APAP Honors Faculty and Programs at Awards Luncheon

By Eileen Evans

APAP’s yearly awards ceremony was a highlight among Education Forum events and provided the Association with the opportunity to recognize PA faculty and programs whose service and contributions have enriched the Association and the profession. The event was moderated by Dawn Morton-Rias, then president elect.

Morton-Rias opened the program with special thanks to the members of APAP’s Education Committee, which planned and implemented the educational portion of the meeting. Committee members are Rena Mitchell (chair), Kris Healy, Michelle Heinan, Emily WhiteHorse, David Brock, Karen Hills, and Debbie Sullivan. In a new cooperative venture, APAP Faculty Development Institute Chair Anita Glicken and Research Institute Chair Rick Dehn worked with the Education Committee chair to plan this year’s educational sessions and increase opportunities for faculty to present their original work. The more than 120 presentations testified to the success of the chairs’ joint efforts.

APAP also honored Michael Huckabee for his long tenure as liaison to the AAPA Education Council and Theresa Horvath, who served for two terms as APAP’s liaison to the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine.

APAP Awards

This issue of the Update will include three of the six awards APAP bestows annually: the New Faculty, Rising Star, and Master Faculty awards. The remaining winners — Sherry Stolberg, selected for the Outstanding Service Award; Jim Cawley, who won the Research Achievement Award; and the University of Texas Panam PA Program, which received the Excellence Through Diversity Award — will be featured in the January issue of the Update.

Jeanie McHugo, a faculty member for less than a year at the University of North Dakota PA Program and a PA in clinical medicine since 1996, was chosen as this year’s recipient of the New Faculty Award for Professional Excellence, which goes to a faculty member with less than three years’ experience. Described by her faculty as a creative and gifted teacher, McHugo designed and rewrote objectives and pharmacological assignments for 22 specialty clerkships for a new master’s course, created and implemented a master rubric adaptable for grading all types of student assignments, and developed and conducted a musculo-skeletal jeopardy contest to facilitate students’ review of material. In addition, she performed site visits for enrolled and pre-program students and was advisor to five graduate students and to the university’s student society.

Connie Goldgar of the University of Utah PA Program was chosen to receive this year’s Rising Star Award, presented to a faculty member with between three and seven years’ experience. Morton-Rias, in presenting the award, commented that certain individuals seem to make a positive mark early in their careers, and it’s no surprise when their names keep coming up. When Goldgar’s program began awarding a graduate degree, she designed, developed, and implemented a comprehensive course that encompassed the tenets of evidence-based medicine that now runs the full six semesters of the program. Since then, she developed an EBM postgraduate program for experienced PAs, and the fifth class is about to graduate. Additionally, Goldgar successfully sought out grant funding to support activities that include student involvement with underprivileged inner city youth and health screening services for seasonal farm workers.

With a background in genetic research and epidemiology, Goldgar is a member of the Genetics Interdisciplinary Faculty Training — the GIFT program based at Duke University — and took the lead in coordinating Utah’s interdisciplinary group that included NPs, nurse midwives, and genetic counselors, as well as PAs, to teach genetics and pedigree design to first-year students. She has infused scholarship into her program through course development, teaching, and evaluation. Goldgar’s own scholarly activities to date include written articles, PA review textbook chapters, and critically appraised topics.

The Master Faculty Award, for which faculty with at least seven years’ experience are eligible, was recently renamed and revamped to more fully reflect the totality of the candidate’s work. The award was presented this year to Timothy Evans, MD, the medical director at the University of Washington MEDEX Northwest PA Program. An internist and endocrinologist, Evans teaches the clinical topics in the MEDEX curriculum. He travels to each of the program’s geographically dispersed didactic training sites in Seattle, Yakima, and Spokane and delivers topics in marathon teaching sessions. By personally delivering his lectures, rather than teleconferencing them, Evans has an opportunity to model critical thinking behavior and skills. Evans also mentors other MEDEX faculty on both group and individual research projects and regularly chairs a working research group to develop these skills among the MEDEX faculty. Evans is in his second term as an ARC-PA Commissioner from the American College of Physicians and was actively involved in the ARC-PA committee that recently updated the Standards.

In his nomination letters, one of his colleagues told the story of Evans’s popularity with the students: “When we started giving out the MEDEX “Golden Apple Award” in 1997 for teaching excellence, he was one of three instructors selected by the students. In fact, he was so popular year after year, that we had to institute a new category, “Recognized in Perpetuity for Excellence in Teaching,” presented to Evans received in 2000, so that students would be able to recognize other guest lecturers.”

Research Institute Grants Program

Meredith Davison, chair of the subcommittee for the Research Institute’s grant awards, presented checks to the faculty whose proposals were selected for funding. On behalf of APAP and its Research Institute, she expressed appreciation to the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA), for its generous donation of $10,000 toward the grant awards. Grant proposals from the following faculty were selected for funding:

1. Anthony Brenneman, Richard Dehn, and Theresa Hegmann, University of Iowa PA Program, received $3,480 for their proposal, “Is Minority Enrollment Impacted by the Shift to Master’s Level in PA Education?”

2. Wilton C. Kennedy, Jefferson College of Health Sciences PA Program, received $4,345 for his proposal, “A Survey of Chronic Disease Curricula in PA Education.”

3. Tom Colletti and David Coniglio, Duke University, received $2,500 for their proposal, “Physician Assistant Faculty Publishing Patterns.”

4. Wallace D. Boeve, Grand Valley State University, received $2,000 for his proposal, “Job Satisfaction Predictors for Career Retention of Physician Assistant Faculty.”

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