USC Times March 28, 2013

University of South Carolina

March 28, 2013

A publication for faculty, staff and friends of the university

Aiken

Beaufort

Columbia

USC Times

Lancaster

Salkehatchie

Sumter

Union

Upstate

40 years and counting

By Liz McCarthy

Music professor comes in to ‘something big’

C

harles Fugo first came to USC about 40 years ago. He was a graduate student, preparing for his first job in academia, and the School of Music was his first interview.

“I really liked the place so I came here,” said Fugo, a piano professor.

A conversation with Dean Jerry Youkey Shepherding the launch of a new medical school is not for the faint hearted. Dean Jerry R. Youkey, a vascular surgeon who also serves as Greenville Hospital System’s executive vice president, has embraced the challenge. He says starting the school from scratch has distinct advantages, particularly since the aim is to establish it as a leading force in redesigning health care education and the care delivery system. The school’s affiliation with the hospital system, one of the largest health systems in the Southeast, also gives students a front row seat to watch those changes play out.

What is different about the Greenville school?

Our school is unique in being both a new medical education program and a medical school that has a parent university with more than 30 years of experience administering and supporting medical education. We also have an affiliate teaching hospital with a large faculty that has more than 20 years of experience teaching and managing the clinical aspects of medical education.

How is medical education adapting to the changes in the health care industry?

The health care industry has to reinvent itself with a focus on improving the patient experience of care and the health of populations, and reducing the per capita cost of care. To accomplish this will require that all health care professional education programs emphasize a patient-centered and team-based approach, focus on evidence directed therapies resulting in individualized or personalized patient precise care, and gain insight into the critical nature of communication to support coordination of care.

What do you see as the biggest challenges facing medical schools today?

Without question, the biggest challenge facing all medical schools today is funding. The main sources of medical school revenue are tuition, clinical practice reimbursement, research dollars and government subsidy. The average debt of newly graduated physicians in the country approximates $200,000, making tuition increase undesirable. Simultaneously, the other three revenue sources are under duress and likely to decline precipitously.

What type of students are you attracting to the school?

We have more than 2,200 applicants for our 50 positions to begin July 2013. The students we are interviewing are engaging, energetic, articulate and generally well versed in the problems facing health care. Most are also quite excited about our approach to early and progressive clinical experience integrated into our biomedical sciences curriculum, starting off with EMT training to certification.

What’s the best part of serving as dean of a new medical school?

I always enjoy recruiting and working with highly competent and driven people to deal with the challenges inherent in building something new. I have been particularly blessed in that regard with the administration, faculty and students of this school.

What’s next for the school?

We are currently revising our first-year curriculum to improve the experience, completing our second-year curriculum, beginning to plan our third and fourth year curricula, initiating our institutional self-study in preparation for our 2014 accreditation site visit, starting to define our research agenda for faculty and student scholarship, interviewing the class of 2017, recruiting the remainder of our biomedical sciences faculty and seeking philanthropic funds for scholarship support. Other than that, not much is going on.

Fugo and nine other university employees will be recognized in April for their 40 years of service at USC. Every year the Division of Human Resources celebrates USC’s longest working employees with the State Service Award ceremony, honoring individuals with 20, 30 and 40 years of service.

And he didn’t leave — he never had a need to. Fugo found his niche teaching applied piano almost immediately, and he had found a place that gave him the freedom to teach and perform.

“The faculty is extremely collegial and very accomplished and that has only increased with the years,” he said. “I thought it was a very good situation. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do.”

In the 41 years he has been teaching at USC, he has seen quite a change in the music school at Carolina.

“It’s grown in stature. It’s grown in volume,” he said.

“The students are at a completely different level. It’s been an exciting time to be here. When I came in, I was told we might be on the ground floor of something big. And that’s exactly what’s happened.”

Fugo said he is proud to be a part of a music program that continues to get better.

“It’s a wonderful place to be working and teaching and I look forward to continuing it,” he said.

University of South Carolina

2

Beyond the clinic

By Craig Brandhorst

To associate professor of psychology Bret Kloos, mental health treatment extends beyond the traditional clinic. That’s because Kloos specializes in community psychology, which emphasizes the links between mental health and a person’s environment.

“That might mean we look at links between a neighborhood and an individual to promote health and prevent problems,” said Kloos. “We try to understand how those environmental factors can contribute to someone’s functioning and wellbeing.”

As director of USC’s Housing Adaptive Functioning Research Lab, Kloos is exploring how factors such as natural disasters and homelessness impact specific populations, including immigrants and persons with serious mental illness or drug abuse problems.

