Dressed in his traditional monk’s robe, Dr. Kerzin highlighted honesty as one of the most important parts of the doctor/patient relationship. “Honesty is the foundation of ethics,” he said. “Slow down, and look introspectively, ask yourself: Am I being honest?” He added that the medical field can be a fast paced world, which puts pressure on physicians to speed through patient visits, or glaze over details about their condition. Dr. Kerzin advised that doctors should always take a minute to pause and evaluate how they are treating their patients. He said such self-evaluation is necessary to maintain trust with the patient.

“Remember the last time you went to the doctor,” Dr. Kerzin asked. “If there wasn’t a smile, or some compassion, you weren’t satisfied.” He added that it is helpful to think of how you would want your own loved ones to be treated and act accordingly.

The presentation was sponsored by Jacque and Rip Gellein and heard by current and prospective medical students, Central Florida community physicians and College of Medicine faculty. As Dr. Deborah German, vice president for medical affairs and dean said as she introduced Dr. Kerzin, “Many of us are physicians or physicians in training, but we’re also patients. “No matter who you are, I think this topic will touch each one of us in a very different way.”

Dr. Kerzin also delved into the difficult situation of caring for a dying patient.  Treating a terminal illness can often inflict a sense of failure in physicians, but he urged healthcare providers to resist that feeling. “Sometimes we feel like we have a mandate to cure,” he said. “We have to recognize [a terminal illness] is the time when we are most needed. Do it with an open heart and it will reward your practice of medicine.” He added that sometimes just sitting with the patient can be the most helpful thing to do. “If you don’t know what to say, then say nothing.”

Because of his vocation as a Buddhist monk, spirituality has continually played a role in Dr. Kerzin’s practice of medicine. As time goes on, he says the two worlds continue to become even more intertwined. “As a physician I was trained to treat physical problems, as a Buddhist monk, I deal with more emotional problems,” he said. “More and more I realize these are not so far away. The two worlds are much more blended for me now.”

He was at the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of the Rhineland during World War II, and he received a Purple Heart for his service during the 1945 Battle for Remagen Bridge in Germany, a key victory for the Allies.

Recently, he was bestowed another honor, Knight of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest decoration, for his courage and selfless service to France while serving in the Army’s 276th Engineer Combat Battalion.

“We were sometimes out in front of our own infantry doing projects,” said Gambrell, who left UCF in 1978. “We swept fields for mines, built bridges and did road work.”

Gambrell enlisted in 1942 while he was a student at the University of Alabama. He said he is still in contact with a couple other men who served with him.  

He was nominated for the award about 18 months ago, he said, and a background check from French officials in the United States followed. During the presentation in Orlando, 10 people were given the award by a French admiral.

“Your decision to fight for freedom was an admirable act,” Elaine Machado of the Legion of Honor wrote in a letter for the presentation. “The solidarity you lent our country and people as a soldier will never be forgotten; be assured that we are eternally grateful.”

During his tenure at UCF, Gambrell was also a faculty member in the College of Engineering. He received his Bachelor of Arts at Florida Southern College; Bachelor of Science at Clemson University; MBA at West Coast University; Master of Science and Engineering at the University of Florida; an honorary LL.D. at Southern California Institute of Law; and Ph.D. at Purdue University.

After leaving UCF, Gambrell held positions at West Coast University, Mercer University and Mercer Engineering Research Center. He now lives with his wife, Olive, in Lakeland.

Gambrell, a retired lieutenant colonel of the Army Reserve, said the Legion of Honor presentation made him reflect on days past.

“It’s easier now to see and realize what we accomplished, and that the sacrifices we made were worthwhile,” he said.

Our region’s “hometown university,” UCF has helped transform our once sleepy little town into a city and region of world renown. Charles Millican, UCF’s first president, built the university in partnership with the then-developing Central Florida community.

Today, the extraordinary 21-year-and-counting tenure of President John C. Hitt has positioned UCF as America’s leading partnership university and a national model for successful community collaborations.

UCF has grown to become the nation’s second-largest university with nearly 60,000 students. Its growth is powered by quality students — last fall UCF ranked 12^th nationally among public institutions in enrolling freshman National Merit Scholars. Each of the universities that attracted more of these prestigious students opened their doors before 1900!

