Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet will be next year’s Life of the Mind common reading selection for UT freshmen.

“I invite the campus community to join the Class of 2017 in reading the book and participating in the discussion and related activities that will be held in the fall,” said Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Susan Martin in announcing the book’s selection.

Now in its tenth year, Life of the Mind is part of First Year Studies 100, a zero-credit, pass-fail class that gives students their first taste of college studies and requires them to complete online lessons on alcohol awareness, financial literacy, plagiarism, technology, civility, and succeeding at UT.

Before arriving on campus, freshmen are to read Eaarth and complete a written response. During Welcome Week, students will hear McKibben speak and attend a small-group discussion session led by a UT faculty or staff member. More details on McKibben’s visit will be announced soon.

Intending to select a book about sustainability for the 2013–14 academic year, Life of the Mind coordinators assembled a committee of faculty, students, and staff to select this year’s book. Although they considered a variety of nonfiction and fiction books, committee members said they chose Eaarth, published in 2010, because it was “clear and direct,” “a really powerful book,” and “accurate, timely, well-written, and well-researched.”

“McKibben’s name is synonymous with climate change,” said John Nolt, philosophy professor and member of the book selection committee. “It will be a huge benefit to our students to get to hear him speak.”

UT debuted its new sustainability major this year, making it one of the first large universities in the Southeast to offer such a program. The interdisciplinary curriculum is intended to equip students to be change makers in producing a sustainable society and environment.

UT is also well known across the nation for its student-initiated campus environmental fee, which funds sustainability efforts on campus.

Ruth Darling, assistant provost for student success and First Year Studies programs, said Eaarth should have wide appeal on campus.

“The theme of Eaarth relates so well to what UT represents and how we are thinking about sustainability,” she said. In connection with this theme, First Year Studies is partnering with the Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment and the Tennessee Valley Authority to support a service-learning workshop for faculty planning to teach FYS 129 seminars that focus on some aspect of sustainability. More information about this opportunity and other initiatives, including Life of the Mind programming, will be posted soon.

McKibben has written ten books, including The End of Nature and Deep Economy that have helped shape public opinion about climate change, alternative energy, and the need for more localized economies.

McKibben formerly worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker and is a contributor to Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the New York Review of Books.

McKibben formerly worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker and is a contributor to various magazines, including Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, National Geographic and the New York Review of Books.

He has received Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, as well as the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000.

He is a scholar in residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.

Life of the Mind committee members were Darling, committee chair; Chris  Cox, professor and associate department head in chemical and electrical engineering; Paul Erwin, professor and director of the Department of Public Health; Joanne Logan, associate professor in biosystems engineering and soil science; Thura Mack, library professor; Mike McKinney, professor of environmental sciences and director of UT’s new sustainability major; Nolt; Nate Sanders, professor in ecology and evolutionary biology; Tricia Stuth, associate professor of architecture; Stella Bridgeman-Prince, assistant director, Student Success Center; Melissa Shivers, assistant vice chancellor, Student Life; Michael Croal, graduate student in public policy administration and First-Year Studies graduate teaching assistant; and undergraduate student members Evan Ford and Elisabeth Spratt.

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C O N T A C T :

Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)

UT will establish the Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence through a $200,000 grant given to the Tennessee Department of Health through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tennessee was one of five states to receive grants. The other four are Florida, Oregon, Colorado, and Minnesota.

Three UT entities are partners on the grant: Paul Erwin, director of the Department of Public Health in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences; Sharon Thompson, director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Security and Preparedness; and Faith Critzer, assistant professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology. The last two are on the UT Institute of Agriculture campus.

John Dunn is deputy state epidemiologist and principal investigator on the award.

“This research grant is important to the university because it positions us to work closely with a stellar state health department in efforts to protect the public’s health through specific work force development activities,” Erwin said.

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CONTACT:

Lola Alapo (865-974-3993, lalapo@utk.edu)

Paul Erwin (865-974-5252, perwin@utk.edu)

Paul Erwin, professor and director of public health, has the big idea of using research to make communities healthier. His Public Health Grand Rounds (PHGR) program focuses on practice-based research to improve the public’s health. PHGR is a collaboration of UT’s Department of Public Health and the Knox County Health Department. Read more at publichealth.utk.edu.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaNdlwixKOs

The UT Kenya Team meeting with their collaborators at Kenyatta University, located in Nairobi, Kenya.

KNOXVILLE—The newly formed Kenya Team at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, believes that the best medicine for the physical and emotional ills that poverty inflicts on children is a strong bond between a child and caregiver.