“For people who are vulnerable, the context is much more important,” said Kloos, who also has a background in clinical psychology.

Kloos and colleagues from USC are also making a difference locally by collaborating on projects with the S.C. Department of Mental Health, community mental health centers and nonprofit organizations.

“Most of these people with psychiatric disabilities don’t need institutional help, but better ways to support them in the community. The quality of their homes or their neighborhoods can make life harder or easier for them,” he said.

With funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and other agencies, Kloos and company are seeking cost-effective interventions to offset state-level budget cuts for mental health services. The end goal, he said, is not merely to help at-risk individuals but also to enable communities to help themselves.

“If we can help communities build capacity to do their own work, everybody’s better off. That’s part of the passion,” he said

Kloos is one of 15 Breakthrough Rising Stars chosen by the Office of Research. The program recognizes junior faculty whose research and scholarship demonstrates the best in academe. Look for more profiles in USC Times in the weeks ahead.

Five questions with

USC Aiken’s Chancellor Sandra Jordan

1

Art history is an interesting background. How does art and creativity play into your role as chancellor?

2

At what point did you turn your attention from art to administration? What was the draw?

3

What are some of your goals moving forward as you develop a strategic plan for USC Aiken?

Art History is a field of study that requires facility in a number of disciplines. Because art historians study the creations associated with the human experience, we are required to leap over discipline boundaries and pull from many fields of study — from history, cultural studies and philosophy, to literature, music and science. Art Historians are often “out of the box” thinkers. Their creativity makes them innovators — independent thinkers with the motivation and intellect to develop new solutions to old problems. These are certainly skills useful to a chancellor.

In my very first college position after graduate school, as an assistant professor, I also took on an official administrative role. So, one could say that I’ve always juggled administrative duties along with the work of a professor. I learned early on that administration was perplexing, frustrating, stimulating, rewarding and meaningful work.

Two months after my arrival, we launched a visioning process. What emerged from the discussions is a clear set of directions that include adding more graduate and undergraduate majors in disciplines that are in demand in our area, growing the university’s student body, becoming the most entrepreneurial campus in our system, being more efficient and “green,” and marketing our liberal arts mission more effectively.

4

What was your first impression of USC Aiken and the USC system?

5

What would surprise people to know about USC Aiken?

My first impression of USC Aiken was more positive than ever expected. In fact, the people here swept me off my feet. As I walked around the campus during my first visit, speaking to faculty, staff, students and campus visitors, I was struck by how often people told me that this university changed their lives or that they “loved” this university.

I’ve been surprised at how few people on the Columbia campus know that USC Aiken, Upstate, and Beaufort are separately accredited universities in their own right, rather than branch campuses. President Pastides has a wonderful way of expressing it. I’ve heard him explain the system as a “constellation of four universities that chose to band together.”

USC Times

March 28, 2013

3

on exhibit

Like flowers of spring, art by university faculty and staff is on display for everyone to enjoy.

Inspired by the season, USC Times is sharing some of these vibrant works, ranging from paper and glass to photography and oil, which are on display in South Carolina and beyond.

James Henderson, director of media services in the art department Henderson has a solo exhibit, “Infrared Visions: The Curious and the Sublime,” at the Gallery At DuPre in Columbia. This piece, “Bamboo I,” is an infrared photograph currently on display.

Fran Gardner, USC Lancaster art and art history professor

Sara Schneckloth, assistant professor of studio art Schneckloth exhibited several drawings at the Soho20 Chelsea Gallery in New York.

Her work explores the potential of contemporary drawing practice.

Kathleen Robbins, associate professor of studio art Robbins, who teaches photography, has a traveling, solo exhibition of pieces produced over a period of six years showing in museums, commercial galleries and contemporary art spaces. It has traveled to eight venues as a solo exhibition since 2008.

Gardner recently had two pieces of her work accepted into a juried exhibition in Missouri.

Jane Nodine, professor of art at USC Upstate

Mary Robinson, associate professor of studio art

Nodine’s artwork — made from encaustic wax, oil pigment, resin, iron oxidation — will be featured in several shows from Massachusetts to the Carolina Upstate in the next few months. Nodine’s primary research focuses on merging traditional and historical techniques of image and art-making with contemporary forms of technology.

Robinson, director of USC printmaking, showed several works made in 2012 and 2013 during the recent Columbia Open Studios.

This piece, a screen print and acrylic collage, is titled “New Routes, First Steps 2.”

