EDUCATION & OUTREACH

Training Tommorrow’s Injury Control Workers

The UAB ICRC is deeply committed to enhancing the awareness of injury control among health care professionals and the general public by disseminating information it continues to learn. These ongoing efforts of training and education include sponsoring interns in the UAB ICRC, hosting a variety of seminars and conferences, university courses, mentoring and fellowships. For example, soon after the ICRC was established in the late 1980s, center leadership began working with deans and interested faculty from various UAB schools to develop courses providing injury control concepts and principles for their curricula.

Philosophy

“Knowledge is power,” the familiar aphorism tells us. One of the chief goals of the UAB ICRC is to empower both health care professionals and the general public by disseminating the wealth of information that it continues to learn about injury prevention, control, and rehabilitation. These ongoing education and training efforts include individual academic courses, conferences, seminars, fellowships, and public service campaigns that utilize the talents of many in our community who are committed to supporting the
Center’s mission.

Minority Enrichment Program

Good science begins when someone asks a new question or asks an old question in a new way. It fulfills its promise when the answers to the questions are sought using rigorous scientific method. The Minority Enrichment Program at the UAB ICRC is helping to ensure that good science continues into the next generation. People with different cultures, histories and personal experiences think about the world in different ways, and when a diverse group is presented with a problem, each member often will bring a different perspective to the discussion. Different perspectives mean different questions, and a range of different questions usually leads to better science. The Minority Enrichment Program (MEP) reaches out to students in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) to encourage black scholars to bring their perspectives to the field of injury control – to ask different questions. Scholars interested in injury control research come to the ICRC and are trained or supported in conducting rigorous scientific research. Since its inception in 1990, the ICRC MEP has brought more than 32 scholars to UAB for injury control research internships. The MEP scholars are encouraged to pursue projects that focus on the special needs of the black community and investigate the sociological aspects of injury control in this traditionally underserved population. The most recent MEP scholars have worked with Dr. John Bolland, who is conducting an ICRCfunded evaluation of a violence intervention program in poor urban communities in Mobile, Alabama. Future scholars also will be teamed with ongoing projects.

Partnering with UAB's School of Public Health

In 1991 Dr. Bill King, an ICRC senior scientist, and Dr. Russ Fine began teaching the first ICRC-sponsored course in the School of Public Health, EPI 603: Injury-Epidemiologic Principles and Prevention Strategies, on an annual basis. In the mid-1990s, Dr. John Waterbor, an ICRC senior scientist and associate professor of epidemiology in UAB's School of Public Health, assumed Dr. King’s teaching responsibilities. Dr. Waterbor, Dr. Fine and Carrie Connolly continue to lead this highly popular course, enrolling larger numbers of students each year. Executive leadership of the ICRC also developed a doctoral seminar course entitled EPI 790: Special Topics in Epidemiology. The course addresses concepts and methods of intentional injury and violence prevention methods, as well as development and evaluation techniques for preventive strategies.

Partnering with UAB's School of Engineering

The UAB ICRC's affiliation with the School of Engineering has resulted in a number of courses that have been developed, revised or enhanced to expose engineering students at all levels, from undergraduate to doctoral, to injury biomechanics and other engineering issues relevant to injury prevention and control. ICRC-driven courses in UAB’s School of Engineering include BME 498, 598: Biomedical Product Development; BME 630, 730: Joint Mechanics; BME 633, 733: Biomechanics: Tissue Mechanics I; ME 631, 731: Computational Structural Mechanics I; and ME 684, 784: Advanced Visualization and Virtual Reality. In addition, multiple master’s theses and doctoral dissertations have been produced from ICRC-sponsored studies and activities. The UAB
ICRC is gratified by the success of these students and proud to have played a part in training future biomechanists in the field of injury control.