This team of researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, recently received an $89,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish an international collaboration with the Orphans and Vulnerable Children’s (OVC) Projects and Kenyatta University to study the effects of child-caregiver attachment to the overall well-being of children in the slum communities of Nairobi, Kenya. The goal: develop a way for community health care workers to assess child-caregiver attachment as a standard component of primary health care.

Hillary Fouts and Carin Neitzel, both assistant professors in child and family studies; with Dr. Paul Erwin, professor and director of the Department of Public Health; Denise Bates, assistant professor in public health; and Fletcher Njororai, post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Public Health, have partnered to create the UT Kenya Team to look at child-caregiver attachment and how it may buffer the negative influence of poverty.

Denise Bates, assistant professor of public health, touring the slums of Nairobi with community healthcare workers.

The team got involved with OVC when Erwin’s mentor in international health, John Bryant, and his wife, Nancy, visited UT two years ago.

Working with UN Habitat, the Bryants had helped develop the OVC project to provide primary health care to orphans and vulnerable children in the slums of Nairobi where thousands of extremely impoverished families live. They wanted to find a way to assess child-caregiver attachment as part of their community health care, and they felt that UT could help them devise an assessment tool. Adding this component to their community health services will make OVC unique among many child health and development projects working in Kenya.

Last winter, the UT team spent several months putting together a proposal for the NSF grant, and then spent spring break in Nairobi, accompanying OVC and Kenyatta University personnel as they made home visits. During the summer, two faculty and two graduate students conducted more pilot research.

Dr. Paul Erwin, professor and director of the UT’s department of public health, meeting families in one of the most impoverished slums on Nairobi.

The grant will allow the UT team to travel to Nairobi to research and explore cultural variations in child-caregiver attachment in areas where everyone is poor. This work could help them secure additional grant funding for the project in the future.

With the socioeconomic status a constant variable, the study will allow researchers to isolate the potential impact of different cultural child-rearing styles in child-caregiver attachment.

OVC reaches a large percentage of the population through local community health workers who provide basic preventive healthcare.

There are twenty-four part-time healthcare workers making visits to more than 2,500 households to weigh children, check nutrition status, advise mothers about feeding and nutrition, and provide info about insecticide-impregnated bed nets and hand washing with soap.

This month, Fouts, Bates and Erwin travel to Kenya to begin training workers, meet their counterparts at Kenyatta University, identify faculty and students for research and plan a workshop to be held in March.

Next summer, more students and faculty will research in Nairobi and the team will start working on grant submission for a follow-up grant.

Clockwise from the bottom: OVC developers Nancy and Jack Bryant, UT faculty members Carin Neitzel, Hillary Fouts, Paul Erwin, and Fletcher Njorora at a planning session with some of their Kenyan counterparts in Mlolongo, a slum area where the group is doing the project.

Erwin said this project ties into UT’s Top 25 Initiative in a variety of ways: It can serve as a powerful recruitment tool for undergraduates who want to do research. It already involves three master’s students and one doctoral student in research that will be used in their theses and dissertations. It provides opportunities that will attract and retain faculty interested in global health, and the research could lead to a larger follow-up grant that would support extensive research for years to come.

Lacreisha Ejike-King, a graduate assistant on the project, said spending the summer in Kenya was a phenomenal experience, both educationally and personally.

“Overall, I think that this collaborative grant project will greatly enhance the UT student experience by providing opportunities for practical field experience to supplement the topics learned in the classroom,” she said, adding that the experience opened her eyes to poverty’s “strong impact on physical, mental and social health.”

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C O N T A C T :

Stephanie Dixon (865-974-2125, sdixon7@utk.edu)

Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)

The UT Board of Trustees approved the creation of the new department in June, and the Department of Public Health came into being on July 1.

“This is an interim step toward our ultimate goal: establishing a School of Public Health,” said Dr. Paul Erwin, head of the new department and director of UT’s Center for Public Health. Erwin is a board-certified physician in internal medicine and public health and preventive medicine and also has a master’s degree and doctorate in public health. Prior to coming to UT in 2007, he worked with the Tennessee Department of Health for 16 years, the last 12 years of those as director of the East Tennessee Regional Health Office.

UT Knoxville has offered programs in public health since 1969, the year the program received national accreditation for the Master of Public Health program.

The programs had been housed in various departments, most recently in the Department of Nutrition, which is also a part of the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences.

During the past two years, administrators laid the groundwork for the Department of Public Health by eliminating the master’s program in safety and reallocating its faculty to public health. Some vacant faculty lines also were filled. By doing this, the public health staff was expanded from five to nine faculty members plus a post-doctoral instructor without any new resources. Erwin credits the hard work of Jay Whelan, department head in nutrition, and the support from Bob Rider, dean of the college, as the critical elements in getting to department status.

