» Dale J. Benos Early Career Professional Service Award

Recipients of the Dale J. Benos Early Career Professional Award



Current 2011 Awardee:

 
Jessica A. Dominguez, Ph.D.
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

The APS Trainee Advisory Committee is pleased to announce that Jessica A. Dominguez, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has been selected as the fourth recipient of the APS Dale J. Benos Early Career Professional Service Award. The Committee was extremely impressed with Dr. Dominguez's remarkable level of service with students at the graduate/medical, undergraduate, and K-12 levels. This service can be seen in three areas: outreach/teaching, mentoring, and leadership, each of which is visible during her career as a graduate student, postdoctoral fellow and now as a faculty member.

Outreach/Teaching: As a graduate student, Dr. Dominguez developed a love of teaching and received a Certificate in College Teaching. She designed and implemented an upper-level undergraduate course in Pathophysiology of Human Disease that she taught for 2 years as a graduate student. Dr. Dominguez’s passion for teaching continued as a Postdoctoral Fellow, where she was a teaching assistant, gave guest lectures in graduate courses, and became Adjunct Faculty at a local university.
As a postdoc, she was named an APS K-12 Minority Outreach Fellow, which allowed her to visit K-12 classrooms to talk about physiology, especially at schools with predominantly minority students. She also was involved in outreach programs that offered seminars on research to the general public and science speakers to K-12 classrooms.
As a faculty member, Dr. Dominguez continues to serve as a constant local science fair judge, as well as an invited speaker at both local and international science fairs. She has been active over the years in many different roles in the APS programs Frontiers in Physiology, PhUn Week, and Physiology for Life Science Teachers and Students at EB.

Mentoring: Dr. Dominguez began mentoring students as a graduate student, starting with her involvement with the Undergraduate Biology Research Program and Biomedical Research Abroad: Vistas Open! Program. To date, she has mentored over 10 trainees.
As a postdoc and new faculty member, she has been involved in programs that bring underrepresented minority high school students and/or teachers into the lab to introduce them to research for a day or over the summer. Dr. Dominguez regularly serves as a meeting mentor during EB and the Shock Society meetings. She was selected as the Chair of the Shock Society’s Diversity Task Force and has developed two new awards: one for minority trainees attending the meeting and the other for minority high school and undergraduate students to become involved in research.
As a result of her outreach activities and mentoring abilities, she was invited to be the keynote speaker at an undergraduate research conference to talk about the importance of science outreach and mentoring.

Leadership: As a graduate student, Dr. Dominguez organized a weekly seminar series for departmental graduate students. As a postdoc, she served both as Vice President and President of the Washington University Postdoctoral Society. She was asked to serve on the Postdoctoral Policy Review Committee and the Office of Postgraduate Affairs Strategic Planning Committee. She also competed for and received a travel award to attend the National Postdoctoral Association meeting. Since 2006, she has served on the HHMI Science Education External Grant Advisory Committee at the University of Arizona. Recently, she was invited to serve on the Academic Program Review Committee for the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Physiological Sciences.
Dr. Dominguez is active both in the APS and the Shock Society. She has served on 3 committees for APS, Trainee Advisory, Membership and now Education and her section Steering Committee. She serves on the Mentorship Committee for the Shock Society as well as on their Diversity Task Force.

Because of her commitment to outreach, teaching, mentorship, and leadership, the Committee and APS Council is pleased to award the 2011 Dale J. Benos Early Career Professional Service Award to Dr. Jessica A. Dominguez.
 

The APS Trainee Advisory Committee is pleased to announce that Catharine G. Clark, graduate student in the Department of Veterinary Biomedical Sciences and Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center, University of Missouri-Columbia, has been selected as the 2010 recipient of the APS Early Career Professional Service Award. The Committee was extremely impressed with Ms. Clark’s record of commitment to public service and education, especially in the area of working to increase the public’s awareness of physiology and specifically the brain. They especially appreciated her involvement with a wide range of ages, from middle school students through the elderly.

Ms. Clark organized and implemented the first “Brain Awareness Week” within the University of Missouri neuroscience community and area middle schools. The event is now in its third year at the university and continues to grow in popularity and size.

Ms. Clark searched out members of the Science Education Department and worked with them to understand how students make decisions regarding the controversial topic of stem cell research. The results from this study have been accepted for publication and information from this study will be used to change both the instruction and the assessment in courses on stem cells.

For the elderly, Ms. Clark designed and presented a seminar regarding the brain and memory entitled: “What to remember about memory loss” at several retirement homes as well as the public library. The resounding success of this seminar led her to create an entire series of seminars devoted to physiological topics of concern to the elderly, such as Alzheimer’s disease and effects of aging on the brain.

