The Nashville Business Journal has named Dr. Phil Johnston, dean of Belmont’s College of Pharmacy, as a “Health Care Hero.” Winners were selected for their contributions to Music City’s health community by a panel of industry judges. Johnston was recognized in the “Health Care Professional Services” category along with other local leaders, including Anne Sumpter Arney of Bone McAllister Norton PLLC, Vicki Estrin of C3/Consulting, Berry Holt of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, Rosemary Plorin of Lovell Communications, Jerry Taylor of Stites & Harbison PLLC and Tommy Yeager of M.J. Harris Construction Services. The honorees will be recognized at an awards luncheon on June 6 at Loews Vanderbilt Hotel and in a special publication in the June 6 print edition of the Nashville Business Journal. The luncheon celebrates “the accomplishments of the leaders, innovators, strategists and caretakers, whose work is helping to grow the region’s health care industry and reinforcing Nashville as the health care capital of the nation.”
Pharmacy Dean Recognized Locally as ‘Health Care Hero’
Fogelberg Visits RAND Corp. for Symposium
Harold Fogelberg, director for the Edward C. Kennedy Center for Business Ethics, was among 22 people from across the country invited by the RAND Corp. to participate in a symposium entitled Transforming Ethics and Compliance: Emerging Trends for Boards, Management and Government on May 28. The Washington, D.C. think tank is known for policy development on many issues. The deliberations by representatives from government agencies, academia, Fortune 200 company executives and general counsel will be published later this summer.
Tennessee Physical Therapy Association Recognizes Hinton
Dr. Cathy Hinton, professor of physical therapy, recently received the 2014 Carol Likens Award presented by the Tennessee Physical Therapy Association (TPTA). The award is given annually to an association member who has provided exceptional service to the profession of physical therapy. Hinton served two terms as president of TPTA and currently serves the state chapter as the state license board liaison. The Likens award is named for its first recipient who served the chapter as president from 1985 to 1995 and whose vision, leadership and commitment to the profession brought the association through one of its greatest periods of growth and service to members.
Nashville Opera Makes First Recording at Belmont University’s Ocean Way Nashville
Nashville Opera and Ocean Way Nashville have recorded Michael Nyman’s “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” at Belmont University’s state-of-the-art Music Row studio facility. The project will be the first recording of a Nashville Opera production for commercial distribution, which will be available this fall.
Since its purchase by Belmont University in 2001, Ocean Way Nashville has become a leader in the music production industry, both locally and globally. The recording studio regularly hosts sessions for artists including Bob Seger, Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton and Steve Martin, among others. Additionally, Ocean Way has recorded scores for films and major video games. Operated as a commercial facility, an academic resource and a community partner, Belmont has offered Ocean Way to many organizations within the Nashville community over the years.
“This partnership reflects Belmont’s ongoing effort to be Nashville’s University and to share its resources with the nonprofit community. As Ocean Way Nashville continues to offer recording opportunities to artists on Music Row and educational development opportunities to Belmont students, we are thrilled to carry on a tradition of community partnerships by offering complimentary use of the studio for Nashville Opera’s first opera recording of its recent piece, ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat,’” said Ocean Way Director Pat McMakin, who served as associate producer for the recording.
The three-day project included the original cast members from Nashville Opera’s critically-acclaimed 2013 production with soprano Rebecca Sjöwall as Mrs. P, bass Matthew Treviño as Dr. P and tenor Ryan MacPherson as Dr. S. The opera’s General and Artistic Director John Hoomes and Chief Operating Officer Noah Spiegel worked as co-producers. Maestro Dean Williamson led the seven-piece orchestra as he did during the original production.
Nashville Opera, Tennessee’s largest professional opera company, is dedicated to creating legendary productions and programs. Among the most successful regional companies in the United States of America, Nashville Opera has presented three different world premiere operas since its inception in 1981. Main stage performances are presented at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and the Noah Liff Opera Center, playing to over 13,000 people annually. Nashville Opera’s extensive education and outreach touring program reaches over 23,000 students throughout Middle Tennessee. These projects are supported by grants from the Metro Nashville Arts Commission, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Judy and Noah Liff Foundation, the Nashville Opera Guild and many other corporate and individual supporters.