The Department of Public Health offers a doctoral program in health behavior and health education; a master of public health degree with concentrations in community health education, veterinary public health and health planning and administration; and a dual-degree program in which students earn master’s degrees in nutrition and public health. The department will maintain a single undergraduate course (Introduction to Public Health), but will otherwise have no undergraduate programs.

The Department of Public Health administration offices and the Center for Public Health are now located in 390 Health and Physical Education Building (HPER), the building where students attend public health classes.

Students this fall will notice a strengthening of public health academic programs, Erwin said. The master’s program will include a new required course in program evaluation. The doctoral program is being completely retooled. There also will be an increasing number of opportunities for service learning so students can put their classroom learning to work with numerous community partners, including the Knox County Health Department, Cherokee Health Systems, the East Tennessee Regional Health Department and other area agencies.

Erwin said the creation of a Department of Public Health allows for greater opportunities for sharing faculty appointments with other departments and allows the departmental focus to be completely devoted to the core academic disciplines within public health.

“Faculty will be more motivated to pursue research opportunities and up the bar on the quality of their teaching,” he said. “The atmosphere, the morale, the attitude of faculty and staff are tremendously supportive, optimistic and forward-looking.

“The onus is on us; it’s time for us to show how we matter and why.”

Now that the Department of Public Health exists, there may be some changes to the mission of the Center for Public Health. Created in September 2007, the center is guided by a board of the deans from the Colleges of Nursing, Social Work, Veterinary Medicine, and Education, Health and Human Sciences; the Graduate School of Medicine; and University Extension. The center’s purpose has been to expand the public health academic program, to create collaborative, public health-related teaching and research opportunities across campus, and to develop a strategic plan for establishing a School of Public Health at UT Knoxville.

The strategic plan, Erwin said, calls for UT to have a School of Public Health within five years.

To meet accreditation standards, a School of Public Health would need 25 faculty members, three doctoral programs and master’s programs in all five core public health disciplines: epidemiology, biostatistics, health behavior, health planning and administration, and environmental health.

“Going from where we were to a Department of Public Health took a very serious and purposeful reallocation of internal resources. We will not be able to go to a full School of Public Health without significant new recurring resources,” Erwin said.

Erwin said the college will look to private funding, institutional funding and external research grants to help fund the growth.

C O N T A C T :

Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, amy.blakely@tennessee.edu)

Paul Campbell Erwin, (865-974-5252, perwin@utk.edu)

Ron Bialek, executive director and president of the Public Health Foundation (PHF), a national nonprofit organization, will speak about improving public health at 5 p.m. in room 235, Health, Physical Education and Recreation Building, 1914 Andy Holt Ave. The event is free and open to the public.

Paul Erwin, professor and director of UT Knoxville’s Center for Public Health, and June Gorski, professor of public health and health education, worked to bring Bialek to campus.

Bialek has nearly 30 years of experience in public health practice and academia.

Bialek has directed efforts that help to train more than 10,000 public health professionals annually through distance education. He currently is developing a distance learning course on community health assessment training for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also serves on a variety of government advisory groups.

Before joining PHF, Bialek was on the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and served as director of the Johns Hopkins Health Program Alliance. Bialek developed a reputation for efforts to link academic institutions and public health agencies.

Bialek received his Bachelor of Arts in political science and a Master of Public Policy from The Johns Hopkins University.

Held since 1995, NPHW is the first full week of April each year. Communities across the country have celebrated NPHW to recognize the contributions of public health and highlight issues that are important to improving the public’s health. This year’s theme is “A Healthier America: One Community at a Time.”

The American Public Health Association (APHA) serves as the organizer of NPHW and develops a national campaign to educate the public, policymakers and practitioners about issues related to that year’s theme. APHA creates comprehensive planning, organizing and outreach materials that can be used during and after the week to raise awareness.

Visitor parking is available at the University Center parking garage at normal rates. Metered parking spots are along Pat Head Summitt and Volunteer boulevards.

For more information about NPHW, visit http://www.nphw.org.

Bialek’s visit is funded by the UT Knoxville Center for Public Health. Established in 2005, the center’s mission is to help improve the health of Tennesseans through research and teaching. The center works to accomplish that goal by coordinating academic units on campus that research public health initiatives and programs that train public health professionals. For more information about the center, visit http://cph.utk.edu/.

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C O N T A C T :

Kristi Hintz (865-974-3993, khintz@utk.edu)

The UT Minute staff talks with two on-campus faculty experts, Mark Sangster and Paul Erwin, about the current outbreak of H1N1, or “swine flu,” virus, and what the University community should know about the disease.

Visit safety.utk.edu for more information and updates regarding the situation.