She has also been highly active with the Graduate Student Association and Graduate Professional Council, where she served as an Ambassador for her department. She also is an active member in the Health Sciences Graduate Student Association.

Consequently, the Committee is pleased to award the 2010 Early Career Professional Service Award to Catharine G. Clark.


 

2009
Rudy M. Ortiz, Ph.D.
University of California, Merced

 

The APS Trainee Advisory Committee is pleased to announce that Rudy M. Ortiz, Assistant Professor of Natural Science at the University of California, Merced, has been selected as the 2009 recipient of the APS Early Career Professional Service Award. The Committee was extremely impressed with his outstanding service contributions at all levels, from K-12 to undergraduate to graduate to postdoctoral education.

Dr. Ortiz has been very active both inside and outside APS, foremost as a mentor and trainer and also as a committee, task force, and advisory board member; session organizer and presenter; and reviewer. He has done service and outreach on a K-12, undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and new investigator level.

In the K-12 arena, Dr. Ortiz has been a career panelist for the APS High School Teacher/Student workshop at Experimental Biology and has served as Physiologist-in-Residence for the APS Frontiers Science Teaching Forum. In his own community, he speaks to local grade school classes on health and nutrition.

Dr. Ortiz has mentored over 30 undergraduate and graduate students, especially under-represented minority students, in his own laboratory at Merced and also at scientific meetings. He has been a meeting mentor to over 10 undergraduate and graduate students at EB and Society for Native Americans and Chicanos in Science (SACNAS). He sponsors undergraduates to conduct research in Japan and then acts as their mentor, as well as serving as a mentor to the Japanese students. He served as a faculty panelist while also taking three of his own students to the APS Undergraduate Physiology Explorations Retreat. He has served as a poster judge for the Bruce Excellence in Undergraduate Research Awards during EB and been the featured speaker at the NIDDK Minority Travel Fellows luncheon.

Dr. Ortiz is committed to training the next generation of physiologists. He served on the Professional Skills Training Project Advisory Board and was instrumental is helping develop both PST courses to meet the needs of underrepresented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. He also participated as one of the speakers for both courses. He developed and implemented an abstract writing symposium for the SACNAS annual meeting that now stands as an integral component of their professional skills training workshops. While serving as an inaugural member of the Trainee Advisory Committee, Ortiz organized their first symposium and selected the topic to be “Transition from Postdoc to Jr. Faculty.” The symposium was so successful, it was standing room only.

In addition to his service on the Trainee Advisory Committee, Dr. Ortiz is or has been a member of the Porter Physiology Development Committee, APS Meetings Task Force, and Comparative & Evolutionary Physiology Section Steering Committee. Importantly he was one of select number of trainees who were asked to participate in the 2005 APS Strategic Planning Retreat. He was also selected to serve on the State of California Legislator’s Task Force on Childhood Diabetes and Obesity as the University of California, Merced representative and is a member of the Merced Chapter of the Central California Regional Obesity Prevention Program.

Dr. Ortiz serves on many scientific review panels, including several for other national and state societies. He is the chair of the university’s graduate program Education Policy Committee and is a member of their Institutional Animal Care & Use, Life Sciences Curriculum, and faculty search Committees.
 

 

The Physiologist 51(5): 180-181, 2008.

Dr. Munzenmaier has served as judge and chair of various K-12 science fairs throughout Wisconsin. Because of her strong commitment to K-12 through medical school education, she was appointed to the APS Education Committee. As a Committee member, she proposed, developed and helped pilot test the K-12 outreach program, Physiology Understanding Week (PhUn Week). Phun Week has met with great acclaim and has grown in just 3 years into a program that is held at locations across the US and its territories and that involves undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty.

Dr. Munzenmaier has taught physiology for the general public, as well as undergraduate, graduate and medical students. She has been very involved in the Summer Program for Undergraduate Research at the Medical College of Wisconsin. She has served as a judge for the APS David Bruce Awards in Undergraduate Research and encouraged her department to be a repeat sponsor of the special APS Undergraduate Poster Session.

Because of her concern with the declining use of animals in teaching medical students, Dr. Munzenmaier helped organize, redesign and direct a new whole animal course for 1st-year medical students. She also is a member of the Medical College of Wisconsin’s IACUC.

Dr. Munzenmaier has served as a reviewer on two NIH Study Sections. Internationally, Dr. Munzenmaier helped organize the 8th World Congress of Microcirculation Meeting, which involved over 600 scientists from 30 countries.