Gill Interview Posted on HigherEdJobs.com
Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness Paula Gill was recently interviewed by HigherEdJobs.com about her position and the overall nature of institutional effectiveness, particularly for higher education. Gill noted, “Higher education institutions are becoming increasingly intentional about institutional effectiveness efforts to help their organizations meet the needs of the students, the needs of future employers, and the needs of their city, their state, and the world. Institutional effectiveness is about building quality in all that we do.” Click here to read the complete interview.
Students Complete Maymester Mission Work in Haiti
Nine student athletes traveled to Haiti on a week-long mission trip this month. In Grand Goâve, a city in southwestern Haiti just 40 miles west of Port Au Prince, the students hosted basketball and soccer clinics with Haitian teenagers ages 13 through 18 as a way to share the Gospel with them.
“It’s a great opportunity to be able to primarily share our faith with kids in the community and share with them a good time through sports,” said men’s basketball Assistant Coach Mark Price, who led the mission trip.
Their trip was part of the three-decade sports evangelism mission trip program started by retired Senior Woman Administrator Betty Wiseman, which has taken Bruins to Italy, Malta, Ukraine, Venezuela, Brazil and South Africa.
“And it has continued to be a blessing for everybody involved,” Price said. “It enriches lives any time you take a gift that God has given you and share it with anybody else. Oftentimes, you are the one that benefits as much as the person you are sharing with.”
Men’s basketball players Reece Chamberlain, J.J. Mann, Jeff Laidig and Spencer Turner, women’s basketball players Katie Carroll and Torie Vaught, women’s soccer players Amy Jo Anderson and Meredith Martin and men’s soccer player Charlie Dankert participated in the trip.
“After an hour of four different stations, we provided them with snacks and juice, and one member of our team gives their testimony of how they came to know Christ,” the students wrote in a blog post. “With the help of the translators, we are able to break the barrier between the Creole and English languages and talk about the commonality of the relationship with Jesus. As a team, we have asked the Lord why he brought us here to Haiti. But we feel that God has called us here to foster relationships and plug into the lives of the Haitian people.”
Twenty-three Belmont students and Assistant Professor Martha Minardi also are in Haiti through the end of the month for the Maymester 2014 Global Health program with LiveBeyond, a nonprofit organization headquartered on Belmont’s campus. The Maymester experience combines classroom experiences with mission work at the LiveBeyond facility in Thomazeau, Haiti. Belmont students are assisting patients in outpatient medical and maternity clinics, playing games with the residents of Children of Hope Orphanage and Hospice and providing nutritional support to residents of the Thomazeau community.
Through a partnership between the University and LiveBeyond, Belmont students and faculty are able to provide medical and educational resources as well as business development to the ailing Caribbean country. Students are scheduled to return to LiveBeyond’s 64-acre Haitian base for the next three semesters.
Musical Theatre Students Workshop Broadway-Bound Production
Musical theatre faculty and students partnered this week with a creative team from New York City to conduct a fully staged, fully choreographed workshop of a new Broadway-bound musical called “Chasing Rainbows.”
“Chasing Rainbows” celebrates the early years of Judy Garland culminating in her being cast in “The Wizard of Oz.” The workshop process is when a show’s producers test out and tweak how a show is booked, scored, choreographed and cast, prior to an attempt at a Broadway run.
Musical Theatre Program Coordinator Nancy Allen said, “Belmont is very excited to have been invited to do this because usually producers use only New York equity actors or top tier musical theater programs. This will hopefully be the first of many such collaborations.”
A staged reading of the show was held May 22 at the end of the 10-day workshop in the campus’ Troutt Theater.
Online Tagboard Captures Belmont ‘From Here to Anywhere’
This summer Belmont’s Social Media Administration Team (SMAT), in collaboration with intern coordinators across campus and the Office of Study Abroad, created an online tagboard to capture images of Belmont students and employees exploring sites around the world.
Using the hashtag #belmont2anywhere, individuals can post photos or videos via Instagram, Facebook, Vine and Twitter, and the images are automatically loaded onto a curated page: https://tagboard.com/belmont2anywhere. In the past week alone, more than 100 photos have been added from sites as far-ranging as South Africa, Poland, Hawaii, Haiti, Brazil, Czech Republic, Turkey, Greece, Israel and Washington, D.C.