This year, UCF will graduate more than 15,000 students — a school record. As most UCF alumni settle in Central Florida, it’s no coincidence that last year Forbes magazine ranked Orlando eighth among U.S. cities “getting smarter the fastest.”

Indeed, just last month a national study released by the New America Foundation concluded that with its many partnerships and emphasis on expanding students’ access to a high-quality education, UCF is a “Next Generation University” that is a national model for 21^st century higher education.

While its size is impressive, UCF doesn’t aspire to be big; rather, it grows to meet the demands and needs of Central Florida. Providing access is important because a college degree has been, and continues to be, the single most important factor for a successful career and a better future for our communities.

At UCF, about one in four students is the first in her or his family to attend college. Imagine how their lives, the lives of their families and the quality of life in Central Florida are being transformed as these students reach for their diplomas.

UCF’s ascent is one of the great success stories in American higher education. In a relatively short time, UCF emerged from scrub pine and dirt roads to become a major metropolitan research university of global impact, paralleling the rise to national prominence of Orlando and Orange County.

From a Seminole and a Gator who are proud to call ourselves “honorary” Knights: Happy 50^th anniversary, UCF! And “Go Knights!”

Teresa Jacobs, FSU Class of ’81, is the mayor of Orange County.

Buddy Dyer, UF Levin College of Law Class of ’87, is the mayor of the City of Orlando.

Her leave of absence started this summer. The area she oversees includes studies and grants in the area of: population dynamics of individual species, demography, fundamental ecological interactions affecting populations, communities, their environments, mechanisms of coexistence and the maintenance of species diversity, and conservation and restoration among others.

Von Holle’s primary responsibilities include interacting with investigators, facilitating merit-review panels, and recommending funding decisions.

“I’m very excited to be here at NSF,” Von Holle said. “I am able to see what the cutting-edge science is in ecology and am excited about facilitating the progress of science. Washington, D.C., is also an exciting place to be, where science, policy, and culture intersect in a very vibrant city.”

She said she is benefitting from the opportunity to work with other top investigators in her field as well as getting a broad look at a variety of research that is impacting ecology.

Von Holle joined UCF in 2007 after working at the Smithsonian’s Environmental Research Center, Harvard University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has a bachelor’s of science in ecology, behavior and evolution from the University of California at San Diego and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She has received multiple awards and grants from many institutions including the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Her leave of absence concludes in a year at which time she plans to return to UCF to continue her own research.

Two other UCF faculty members are currently working at NSF:  Debra Reinhart, assistant vice president for Research and Commercialization, and Ruey-Hung Chen, a professor in the college of Engineering and Computer Science.

The pantry is larger and able to accommodate more food, toiletries and clothing for UCF’s fellow Knights. KHK helps all Knights that are in need. Students can come to the pantry and receive six pounds of food and unlimited toiletries. Clothing available is business casual and business professional, perfect for an interview or conference.

In May, KHK had a “Home Warming” Celebration for four days from 9 a.m.-11 a.m.in its new location with tours of the facility.

Summer hours are 12-5 p.m. Monday through Thursday. For more information, call 407.823.3663 or visit: knightspantry.org.

The result of the team’s work appears in today’s online edition of Nature.

Peijun Zhang, an associate professor in the department of Structural Biology at the University of Pittsburgh led the team. Others are: Gongpu Zhao, Xin Meng, Jiying Nig, Jinwoo Ahn and Angela Gronenborn also from the University of Pittsburgh;  Juan R. Perilla and Klaus Schulten from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Ernest L. Yufenyuy and Christopher Aiken from Vanderbilt University and UCF physics professor Bo Chen.

Zhang has been working with cryo-electron microscopy to figure out how the HIV-1 virus creates its capsid, the protective armor around the viral genome materials, which corrupt a host cells DNA and turns them against the body.

The integrity of capsids is critical to viral infection and propagation, but their structure has remained elusive because of how different each capsid can be, said UCF’s Chen. That complexity is compounded because the assembly process necessary to create large protective shells includes thousands of individual proteins joining together in assembly, all of which only takes a few seconds to minutes to complete.

“The speed makes it difficult to track and analyze experimentally, and even more challenging to simulate theoretically, because it involves a large amount of molecules and extends the time scale far too long for current computation resources,” Chen said.  He came up with an advanced simulation model that captures the overall structure of the capsid protein that forms the shell without slowing down the speed, and can simulate how hundreds of capsid proteins assemble at the same time. It doesn’t capture the whole system, but it is a big leap in the right direction, he said.

