Yaowaree “Noona” Leavell

• 2008-09 – Danielle Barnes was Region 4 coordinator.
• 2009-10 – Tiffany Williams was Region 4 coordinator; Barnes was national advocacy co-chair; Lauren Engelmann was national undergraduate liaison; and Stacia Kutter-Groll and Amanda Rose were national recruitment co-chairs.
• 2010-11 – Michelle Miller was national undergraduate liaison; Sarah Mike was national advocacy chair; and Kutter-Groll and Rose were national recruitment co-chairs.
• 2011-12 – Winn was national recruitment chair, and Barnes was national president of the Resident Division.
• 2012-13 – Winn is national recruitment chair.

Brett Thomas (Class of 2014, Tallahassee campus, pictured at left) received an Academic Leadership Award during the 2013 Leadership Awards Night, sponsored by the university’s Division of Student Affairs. The April 2 program recognized students, faculty, staff and organizations that epitomize the definition of leadership.
 
Austin Henkel (Class of 2013, Tallahassee campus) was one of only two Florida medical students to receive a Chairman’s Recognition Award for “exemplifying professionalism, moral character, compassion and intellect essential to the future leaders of our medical profession.” The certificate was signed by Dr. Zachariah P. Zachariah, chairman of the Florida Board of Medicine.

Chirley Rodriguez (Class of 2014, Daytona Beach campus) has been selected for a Denver Health externship called Clinical Emergency Medicine & Research for the Underserved. Participants in the four-week externship will rotate through 10 clinical shifts and take part in a small scholarly project involving research for the medically underserved.

Camilo Fernandez-Salvador and Annie Chau (both Class of 2014, Orlando campus) recently accepted Orlando’s invitation to turn traffic signal boxes into works of public art. Following a suggestion from Student Support Coordinator Rodger Wunderlich to create a design complementing the College of Medicine’s mission, the students painted a box outside the Orlando campus in March. It’s part of a project headed by the Mills 50 District and the city to help highlight the creativity and cultural diversity of downtown Orlando.

Monica Chatwal (Class of 2013, Daytona Beach campus) had one of her illustrations accepted as cover art for the March 2013 issue of Academic Medicine. In her artist’s statement she wrote, in part: “It is my passion for art that has inspired and shaped my passion for medicine. It has given me the balance that is required to succeed in this field—between knowledge of science and an appreciation for nature—and has ultimately given me a greater understanding of humanity. Medicine transcends art, providing me with the physical interaction and emotional bond I crave.”

Kush Bhorania (Fort Pierce campus) and Sanam Zahedi (Daytona Beach campus, both Class of 2014) won awards in March at the conference of the Florida Chapter of the American College of Physicians, the leading professional organization for internal medicine. They were honored for their medical student poster presentations. Bhorania won second place in the clinical vignette poster competition for “Management of Gastric Variceal Bleed with Balloon-Occluded Retrograde Transvenous Obliteration (BRTO) Via Spontaneously Formed Splenorenal Shunt: A Case Report.” Zahedi won first place in the research poster competition for “The Incidence of Malignant and Premalignant Cutaneous Lesions Undetected by Patients Prior to Undergoing Total Body Skin Examination (TBSE) at a North Florida Dermatology Clinic.”

Sarah Weaver (Class of 2013, Orlando campus) traveled to Washington, D.C., for the American Medical Association’s National Advocacy Day. The purpose was for medical students to meet with members of Congress to discuss the future of the nation’s health care.

Co-captains Laura McLaughlin and An Lawrence, along with Zachary Zimmerman and Cesar Garcia-Canet (all Class of 2015), formed a Relay for Life team that raised approximately $2,000 for the American Cancer Society. The “Keep Calm and Fight On” shirts (suggested donation of $10) were created by Zimmerman’s father. The teammates also had a volunteer from the National Bone Marrow Registry registering potential donors. And they raffled off goods and services contributed by Aveda Spa and Salon, Gordo’s Cuban Restaurant, Tijuana Flats, Italian Dinner, Panera, Doggie Dayz and Good Friends Fitness.

These are the newly elected officers for the Class of 2015’s third and fourth years:

• Aaron Hayson, president.
• Nicole Dillow, secretary.
• An Lawrence, treasurer.
• JD Hales, vice president-Daytona Beach campus.
• Cesar Garcia-Canet, vice president-Fort Pierce campus.
• Jonny Salud, vice president-Orlando campus.
• John Hahn, vice president-Pensacola campus.
• Tony Brar, vice president-Sarasota campus.
• Sarah-Ashley Robbins, vice president-Tallahassee campus.
• Kathleen Burns, vice president-rural sites.

And here are the newly elected officers for the Class of 2016’s second year:

• Alex Chavarriaga, president.
• Max Olivier, vice president.
• Heather Domark, secretary.
• Josh Dault, treasurer.
• Matthew Harnach, social chair.
• Melissa Geary and Gesnyr Ocean, community outreach chairs.
• Amy Joy Thompson, historian chair.
• Loren Farley and Shea Aupont, hospitality chairs.
• Megan Walley and Paige DePriest, gala chairs.
• Ryan Fitzgerald and Nima Rezale, intramural chairs.
• Josh Burns, IT/Library Committee representative.

GRADUATE STUDENTS AND POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS
Biomedical Sciences doctoral student Elise Cope (pictured at left) received a Mars Inc. Predoctoral Fellowship for 2013 from the American Society for Nutrition. She will receive a nonrenewable award of $5,000 to recognize the excellence of her proposed project, “Use of Dietary Zinc to Enhance Neurogenesis after Brain Injury.”

Liam Longo, an FSU graduate student who works in the Blaber Lab (pictured below), will attend the 2013 Protein Society annual symposium in Boston. According to Protein Society President Lynne Regan: “This year, we started a new initiative, where 2 papers are chosen from all those published in Protein Science the previous year, and we invite the first author (with the intention that this is the student or postdoc who did the work) to give a short oral presentation ... at the Annual Protein Society Symposium.” One of the papers chosen was “Experimental support for the foldability-function tradeoff hypothesis: Segregation of the folding nucleus and functional regions in fibroblast growth factor-1,” which Longo wrote along with former postdoc Jihun Lee and Professor Michael Blaber. It was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Longo also received the Michael Kasha Student Publication Award at Florida State's Institute of Molecular Biophysics structural biology seminar in April. He was co-author of “Simplified Protein Design Biased for Pre-Biotic Amino Acids Yields a Foldable, Halophilic Protein.”

Postdoc Milica Vukmirovic received a travel award from the National Postdoctoral Association to attend its annual meeting March 15-17 in Charleston. Biomedical Sciences Chair Richard Nowakowski and the College of Medicine provided matching funds.