University Times

Walt Alan Stoy, professor and program director of the emergency medicine program at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS), has received a lifetime achievement award for career accomplishments that have advanced the field of emergency medicine.

The award was presented this month by the National Association of EMS Educators (NAEMSE), an organization Stoy founded.

The mission of the NAEMSE is to promote EMS education, develop and deliver educational resources and advocate research and lifelong learning.

Stoy, who also is director of educational and international emergency medicine at the Center for Emergency Medicine of Pittsburgh, is internationally renowned for his efforts in EMS and is recognized by his peers and colleagues as a trailblazer and national leader in the field of EMS education. Stoy also has extensive experience with national project design, development implementation and evaluation related to paramedic education.

Stoy has served as the principal investigator for the U.S. Department of Transportation/National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for the National Standard Curricula revisions project throughout the 1990s. This includes the first responder; EMT basic; EMT intermediate, and paramedic curricula. He has authored numerous textbooks and ancillary instructional materials for EMS education.

In 1980, Stoy became the first paramedic to receive a bachelor’s degree from SHRS. He obtained a master’s degree in 1983 also from SHRS with a dual concentration in education and administration.

In 1991, Stoy received his Ph.D. in instructional design technology, from Pitt’s School of Education. He also has served as a paramedic for the City of Pittsburgh, a flight paramedic for STAT MedEvac and has been involved with volunteer EMS/fire service.

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Alumna Cynthia L. Roth, former executive director of Family House, Inc., of Pittsburgh and a former Pitt trustee, has joined the staff of the Office of Institutional Advancement (IA) as associate vice chancellor for planning, organization development and quality improvement.

Roth will serve as an internal consultant to the IA management staff in the planning and development of quality improvement initiatives.

Her appointment comes as Pitt is more than four-fifths of the way toward the goal of its $1 billion Discover a World of Possibilities fundraising campaign.

As executive director of the nonprofit Family House from 2002 to 2005, Roth was credited with cultivating new partnerships within the business and corporate community and achieving a 21 percent increase in fundraising totals in a single year for the nonprofit organization.

At Monroeville’s Forbes Regional Hospital of the West Penn Allegheny Health System, Roth served as vice president for patient care services, 1999-2001.

Roth was patient care systems vice president at the Sharon (Pa.) Regional Health System, 1992-95. She worked in various managerial positions at Western Pennsylvania Hospital, 1986-92.

She began her career as a critical care nurse in the intensive/coronary care unit of Allegheny General Hospital (1981-84) and director of nursing at Greensburg Nursing Center (1985-86).

Roth earned a B.S. in nursing at Pitt, where she was president of her senior class, in 1981; she received a Master of Public Management degree with highest distinction from Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz School of Public Policy in 1987.

Roth served as a Pitt trustee from 2000 to 2004. She is chair of the board of visitors in the School of Dental Medicine and a member of the board of visitors in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. She also served as president of Pitt’s national Alumni Association from 1998 to 2000.

The Graduate School of Public Health Center for Public Health Preparedness (UPCPHP) has appointed Sam Stebbins as executive director.

UPCPHP is part of the national network of Centers for Public Health Preparedness funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to train the public health workforce to respond to threats to the nation’s health from bioterrorism, infectious disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies.

As the former deputy health officer at the San Mateo County Health Department, Stebbins has extensive hands-on experience in emergency preparedness and disaster response. He helped lead the health department’s development of the public health bioterrorism response plan, the public health 3-level response plan for small, medium and large outbreaks, and the neighborhood emergency triage, vaccination and antibiotic centers.

Additionally, during his six-year tenure, Stebbins led both the disease control and prevention unit and the public health laboratory, and served on the advisory committee for the University of California at Berkeley Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness.

Stebbins, who holds a dual M.D./M.P.H. from Tufts Medical School, also received a faculty appointment in the GSPH Department of Epidemiology, bringing to this position teaching experience at Stanford University, Francis J. Curry National TB Center and Oregon Health Sciences University.

As UPCPHP executive director, Stebbins aims to strengthen the public health workforce through effective adult education and by fostering strong collaborations with professionals in the field. Additionally, he plans to advance research to improve the capacity of front-line professionals to prevent and respond to natural disasters and emergencies.

“My main interest is ensuring that public serviced-related research and the academic side of public health is closely tied into and supports the day-to-day work of the local health department and other practitioners,” Stebbins said. “I am particularly interesting in ensuring that response plans designed for rare emergencies such as bird flu or bioterrorism also work effectively in more commonly occurring problems such as floods and infectious disease outbreaks.”

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Theresa Miller, deputy director of Pitt’s Institute of Politics (IOP) since 1992, has been appointed director.

The institute delivers information about issues affecting the region to elected officials, community leaders and the public, providing a neutral forum where diverse viewpoints are discussed, digested, enriched and applied.

As the institute’s deputy director, Miller has been responsible for creating high-quality and innovative continuing education programs for elected officials, foundation executives and community and civic leaders on critical public policy issues that affect not only the region but also the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Before joining IOP, Miller cofounded and served as the executive director of the Pennsylvania Organization for Women in Early Recovery House (P.O.W.E.R.), a drug and alcohol treatment program for women.

