Photo courtesy of UAB Media Relations.
Scott Peacock
Alabama native Scott Peacock is an acclaimed chef and author. He will make a virtual appearance at an event presented by AEIVA on Oct. 20
In this weekly online feature, we keep track of interesting people and events on campus at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.
We also provide updates regarding UAB’s efforts to cope with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
For example, UAB Hospital and UAB Medicine clinics have implemented and visitation guidelines.
For information regarding how to plan your in-person UAB Medicine hospital or clinic visit, click here.
To read other UAB COVID-19 updates or find health information, go to uab.edu/coronavirus.
Let us know about people, events and programs on campus that deserve a mention in UAB Briefs. Email jchambers@starnespublishing.com.
BISCUITS AND MORE
Renowned chef Scott Peacock will talk about his career, his love for biscuits and the importance of food in shaping our memories and traditions during a virtual event on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at 6 p.m., according to UAB Media Relations.
The Arts Circle Live event is presented by the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at UAB.
AEIVA Director John Fields will join Peacock via Zoom for the event.
They will be joined by Celestia Morgan — artist and UAB alumna — whose photograph “Flour, Milk, Salt” uses her grandmother’s biscuit recipe as an anchor to her own family identity.
Born and raised in rural Alabama, Peacock was named Best Chef in the Southeast in 2007 by the James Beard Foundation.
He was also a semifinalist for Outstanding Chef in America in 2009.
He has been at the forefront of the local food movement since the early 1990s and left the restaurant business in 2010 to focus on writing and on documenting the traditional foodways of Alabama.
The event is available to Arts Circle members or those subscribing to the Virtual Arts Pass, from $29 a month, which grants exclusive access to artists and events presented by AEIVA, the Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center and ArtPlay.
For more about the Virtual Arts Pass, go to alysstephens.org/support.
MODELING TREATMENTS
UAB has established a new Center for Precision Animal Modeling, or C-PAM, using a five-year, $9.3 million grant from the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs at the federal National Institutes of Health.
The UAB C-PAM is one of only three centers in the United States funded through a highly competitive NIH program to create national centers for “precision disease modeling,” according to UAB Media Relations.
The leaders of the effort are Brad Yoder, chair of the UAB Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology, and Matt Might, professor in the UAB Department of Medicine and director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute.
Precision disease modeling involves creation of patient-specific disease models that mimic the molecular character of a condition present in a patient.
For example, if a patient has a disease caused by a sequence variant leading to the dysfunction of a gene, C-PAM will create an animal model with this same variant.
Yeast, worms, fruit flies, zebrafish, frogs, mice and rats are used to do the modeling.
Computational capabilities available at UAB, including advanced data science and artificial intelligence, will help predict possible treatments that can be tested in the models.
Therapies that help treat the model would then become candidates for treatment of the patient.
TELE-LEARNING ABOUT OPIOIDS
UAB Medicine will launch a series of online learning experiences for health care providers around the state of Alabama on the subject of opioid use disorder.
The initiative is part of a national program called Project ECHO, or Extension of Community Healthcare Outcomes, according to UAB Media Relations.
The goal is to foster interactive collaboration in case-based learning to improve patient care.
“It allows an expert in a field to impart important lessons to potentially large numbers of health care providers at one time,” said Eric Wallace, M.D., medical director of UAB Medicine’s eMedicine program.
Wallace describes Project ECHO as a kind of virtual version of the traditional hospital rounds in an academic medical center in which a senior physician discusses cases with residents, medical students and other health care professionals.
“We’ve selected substance use disorder as our central theme,” Wallace said. “Participants will send in a de-identified case study of a particular problem they have encountered. The expert presenter will provide some basic information on the topic, and then examine the case studies in conjunction with all participants. Everyone engaged in the conference has an opportunity to learn and to participate in the discussion, an ‘all teach, all learn’ model.”
Wallace says substance use disorder was chosen due to the rise of substance abuse connected to the COVID-19 pandemic and a shortage of trained health care professionals in the field.
“Alabama does not have enough specialists in substance abuse to manage every patient,” he said.
The series is funded by a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission.
