 2012, he has served as the chair of the steering committee for Neural Interfaces Conference, an international meeting central to the neurotechnology field. He was named Neurotechnology Researcher of the Year for 2016 by the industry newsletter Neurotech Reports.

In the next few weeks Texas’ healthcare system could be facing the largest surge in coronavirus patients since the onset of the pandemic. According to the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, hospitalizations across the U.S. will peak far above the previous high by the end of January.

Total hospitalizations in the U.S. this week surpassed the January 2021 peak to reach nearly 146,000. Coronavirus patients in Texas have surged above 11,000 patients, accounting for roughly one sixth of all hospitalizations in the state.

Anass Bouchnita, a postdoctoral researcher with the UT Austin consortium, says hospitalizations in Texas will likely keep pace with national trends.

“We are in the middle of this tsunami of cases that keep rising day after day with new records set every week,” he said.

Seven-day averages for new cases have shattered previous records this month. The U.S. is averaging roughly 700,000 new cases a day. Texas is reporting more than 40,000 new cases daily. State health officials on Wednesday confirmed 61,113 new infections, Texas’ highest daily case count ever.

Bouchnita and fellow researchers based their latest projections on what’s currently known about the omicron variant's transmissibility, severity of illness and the U.S. population's overall immunity from prior infections and vaccinations.

The team’s best case scenario projects the ongoing surge will result in about half as many deaths and slightly more hospitalizations in the U.S. than the peak last January.

"We will exceed the prior level of hospitalizations by 20% on average," said Bouchnita of the most optimistic projection. In Texas, that rate of increase means hospitals would be treating nearly 17,000 people for COVID-19 by the end of the month.

“This could represent a threat to the healthcare system and we know that some places do not have the capacity to deal with surges like that,” said Bouchnita.

According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, coronavirus patients account for more than 15% of all hospitalizations in nine of Texas’ 22 trauma service areas. The El Paso area is currently most affected with roughly one in four beds filled with COVID-19 patients.

UT Austin’s worst case scenario projects slightly more fatalities and about three times as many hospital admissions in the U.S. than a year ago. However, the consortium is projecting a lower rate of fatalities overall for the current surge, due to better treatments available and evidence that the omicron variant is generally less severe than previous strains, said Bouchnita.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently updated its data available on the omicron variant characteristics, which prompted the University of Texas research group to push back its initial prediction that the surge in omicron hospitalizations would peak by mid-January.

“It’s really hard to discern whether this reduced severity is due to omicron being less severe itself,” said Bouchnita, “because it does not replicate in the lungs as fast as [the] delta [variant] or whether it’s due to existing protection from prior immunity from vaccinations and also prior exposure to other variants.”

UT’s current modeling predicts the wave of coronavirus hospitalizations will peak in the US and Texas within the next two weeks.

One of the most surprising stories to emerge from this summer’s Rio Olympics was Michael Phelps’s defeat by University of Texas–Austin swimmer Joseph Schooling, a native Singaporean who out-swam arguably the most dominant athlete in Olympic history to win gold in the 100-meter butterfly.

It was the first-ever Olympic gold medal for Singapore, and the Southeastern Asian nation—which has the world’s eighth-largest GDP per capita—paid Schooling back with an award totaling one million Singapore dollars, or roughly $740,000. Not a bad haul for Schooling, who just started his junior year as a key member of UT’s swimming and diving team, fresh off of back-to-back team NCAA championships.

But the National Collegiate Athletic Association isn’t happy about the swimmer’s reward. On Thursday, NCAA President Mark Emmert said the swimmer’s huge payment may prompt the NCAA to reevaluate a relatively new policy that allows Olympic athletes to keep whatever award they get from their country’s Olympic organizations for winning medals.

In 2001, the NCAA’s member schools passed a rule that said U.S. Olympians could accept money from the U.S. Olympic Committee: usually between $10,000 and $20,000 for winning a bronze, silver, or gold medal. In 2015, the NCAA OK’d foreign athletes to accept money from their home country’s Olympic organizations too. Those exemptions fly in the face of the NCAA’s hardline commitment to “amateurism,” a vaguely defined status that the NCAA says it protects by preventing athletes from earning money or extra benefits related to their athletics outside of scholarships. The debate over whether college athletes should be paid has been raging for years now, and Schooling swam right into the middle of it.

“To be perfectly honest, it’s caused everybody to say, ‘Oh, well that’s not really what we were thinking about,'” Emmert said Thursday during a panel discussion about college athletics at the Aspen Institute, according to CBS. “So I don’t know where the members will go on that. That’s a little different than 15 grand for the silver medal for swimming for the US of A. So I think it’s going to stimulate a very interesting conversation.” Emmert said later that when the NCAA first gave the OK for Olympians to get paid, “it was such a rare occasion that somebody would be a college student and go out and win a medal. They get to do it once in their career, maybe, because it was once every four years. The members at that time hadn’t anticipated—at least this is what I’ve been told—this phenomenon of like the Singaporean kid getting paid a very large amount. I suspect they’re going to want to address this quickly because that’s a very different notion than just covering their training costs.”