Chen has been able to create simulations based on the general information understood by researcher to date. Compared to many other models, his simulation model is able to capture the structure information of the molecule to high fidelity without sacrificing the simulation speed. By working with Peijun, he was able to use the detailed structural information of HIV-1 she has discovered.

“The mechanism is challenging to study and simulate,” said Chen, who specializes in complex biomolecular computer simulations also known as multiscale theory and coarse-grained model simulation. “It involves hundreds and in some cases thousands of molecules working at the same time to assemble and construct new structures. And with our technology we’ve had limited success previously. But the cryoEM structure model from Dr. Zhang’s group developed has greatly inspired our simulation work.”

The simulation gives Zhang a picture of how the process works, adding a new perspective as she tries to uncover how individual capsid proteins come together to form the large protective shell.

Unlike sci-fi computers that simulate and predict how complicated organisms will react to any given stimulus in seconds, today’s technology isn’t quite there yet.

“Even with the world’s biggest supercomputers, we can’t do a simulation that keeps pace with the complexities involved in self assembly for more than a few microseconds,” Chen said. One microsecond is one millionth of a second. “And most of these processes take up to several seconds to minutes. In time, I think we’ll get there, but right now, we’re limited by our current technology. Even so, our advances are helping scientists understand how it all works.

Chen isn’t a patient researcher, which is why he switched from more fundamental condensed physics to applied physics in the area of biomedical sciences, in hope of seeing quicker impacts of his research to society.  Despite hardware limitations, he said progress in this area of research is likely to produce benefits to mankind in his lifetime.

“I wanted to see my work impact people,” he said. “I’m hoping the use of my simulations will help us learn about the processes and to predict outcomes as a way to help prevent adverse health issues. While my work is focused on HIV-1 at the moment, we can apply this model to other proteins that are keys to other diseases. There’s still work to do, but there is good promise here.”

Chen joined UCF in 2011. Previously he was a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health for four years. In 2013 he was awarded the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award. Previously, his work has been reported in journals such as Nature Physics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Biochemistry, among others. Chen has a Ph.D. in physics from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree from Beijing University. He is the father of two young children is a strong advocate of teaching science to youth. He has several graduate and undergraduate students in his lab and he mentors children at an elementary school.

Rafael Campos (@rcampos1990) asked what books I would suggest for a recent college grad.

To put my recommendations into context, you should know that I read widely for work and deeply for fun. I read tons about history (e.g., ancient, American Revolution, World War II), baseball, and classic fiction (e.g., Dickens, Hemingway and Tolstoy). I rarely read “business books”–things you would find in the business section of Amazon or your local book shop. Instead I look for books from other walks of life that might provide insight into leadership and the work that I do. There are three authors whose books I always read: Thomas Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Seth Godin. I’m just finishing The Icarus Deception. I’m also fond of Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Moneyball).

So, with all of that out of the way and in no particular order, here is my list of ten books I’ve just completed or hope to finish this summer:

• “The Icarus Deception,” Seth Godin
• “Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children,” Dorie McCullough Lawson
• “In The Garden of Beasts,” Erik Larson
• “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk,” Peter Bernstein
• “My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla”
• “The Stuff of Thought,” Steven Pinker
• “Why I Write,” George Orwell
• “Girls of Atomic City,” Denise Kiernan
• “Unbroken,” Laura Hillenbrand
• “Paris: the novel,” Edward Rutherfurd

I am also addicted to Flipboard. If you are an iPad user, it is a free app and I curate all of the content I read there into a magazine called UCF Business. You can take a look at it and subscribe by clicking here.

Paul Jarley, Ph.D., is the dean of the UCF College of Business Administration. He blogs every week at http://www.bus.ucf.edu/dean. This post appeared on June 17, 2013. Follow him on Twitter @pauljarley

“I set out on a mission to make this program a track and field superpower,” Smith Gilbert said. “We were in the top five, both indoor and outdoor, this year. So I think the program is definitely headed in the right direction. I want to thank Todd Stansbury, Jessica Reo, Keith Tribble and so many others for the opportunity, the help and all the assistance they gave us to get us to this point. President Hitt is very supportive of the team and everybody at UCF embraced us. We made major strides in this program.

