UAB Briefs: A national honor, Jonny Lang and Baja racers

by

Welcome to another installment of UAB Briefs, in which we keep track of interesting people and events on campus.

Know people, places and programs on the UAB campus that deserve a mention?

Email Iron City Ink at sydney@starnespublishing.com or jchambers@starnespublishing.com.

National recognition

UAB and Firehouse Ministries partnered beginning in June 2016 to create a student-run health clinic for Birmingham’s homeless at the Firehouse Shelter downtown.

The screening clinic -- run by James Kilgore, director of the Physician Assistant Program at the UAB School of Health Professions -- is held on the first and third Wednesdays of each month, and health-education sessions are held on second and fourth Wednesdays.

And the clinic has now received some national recognition from the U.S. Public Health Service and the Interprofessional Education Collaborative.

Those agencies recently gave the inaugural Excellence in Interprofessional Education Collaboration National Award.

And while the UAB clinic did not win the award, it received an honorable mention in the category of at risk and vulnerable communities.

The clinics and educational sessions at Firehouse Shelter are supervised by faculty but staffed by students training to be doctors, nurses, physician assistants, dietitians, nutritionists and physical and occupational therapists.

“It gives us a chance to see real-life patients with real-life problems,” Ashley King, who’s in the physician assistant program, told Iron City Ink recently.

Client Robert Means is homeless and a former longtime drug user. “They are giving me the chance to go to the doctor and get some stuff corrected,” he said. “I’m just grateful they came.”

A big grant

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has awarded a five-year, $11.2 million Program Project Grant to two researchers in the UAB Division of Nephrology.

David Pollock and Jennifer Pollock -- along with Ed Inscho of the University of Utah -- will study the renal control of sodium and salt balance.

“We know that the Western diet we all eat has far too much salt in it, and we know the number of people consuming salt in Western and developing countries is rising,” David Pollock said. “Now that it’s become appreciated that a high-salt diet may contribute to the rise of many diverse health problems including autoimmune disease, trying to understand how the body regulates salt is extremely important.”

‘Reaching out and connecting’

Guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Jonny Lang recently recorded his first album of new music in seven years -- “Fight for My Soul,” on the Concord Record label.

He will perform that new music in the Jemison Concert Hall at UAB’s Alys Stephens Center on Saturday, June 10, at 8 p.m.

A Grammy Award-winning blues, gospel and rock musician, Lang has released seven albums.

“Much of what I’ve experienced through music and life in general is in these songs,” Lang said in a news release. “I really like reaching out and connecting with people. For me, this is what it’s all about. It keeps it fresh with different experiences every day.”

Tickets are $54, $63 and $72. Lang also offers a special VIP package that includes a premium performance ticket, a photo opportunity and some other perks.

For tickets or more information, call 975-2787 or go to alysstephens.org.

Money to head off road

Blazer Motorsports, an organization at UAB that allows students from various disciplines to work in automotive design, is seeking to take a student-made off-road car to a national competition -- the Baja SAE Kansas, to be held at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, from May 25-28.

To get there, Blazer Motorsports launched a crowdfunding campaign in April. Travel expenses for the car and the team are expected to be around $10,000.

Baja SAE is an intercollegiate design competition run by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Teams of students from universities around the world work to design and build small off-road cars that can withstand harsh elements and rough terrain.

At UAB, the Baja racing team has worked for about two years to build an an improved Baja car to compete in Kansas.

Graduating to better jobs

The first group of 18 students graduated from the Innovate Birmingham Workforce program in a ceremony at Birmingham’s Railroad Park on Friday, May 5, according to a UAB news release.

The program, which trains unemployed or underemployed area young adults for good-paying information technology careers, is funded by a 2016 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor worth about $6 million.

Many of the graduates have already received job offers.

Students were selected for the program through a rigorous interview and screening process and completed an intensive 12-week training at Innovation Depot to prepare them for entry into the IT workforce.

The goal of the program is to prepare Birmingham-area young adults to obtain 925 IT jobs by 2021.