Although there’s little precedent (remember, the NCAA’s international Olympic medal award exemption is less than a year old), it’s highly unlikely the NCAA will retroactively rule that Schooling must either fork over his award or forfeit his amateur status. Doing so would be a public relations nightmare. With that in mind, it’s difficult to imagine what Emmert’s end game is in expressing so much concern, other than that he’s possibly worried about the potential for Schooling’s payout to impact future litigation challenging the NCAA’s strict rules regarding pay-for-play. If the NCAA allows Schooling to earn $740,000, is it really fair for the organization to bar athletes in higher-profile sports, such as football and basketball, from profiting off of their own athletic talents?

Should the NCAA decide to do away with the Olympic payment exemption, it would end pretty much the only NCAA-sanctioned opportunity for college athletes to get paid for their athletic abilities. They already aren’t allowed to sign sponsorship deals or accept anything that even remotely resembles a performance bonus or a gift. Athletes have been found in violation of NCAA rules for everything from football players eating too much free pasta to a high school basketball recruit’s mother accepting a loan from an AAU coach to keep her family from becoming homeless. In some cases, they’ve made the athletes return what they earned, with penalties ranging widely in severity. The pasta-eaters were forced to pay $3.83 each to a charity of their choice in order to regain their eligibility, while, in 2004, the NCAA barred Colorado’s Jeremy Bloom from ever playing college football again after the Olympic skier accepted endorsement money he said he needed to fund his training for the upcoming winter games.

Of course, it’s not against the NCAA’s rules for the NCAA to make money off of athletes like Schooling. Emmert reportedly earns a salary of about $1.8 million a year, while the NCAA sells tee shirts commemorating UT swimming’s national championship win on its website for $27.99. But Schooling won’t see a penny of that profit.

The red devil with the pointy white ears and pitchfork — University of the Sciences’ mascot — has been gracefully retired, along with the school colors and name.

Now, those devils are hawks — St. Joseph’s University Hawks — and as the saying goes: “The Hawk will never die.”

The merger of the health and sciences university into the Catholic university — about 18 months in the making — is now official. Click on the USciences website, and it redirects to St. Joseph’s. USciences’ board of trustees no longer exists, though four of its members — two of them coincidentally St. Joe’s alumni — are now on St. Joseph’s board. USciences’ signs and banners are being replaced with St. Joseph’s signs and banners. There will be a single alumni association. And in June, new students to both campuses will have a unified orientation, with breakout sessions at the campus where they will live.

» READ MORE: St. Joe's merger with USciences is approved by Middle States Commission on Higher Education

Advertisement

“We’re at that point right now where we’re ready to go,” said St. Joseph’s president Mark C. Reed, who will be departing in August to become president of Loyola University Chicago.

The new combined St. Joseph’s will hold a news conference at the University City campus Wednesday morning, and by evening, Boathouse Row, the Peco building, and other city landmarks are scheduled to be lit in St. Joe’s colors of crimson and gray in celebration.

By adding USciences, St. Joseph’s automatically has 26 new programs in its repertoire “that have the ability to transform our institution for the future,” said provost Cheryl McConnell, who will become interim president when Reed leaves.

They include programs in pharmacy, physician assistant, physical therapy, and occupational therapy, all cornerstones of a USciences education. Genomics, cancer biology, and neuroscience are among other adds. And the university already is talking about potential programs that could be developed, such as pharmaceutical marketing, pharmaceutical engineering, and “nutraceuticals” — the combination of food and pharma.

» READ MORE: St. Joe's and University of the Sciences vote to proceed with a merger

Combined, the institutions will enroll more than 9,000 undergraduate and graduate students, employ nearly 400 full-time faculty, and have an endowment in excess of a half-billion dollars, an operating budget over $300 million, assets of $1.2 billion, and an alumni network of nearly 100,000.

“I’m incredibly optimistic and hopeful that this ultimately will lead to a wave of innovation, creativity, and accomplishments that we can’t even possibly conceive of at this point in time,” Reed said.

But Reed said he understands that the merger isn’t fully in swing just because a date on the calendar flipped.

“It’s going to take time for people to experience the university as a single entity, and we’re aware of that,” he said. “Students who applied to USciences only visited there. That’s where they expect to live and spend the majority of their time, and that’s what will happen. But over time, we certainly expect and foresee much greater integration.”

» READ MORE: St. Joe’s president announces his departure less than a month before merger is final

The culture of a Catholic university may take some adaptation, too. Some students expressed anger in April when USciences’ student health center said it no longer would dispense birth control once the merger took effect. But Reed said St. Joseph’s Jesuit identity was known from the start and a drawing point for USciences.