Social Media & Digital Marketing Specialist Lougan Bishop, who chairs the SMAT, said, “For years Belmont’s tagline has been ‘From Here to Anywhere,’ and our students and alumni definitely live up to that challenge. With social media, we can really see the impact of that statement as our students share their amazing experiences through internships, mission trips and study abroad. It’s only May. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the summer has in store.”
Read more about Belmont’s Maymester Study Abroad programs here.
Maymester Course Teaches ‘Better Eating Through Chemistry’
C2H4. That’s the chemical formula for ethylene, a colorless, odorless gas that’s released as fruit ripens, and it’s also what music business major Mimi Ijir learned this week can break down starches in the food she consumes.
Ijir is among the 22 students taking an undergraduate Maymester course being offered on campus this year for the third time, a Junior Cornerstone Seminar taught by chemistry Professor Dr. Kim Daus. The seminar, titled “Better Eating through Chemistry: Using Chemistry to Improve Local Cuisine,” manages to accomplish two noteworthy feats: getting non-science majors excited about organic chemistry while also encouraging better eating habits in college students.
The four-credit hour course, which meets from 9 a.m. to 1:50 p.m. five days a week for three weeks, includes lectures, readings, problem solving assignments, research, field trips, lab experimentation and intensive group work and assessment. Though the work load and time commitment is not for the faint-hearted, the class appeared thoroughly engaged in the course material.
Ijir said, “It’s definitely made me a smarter cook. It’s been fascinating to see the connections behind the food and realize not just that bread is bad for me but learn why it’s bad from a chemistry standpoint.”
The class begins each morning with an overview of basic chemistry principles involved in food and cooking, including covalent bonds, pH, solubility, states of matter, physical and chemical properties, and intermolecular attractive forces. A lab experiment generally follows, with Tuesday’s research asking students to hypothesize which type of flour contained the most gluten and then to test their theories through water rinses that distinguished gluten from starch.
Daus said, “One of the major challenges associated with eating healthier within cuisines is how to make food we love taste good and still remain true to our traditions and cultures. In order to make changes we need to understand the nature of our food, how preparation alters it and how to work within recipes. In other words, we need to understand the chemistry behind food and cooking.”
Each week students receive a challenge that sets up their research and collaboration for the following days. For example, students ate lunch locally at La Hacienda and Mas Tacos Por Favor on consecutive days, and then were challenged to research and prepare a healthy, vegetarian Hispanic meal as one of their group projects. The meal would need to not only provide natural alternatives to the typically higher-fat fare found in many Mexican restaurants, but it would also need to maintain good protein counts without using meat.
“We’re cooking the same meals,” said public relations major Megan McBride, “but we’re making them better and healthier. You still have the integrity of the original dish.”
In addition to presenting their plates to the class, each group must also explain the rationales for the recipes they created before all the participants get to dive in and test their research through a class meal. Other field trips for the course include visits to Noble Dairy Farm, Delvin Farm and the Nashville Farmer’s Market, where students take tours and discover more about the nutrient value of various foods.
McBride noted she took this Maymester course because “I needed both a lab and a Junior Cornerstone for my gen ed requirements. I’m not very skilled with sciences but incorporating it this way with food helps me understand and apply it better. In this class we get to see how the chemistry is reflected in the food, and it all just clicks. It makes chemistry practical.”
Click here to view more photos from the “Better Eating Through Chemistry” class.
Tour Course Prepares Student for Road with Kings of Leon
Alumna Samantha Pauly (’13) is working as a production assistant on the international 2014 Kings of Leon Mechanical Bull tour. While a student at Belmont, she interned with MTV News, Q Prime, Soundland, Vector Management and worked on the Happy Together Tour. Pauly said she enjoys learning something new daily, visiting different cities and studying under people she admires in the music industry.
“My time at Belmont shaped me into the person I am and prepared me to pursue a career in touring,” she said. “Belmont taught me many things about entertainment and how to work in the music industry, but the most important lesson of them all was one that was highlighted to me first on the Happy Together Tour and now again on the road as a graduate: the good things in life come from the relationships that you build and maintain with others.”
