Every day College of Health Professions students, alumni, faculty and staff do extraordinary things. Read more about our latest achievements below.
When Waganesh “Waggy” Zeleke, Ph.D., returned to her native Ethiopia as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar, she brought her personal history, native language and a deep commitment to healing trauma through culturally responsive care.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) researcher and survivor Kelli Talley, Ph.D., recently joined national experts and advocates at the U.S. Capitol to help shape the conversation on brain injury recovery and research.
Fully outfitted in scrubs, Joe Wilkins walks into the Bon Secours St. Francis Medical Center and heads to the rehab unit. Long before he became the hospital’s president, Wilkins was a physical therapist – and that part of him shows up every first Friday of the month.
At the intersection of clinical practice, scientific discovery and international collaboration, VCU physical therapy researcher Mike Kiefer, DPT, Ph.D., is helping rewrite the future for patients with rare and progressive muscle disorders.
On any given weekday afternoon, you’ll likely find Colin Thibodeau, M.S., carefully pipetting reagents, arranging lab benches or chatting with a group of Medical Laboratory Sciences students gearing up for their next hands-on experiment. Just a few years ago, Thibodeau was a student himself – navigating lab protocols, mastering microbiology techniques and in many ways trying to figure out what was next.
Through TRiO programs including the McNair Scholars, he looks forward to graduate studies and a career focused on the people and processes of health care.
As part of the exit experience when retiring from the U.S. Army after 21 years, Joe McCampbell took an assessment that recommended future careers for him to consider. One of them – radiation sciences – was spot on the money.
Identifying why a patient is suffering from meningitis must be fast – and a new test pioneered by a team at VCU’s Medical Laboratory Sciences promises a breakthrough in pinpointing when a brain-invading amoeba is the cause. Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), an extremely rare but often-fatal infection, has been difficult for medical professionals to identify.
For uninsured patients who have nowhere to turn, the CARES Clinic offers something rare: a chance for a better quality of life.
A new summer program aims to build the next generation of lab specialists by giving students a front-row seat to a critical and often overlooked area of health care: Transfusion medicine.
Have a story about the College of Health Professions in action that you'd like to share? Contact us at mgburkett@vcu.edu or (804) 828-7247.