It was USciences that initiated merger talks with St. Joseph’s, which was on the hunt for health and science programs. In February 2021, the schools announced they were exploring a merger to help them grow and thrive in an increasingly challenging higher-education market. A little less than a year ago, their boards voted to proceed with the process — and a process it has been.

The merger required a series of approvals, including a nod from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which came in March, and another from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, which just came in May. Even the U.S. Department of Justice had to sign off, given the size of the schools and the value of their assets, Reed said.

The universities’ email, phone, and computer systems, and policies and processes, had to be evaluated and integrated. Even their policies governing intellectual property had to be combined. Some practices ofUSciences will be incorporated into St. Joseph’s. St. Joseph’s, for example, is adapting USciences’ human resources, finance, and payroll system as its own.

In mid-May, Reed signed off on faculty handbook policies and procedures developed by educators at both schools, including a process for non-tenure track faculty appointments, which USciences had in place. Known as professors of practice in some institutions, they are faculty who are experts in their fields but didn’t train as professors.

“We didn’t just take one or the other,” McConnell said. “We really came up with a better policy going forward.”

There will be one student government and combined student activities. USciences’ sports program, which was Division II, will no longer exist; St. Joseph’s is Division I. But scholarships already in place for USciences’ athletes will continue to be honored, Reed said, and combined club sports will continue.

Under the merger, both campuses, which are less than five miles apart, will be retained. The St. Joseph’s campus, which straddles the Philadelphia/Lower Merion border, will be known as the Hawk Hill campus, and USciences will become the University City campus.

Interest in the merger from other universities has been building, Reed said, so much so that later this month, Reed and McConnell will present a webinar on what they learned. It will be hosted by Stephen Spinelli Jr., who had been president of the former Philadelphia University when it was merged with Thomas Jefferson University in 2017. Spinelli had served as chancellor of Jefferson after the merger and then in 2019 became president of Babson College, an entrepreneurship-focused school in Massachusetts.

“People are intrigued by it, and impressed by it, and they kind of want to know how it came about,” Reed said of the St. Joseph’s merger.

St. Joseph’s is having conversations with other potential partners, too, though no one on the scale of USciences, Reed said.

“We have been talking very openly on our campus about nursing being a fit at St. Joe’s,” Reed said. “Is that something we can start ourselves or can we acquire it from another entity or some other partnership?”

But at least for a day, Reed and McConnell will relish the birth of a new era at St. Joseph’s, one that didn’t come easy. When the merger talk started, employees brainstormed on all the things that would have to be done and filled up multiple whiteboards and then went about tackling them one by one.

“We knew it was going to be hard work, and it was,” McConnell said.

TYLER, Texas (KLTV) - A graduate student at UT Tyler was named the 2023 Help a Hero Scholar, winning a scholarship sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars Foundation and Sports Clips Haircuts.

Joseph Brewer, of Tyler, is a graduate student in the clinical psychology program at UT Tyler. In a release, the university announced Brewer has received a $5,000 scholarship as this year’s Help a Hero Scholar.

“I appreciate Sport Clips and the VFW for selecting me for the Help a Hero Scholarship,” said Brewer, who has served in the U.S. Marine Corps. “It made a huge difference in my life. Everyone who donated money has helped keep my educational goals alive, and for that I am deeply appreciative of all who played a part in it.”

At UT Tyler, Brewer is a research assistant in the Enhancing Lives and Experiences of Veterans Affected by Traumatic Events, or ELEVATE, research lab, under Assistant Professor of Psychology Dr. Adam McGuire.

“It’s an honor to see local veterans chosen for this prestigious scholarship,” said Mike Johnson, commander of the VFW Carl Webb Post 1799 in Tyler. “Having served his country honorably, Joseph is a great example of a veteran whose service didn’t end after the military.”

Brewer will graduate with a master’s degree in clinical psychology with a neuropsychology specialization next summer.

Help a Hero Scholarships are awarded to qualified veterans across all branches of the military by sending the funds directly to the college or technical school of their choice. To apply for or learn more, visit SportClips.com/Hero. Sport Clips, through its annual Help a Hero fundraiser, has contributed $13 million to the VFW. Founded in 1899, the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. is the nation’s largest and oldest major war veterans organization, with more than 1.4 million VFW and auxiliary members located in nearly 6,000 posts worldwide. The VFW is dedicated to veterans’ service, legislative advocacy and military/community service programs. For more information, visit vfw.org.

With a mission to improve educational and health care outcomes for East Texas and beyond, UT Tyler offers more than 90 undergraduate and graduate programs to nearly 10,000 students. Through its alignment with the UT Tyler Health Science Center and UT Health East Texas, UT Tyler has unified these entities to serve Texas with quality education, cutting-edge research and excellent patient care. Classified by Carnegie as a doctoral research institution and by U.S. News & World Report as a national university, UT Tyler has campuses in Tyler, Longview, Palestine and Houston.

Copyright 2023 KLTV. All rights reserved.