“Orlando is a great place. UCF is a great place,” Smith Gilbert continued. “It’s going to be very sad. I’m excited about embarking on a new adventure. But it is going to be very hard for me to leave. We grew as a family, so they’re more than just my athletes. They’re like my little sisters and daughters. I taught them everything I could.”

In her new role at USC, Smith Gilbert will be responsible for all aspects of the Trojans’ men’s and women’s track and field programs.

During her UCF tenure, the Knights won six Conference USA outdoor and indoor crowns. Her athletes were named All-America more than 100 times and set more than 100 school records. In the classroom, her team’s GPA exceeded 3.0 nearly every term during her tenure.

“Caryl Smith Gilbert and our student-athletes are responsible for our women’s track and field program being recognized among the best in the nation,” said UCF Vice President and Director of Athletics Todd Stansbury. “She is an amazing coach and an amazing person. We certainly understand that when you have a coach who has accomplished the sort of things Coach Caryl has, that she will be presented with other opportunities. We thank her for everything she has done at UCF and wish her and her family nothing but the best in the future.”

In 2013, UCF’s fifth-place showing at the NCAA outdoor meet was the best finish by a non-BCS school since 2000 and its 35 points more than doubled the previous program best. Smith Gilbert was named the USTFCCA South Region Coach of the Year for a fifth time in 2013 as she guided UCF to its first-ever Top-10 outdoor ranking in the USTFCCCA poll. She was the only coach to have three 100-meter runners ranked among the Top 10-seeded qualifiers at the NCAA meet. Twelve school records were broken during the 2013 outdoor season while the team won its fourth-straight C-USA title, a feat unmatched by any other women’s track and field program in C-USA history. Octavious Freeman was the C-USA Track Athlete of the Year for the second consecutive year.

UCF also finished fifth at the 2013 NCAA indoor meet, as Aurieyall Scott won the 60-meter dash to become the school’s first NCAA champion in any sport. Scott was also the C-USA Indoor Track Athlete of the Year.

UCF’s eighth-place finish at the 2012 NCAA indoor meet was the program’s best at the time. UCF won the C-USA outdoor title and capped the season by sending four Knights to compete at the USA Olympic Trials. In 2011, UCF swept the indoor and outdoor C-USA titles as Jackie Coward was named C-USA Track Athlete of the Year and UCF’s first two-time All-America first-teamer. Smith Gilbert was C-USA’s outdoor and indoor Coach of the Year. She led the 2010 Knights to the C-USA Outdoor championship. Coward became UCF’s first NCAA Outdoor All-American, finishing fourth in the 100-meter hurdles.

In Smith Gilbert’s first two seasons at UCF, 2008 and 2009, her athletes broke 30 of the school’s indoor and outdoor school records. She also served as the jumps and multi-events coach of Team USA at the 2009 IAAF World Outdoor Championships in Berlin.

Smith Gilbert came to UCF after five seasons (2003-07) as an assistant coach at Tennessee, where she was responsible for coaching sprints, hurdles and jumps. Smith Gilbert was an assistant coach at Alabama for three years (2000-02) and held similar responsibilities as an assistant at Penn State for two seasons (1998-99). Prior to becoming a collegiate coach, Smith Gilbert was the head coach for four seasons (1994-97) at her prep alma mater, George Washington High in Denver.

Those scenes have played out for decades, but today’s military children face a challenge not experienced by those before them: Many mothers and fathers have been deployed three, four, five or more times to Afghanistan and Iraq. Some may be away for half of their children’s formative years, with frequent transitions from living at home to serving overseas.

The U.S. Department of Defense is turning to University of Central Florida professor Deborah Beidel to help find out how deployments impact family members at home. Her UCF team already has earned national attention for developing an innovative program that helps active-duty military personnel and veterans with PTSD. This time, they will examine how the stress of multiple deployments impacts families and determine what resources should be provided or developed to help them.

Unlike researchers in most previous national studies, Beidel’s team will do more than interview families. They’ll be measuring family members’ levels of cortisol, a hormone linked to stress. The team also will measure the family members’ sleep patterns by having them wear devices similar to wristwatches that track their movements while in bed.

“It’s hard for kids to express how they feel,” said Beidel, who this year earned the Pegasus Professor Award given to UCF’s most outstanding faculty members. “Boys are told not to be emotional, not to be scared, and even young boys learn how to filter those emotions. But you can’t filter your cortisol and you can’t filter your sleep. Those are objective measures that are not colored by society’s expectations or how you should feel.”