Miller was named the Legislative Office for Research Liaison Faculty Associate in 2005. Her other awards and honors include the 2004 Pitt Alumnae Council honoree for Strong, Smart Successful: Women in the 21st Century; League of Women Voters Good Government Award to the Institute of Politics staff in 2003; League of Women Voters Good Government Award in 2001 for consulting work with The Pittsburgh Foundation; YWCA of Greater Pittsburgh’s Racial Justice Award in 2001, and United Way and J. C. Penney Golden Rule Award, for which P.O.W.E.R. received $10,000 in 1995.

Miller holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work from Pitt. She has served as an adjunct faculty member for the School of Social Work and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

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James D. Luketich, associate professor of surgery at the medical school and chief, Division of Thoracic Surgery, UPMC, has been named the first recipient of the Sampson Family Endowed Chair in Thoracic Surgical Oncology.

Pittsburgh real estate developer Myles D. Sampson has donated $1.5 million to the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) and the School of Medicine’s Department of Surgery to establish the Sampson chair. The chair will help promote clinical and surgical strategies to prevent, detect, diagnose and treat lung and esophageal cancers, collectively diagnosed in approximately 187,000 Americans each year.

“Thoracic malignancies can be devastating for a patient,” said Luketich. “These diseases, in particular, are extremely difficult to treat long term and can have a detrimental impact on quality of life. There is much more we need to learn about the causes of these cancers and about how we can catch them earlier on, when treatment is more likely to succeed.”

Luketich, who also is chief of UPMC’s Heart, Lung and Esophageal Surgery Institute, explained that the funds provided by Sampson will be used to pursue research in a number of areas including the molecular detection and staging of cancers to better understand a patient’s risk for recurrence; the detection of micrometastases in lymph nodes that could help detect these cancers much earlier in their development; the creation of therapeutic vaccine approaches to stimulate a patient’s immune system to fight cancer; the evaluation of minimally invasive esophagectomy outcomes in a multi-site trial, and improved understanding of genetic mutations that may be associated with defects in the ability of cells to repair themselves once cancer has invaded.

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The Society of American Archivists (SAA) 2005 Waldo Gifford Leland Award for writing of superior excellence and usefulness in the field of archival history, theory or practice was presented last month to library and information science professor Richard J. Cox for “No Innocent Deposits: Forming Archives by Rethinking Appraisal” (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2004). Established in 1959, the award is named for one of North America’s archival pioneers and SAA’s second president.

Rather than offering a basic primer or “how-to” guide, Cox’s book presents an analysis of the issues surrounding critically important archival enterprises.

This is third time Cox has received the Waldo Gifford Leland Award.

Founded in 1936, the Society of American Archivists is North America’s oldest and largest national archival professional association. SAA’s mission is to serve the educational and informational needs of more than 4,100 individual and institutional members and to provide leadership to ensure the identification, preservation and use of records of historical value.

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Craig Hartburg, president of Servco Services and an alumnus of Pitt-Bradford, has been elected chairman of the campus’s advisory board.

Hartburg replaces Judge John M. Cleland, who served as chairman for 10 years.

Hartburg has been a member of the advisory board since 2000. He has served as board vice chairman, chairman of the communications and university relations council and as a member of the development council and the executive committee.

Hartburg attended Pitt-Bradford from 1973 to 1975 and then completed his B.A. at the Pittsburgh campus.

He has been president of Servco Services Inc. since 1995. Hartburg has been with the company since 1977. Before becoming president, he served as sales manager, vice president of operations and executive vice president.

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Amy E. Heath joined the physical therapist assistant program at Pitt’s Titusville campus this fall as the new academic coordinator of clinical education.

Heath earned both her B.S. in health studies and doctorate in physical therapy from Simmons College in Boston.

Prior to coming to UPT, Heath served as a site coordinator and a physical therapist at HEALTHSOUTH Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as sports center facilities supervisor and student athletic trainer at Simmons College Holmes Sports Center.

The Greensburg campus has been honored with a Good Neighbor Award by the Westmoreland Chapter of the American Red Cross.

Under the leadership of nurse Patricia LaMantia, Pitt-Greensburg has participated in relief efforts for last fall’s Hurricane Ivan and last winter’s tsunami. LaMantia also has organized blood drives on campus and has participated in first aid and CPR training.

Currently, she is in charge of collecting donations from faculty, staff and students to help those affected by the Gulf Coast hurricanes.

Pitt-Greensburg and other recipients of the award will be honored at a dinner on Oct. 26.

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Barry Gold has been named chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Pitt’s pharmacy school.

Gold came to Pitt after years of working at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, where he was a professor and associate director of the Eppley Cancer Center, among a number of academic positions.

He was principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health multidisciplinary training grant for pre- and post-doctoral students in the area of cancer research.

Gold’s primary research interests are in chemical carcinogenesis, cancer biology and DNA structure and repair.

Focusing on the design and synthesis of DNA equilibrium binding molecules, his work has led to the development of polymeric materials that form sequence-specific DNA triplex at any sequence of native DNA.

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Kenneth J. Horoho Jr., adjunct professor at Pitt’s law school, is serving as president-elect of the Pennsylvania Bar Association and will become president next June.

Horoho is a partner in the Pittsburgh law firm Goldberg, Gruener, Gentile, Horoho & Avalli, P.C.

He teaches Pitt’s advanced family law trial advocacy course.