Gaining global perspectives

By Amy Long Caffee

As David Voros and Pam Bowers spoke with a Chinese landscape painter sharing their perspectives on landscape painting, the painter gestured toward the mountain in the distance.

“For you, the landscape is out there,” he said, with the help of a translator, placing his hand on his heart. “For me, it is in here.”

For Voros and Bowers, faculty members in USC’s art department, this vignette illustrates how cultural exchanges can challenge a person’s view of the world around them. And it wouldn’t have happened without the university’s help.

For artists working in academia, the solo exhibition is important, but many hurdles can delay artists from showing work internationally.

“Having an exhibition filled with your own works really allows the viewer to access it in a different way,” Bowers said.

Voros and Bowers were invited to China for solo exhibitions at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and the Guilin Academy of Chinese Painting in Guilin.

Voros explained the difficulties artists face in showing work internationally to the Vice President for Research Prakash Nagarkatti.

“This is a significant recognition of their work, and I was happy to provide support for them,” Nagarkatti said. “These global connections bring about cultural exchanges that benefit the university community, and I am happy to promote such exchanges.”

The university’s support of the artists’ work was essential for the visit.

The exchange of perspectives from other cultures can play an important role in creating art, making these kinds of trips even more important, Voros said.

“Artists shouldn’t be limited by a particular cultural or temporal perspective,” he said. “By recognizing different perspectives we can look at common issues from different sides and understand them more deeply.”

Bryan Burgin, College of Education’s director of conferences, public relations and marketing Burgin produces glass artwork on the side. This piece, “Some Like it Hot,” is the featured art piece for Dining With Friends, sponsored by the AIDS Benefit Foundation of South Carolina.

Voros and Bowers plan to continue the dialogue with the painters in Guilin. With generous support from that city, as well as USC’s art department and the Confucius Institute, the artists plan to host six painters from the Guilin Academy of Painting in the fall.

The artists will give a workshop and seminar on Chinese painting, perform critiques with students and will exhibit their works in the McMaster Gallery.

USC Times

March 28, 2013

4

More than 80 students participated in seven spring break trips sponsored by Carolina’s Community Service Programs office. Serving in places from New Orleans to New Jersey, the students took to social media to document their journeys.

Aternative Spring Break

Beth @bbrink2012 “If we don’t feel tired and we are not dirty, we didn’t do anything” -Eric #reflection #TeamNashville

Abbey O’Brien @abbeyobrien Just let out my inner farm girl picking corn & potatoes.

Feels awesome to know it’s going to feed the hungry/ homeless in FL. #TeamSouthFlorida

Hailey Morris @hayymorris Okay now off to bed. Waking up in 6 hours to help demolish a house in Atlantic City! Lets go #JerseyFamily #TeamJersey

Best and the brightest

$ 16.7 million earned through national fellowships

by USC students since ’94

students selected in 2011-12, securing more than $1.4 million for advanced academic study.

National fellowship awards earned by USC students since 1994

Vol. 24, No. 6 | March 28, 2013 USC Times is published 20 times a year for the faculty and staff of the University of South Carolina by the Division of Communications.

Managing editor: Liz McCarthy Designer: Linda Dodge

55 595 53

National scholarships, by-the-numbers

USC TIMES

faculty and staff serve on national fellowship committees

Contributors: Peggy Binette, Craig Brandhorst, Frenché Brewer, Glenn Hare, Thom Harman, Chris Horn, Page Ivey, Steven Powell, Megan Sexton, Jeff Stensland and Marshall Swanson Photographers: Kim Truett To reach us: 803-777-2848 or lizmccarthy@sc.edu Campus correspondents: Patti McGrath, Aiken Candace Brasseur, Beaufort Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Misty Hatfield, Sumter Tammy Whaley, Upstate

Source: Office of Fellowships and Scholar Programs

SPRI NG 2013

UNIV ERSI TY

CAR OLIN A OF SOUT H

AZIN E ALUM NI MAG

The University of South Carolina does not

Hot off the press!

The Spring 2013 edition of Carolinian magazine is here, featuring stories about USC faculty, students and alumni — plus one very unusual trip down memory lane.

ide Th ink ing ins x a ver y bigER,bo ’97 BLAZ CAM ERO N COL LEGE S.C. HON ORS

plus ONS O BJEC T LESS CARO LINIA

NS WHO RUN

MES DEAT H BECO

HER

Annie Houston, Union

Don’t already receive Carolinian? No problem. To join the mailing list for the next three issues just make a donation of $50 or more to the Family Fund at giving.sc.edu.

discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation or veteran status.