Beidel’s team is looking for families throughout Central Florida – in the Orlando, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Daytona Beach, Lakeland and Melbourne areas – to participate in the study. Her co-investigators, professors Candice Alfano at the University of Houston and Charmaine Higa-McMillan at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, also are looking for families.

To participate, families must have a deployed caregiver in any branch of the military and at least one child 7 to 17 years old. The caregiver at home does not necessarily have to be a mother or father, but does have to be a primary caregiver.

The Department of Defense provided a three-year, $2.7 million grant for the study. Researchers also are recruiting three other types of families to compare to the military families. One group will include military families with both parents or other caregivers at home, a second group will include families with only one parent or caregiver at home due to a separation or divorce, and a third group will include non-military families with both parents or caregivers at home.

Families will receive compensation for participating in the study, which will take about 10 hours of their time over one week. Although families need to have at least one child 7 to 17, they can participate if they have children of other ages.

For more information, call 407-823-3910 or go to www.ucfmilitaryfamilies.org.

Update: Helping Military Personnel, Veterans Overcome PTSD

In a separate program funded by the U.S. Army, the UCF research team has developed innovative therapies featuring the real smells of war to help those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan overcome post-traumatic stress disorder.

Servicemen and women returning from those countries often say smells that remind them of war or the countries where they fought can trigger memories or flashbacks of combat trauma. Therapy sessions combine virtual reality experiences in a war zone with real smells to gradually expose participants to the sights, sounds and smells that they experienced while at war.

The Trauma Management Therapy program, which also includes group sessions, has provided treatment for approximately 60 active-duty personnel and veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Participants are reporting that PTSD became much less prevalent in their lives after treatment and has stayed that way after several months.

Beidel continues to recruit participants for a 17-week outpatient program offered at UCF’s main campus in Orlando and at Stewart-Marchman-Act Behavioral Healthcare in Daytona Beach.

An intensive three-week program is available at UCF for participants who live outside the area, and that includes complimentary hotel rooms at the Homewood Suites near campus.

Participants in those programs can be from any service branch; they do not need to have been discharged honorably; and they do not need a formal PTSD diagnosis. They also do not need to be UCF students. A member of UCF’s research team will follow up within 72 hours after someone calls, and the team aims to start treatment within a week, if possible.

“The greatest compliment we have received is that people we have treated are referring their military friends to us,” Beidel said.

For more information, call 407-823-3910 or visit http://psychology.cos.ucf.edu/anxietyclinic.

Eduardo Salas, Pegasus and Trustee Chair professor of psychology and scientist with the Institute for Simulation and Training, will lead the research that supports NASA’s objectives to ensure the health of space flight crews, especially as they venture beyond the Earth’s orbit for extended periods of time.

NASA and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute announced a total of 23 awards valued at approximately $17 million.  Salas is the only researcher to receive two awards in the peer-reviewed competition and only two other universities received more than one award.

Salas is an internationally recognized expert on teams and training.  His projects will help NASA safely and efficiently divide tasks between humans and automation, and assess the cognitive and emotional states of individuals and teams, both of which are priorities of the space agency.

The first project will focus on methods to detect and mitigate cognitive performance deficits, stress, fatigue, anxiety and depression for the operational setting of spaceflight from ongoing team member communications, either spoken or written.

Using software and analytic tools the researchers will quantify word choice and patterns in real-time, which may be used to alert them to any changes or potential risk factors.

The effort is critical to keeping teams in space for months and perhaps years, Salas said.

“During long-term spaceflight team members will talk a lot, both during mission critical operations and their down time.  By analyzing spontaneous verbal output in real-time communication, we can develop tools to predict problems before they arise,” he said.

The second project will develop a framework for measuring the safety and efficiency of interactions between human team members and the automation required to sustain long-term flight.

The awards come less than two weeks after UCF became the first Florida university selected to lead a NASA project.  Physicist Richard Eastes, from the Florida Space Institute, is leading that $55 million project to develop an imaging instrument to study Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“NASA is one of our earliest research partners and we are pleased, in our 50^th anniversary year, to be granted these awards, in complimentary disciplines, which highlight the increasing breadth of our research strength,” said MJ Soileau, vice president for research & commercialization at UCF.