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Two Weeks and Five Days

June 29, 2020 by Derek Dillon

UNO students team with UNMC, Apple Inc. to develop COVID-19 app

It starts with an email notification.

An interesting opportunity. Care to hop on a conference call to discuss?

The three University of Nebraska at Omaha students are intrigued.

On the phone, the pitch goes like this:

Would you like to build a groundbreaking mobile application with considerable value as a public health tool? It’ll involve collaborating with two teams.

The first is the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security, which is rapidly working to quell an unprecedented global health crisis and is also home to the nation’s only federal quarantine unit. The other is Apple Inc.

With the COVID-19 pandemic having recently arrived in Nebraska, spring break has come early.

No need to juggle coursework.

The students quickly agree.

Work begins immediately. Prototyping and wireframing and coding. Analysis and dialogue and refinement. Daily meetings stretch into the pre-dawn hours as each team navigates hunger — the UNMC team subsisted on takeout curry — exhaustion and multiple time zones.

As news segments turn some of their peers infamous during imprudent trips to warmer regions, Keegan Brown, Grayson Stanton and Carly Cameron spend their spring break tucked away in a design studio, maintaining 6 feet of separation and working in conjunction with experts in the fields of medicine and technology.

Less than three weeks later, 1-Check COVID was available in the Apple App Store and was downloaded more than 10,000 times in the first 10 days. The app is now also available on Google Play for Android phone users.

1-Check COVID is a risk-assessment tool that asks the user a series of questions ranging from biographical to geographical before inquiring about symptoms. All are computed in an effort to assess the likelihood of someone having contracted COVID-19. Once the questions are completed, users learn their risk levels: low, urgent or emergent. From there, they are guided toward subsequent steps, whether to continue to monitor their symptoms or contact the public health department. If users agree, they can share their risk profiles with health care professionals, employers and family members, among others.

“This will hopefully be lifesaving,” UNO and UNMC Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D., said in a news release, which names the three Scott Scholars, who are all Nebraska natives, computer science majors and underclassmen. Cameron, the oldest of the trio, was 2 years old when the SARS outbreak occurred. She doesn’t remember it.

In a time of crisis, both UNMC and Apple have bet on youth. And youth has delivered.

“What these students did is nothing short of extraordinary,” said Harnoor Singh, director of student development for the Walter Scott, Jr. Scholarship Program (Scott Scholars), which was launched in 1997, thanks to the generous support of the Suzanne & Walter Scott Foundation. The program challenges high-achieving engineering and information science and technology students to develop their technical, creative and leadership skills.

As a Ph.D. candidate at UNMC, Thang Nguyen is researching and developing decision-support tools. An innovator at heart, Nguyen had built one such tool focused on strep throat analysis “as a launching-off point,” he said.

Then came a pandemic. And an opportunity.

With an understanding of how to parse the literature, decode and translate information into a language that coders can comprehend, Nguyen pivoted to the issue at hand, using the same logic that was already built.

“A lot of what we do is identify problems as they come up and try to just solve in a rapid manner,” said Michael Wadman, M.D., chair of the UNMC Department of Emergency Medicine, “so I think that’s kind of our mindset when we approach any problem.”

A relationship between Scott Scholars and Apple Inc. formed after UNO students took part in a summerlong workshop called AppJam, which included a trip to the tech giant’s California campus. Gold reached out to Singh to see if a partnership could be struck between the three teams.

After the Scott Scholars, UNMC and Apple began working together, Nguyen said the students’ focus and attention to detail stuck out.

“When you cross from the clinical side to the technical, there’s a lot of language that gets lost,” he said. “There was none of that with this team. Those are special students in a very high-functioning program. I don’t know if you see that in too many places.”

Apple representatives helped the teams troubleshoot bugs and fast-track the app for development.

“Sometimes it takes several weeks just to get approval through the App Store,” Singh said, noting that his team needed all of two weeks and five days to bring the project to the public.

“It has the potential to save so many lives,” he said, “to not only allow folks to assess their risk, but also decrease the pressure on emergency rooms and urgent care clinics.

“Sometimes the universe brings people together. Personally, I couldn’t be more proud of our students. I don’t know how many times I heard Apple executives say, ‘This has never been done before.’

“A public health crisis like this has the ability to leverage human talent to create radically innovative solutions. We took a group of high achievers and placed them in a learning environment that emphasizes human-centered design and were very intentional with teaching them how to navigate ambiguity and how to become comfortable with failure. These are all elements that they’ve learned in the Scott Scholars program.”

The Epidemic Within the Pandemic

June 29, 2020 by Derek Dillon

UNO Professor Examines Loneliness

In 2019, researchers and the media began sounding alarm bells about a “loneliness epidemic” — a rise in people reporting feelings of isolation that could become a health crisis, leading to increases in heart disease or even shorter life spans.

And that was before COVID-19. Before the world shut itself indoors and government leaders mandated, and pleaded, for everyone to stay at least 6 feet apart.

Isolation and social distancing are terms the world is all too familiar with now.

“I have, for years, been trying to come up with ways to make people more aware,” said Todd Richardson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the University of Nebraska at Omaha Goodrich Scholarship Program who is researching loneliness. “And then this comes around and does it for me.”

What researchers like Richardson have warned of — fraying social connections and the ways people arrange their lives to perpetuate isolation — rocketed to the world’s collective consciousness as COVID-19 spread rapidly across the globe. As cities, states and countries shut down, everyone felt the pain of isolation. People kept friends and family members at bay. They missed play dates, barbecues, birthday parties and graduation ceremonies. They missed the rush and roar of live music, the shared excitement of home runs and 3-pointers. They wondered if the “sea of red” would ever wash over Memorial Stadium in quite the same way.

And everyone felt those things, together.

“It’s ironic that the experience of loneliness unites us, but I think it can in this moment,” said Richardson. “We’re all under threat from something that doesn’t discriminate between human beings. This is an extra-human threat. So we can bond as humans and realize we’re working together in order to resist this. And I think there’s something really, really beautiful in that.”

But there’s a flip side to that potential beauty. The longer people stay apart, the harder it becomes to return to one another.

“There is a period where you acknowledge the loss in your life, and you lament it, and you try and fill it in whatever way you can,” Richardson said. “But the longer you’re away from other people, the less trust you have for other people, so the harder it gets to break out and to reach out. And at that point, loneliness starts feeding in on itself. It becomes a self-perpetuating kind of cycle.”

Richardson said social interaction influences people in ways they’re not even aware of. Seeing another person express emotions, such as joy and pain, sparks a mirror response in the brain.

“The mere fact of making eye contact with them, or being in the same physical space as them, connects us to them in important ways,” he said. “It makes us acknowledge them as people, as fellow humans, as entities worthy of respect and autonomy.”

Fundamentally, Richardson said, it teaches people empathy.

“The longer we retreat from one another,” he said, “the longer we don’t share that physical space, the less empathetic we get, and the less we care about other people.”

There is also risk in social interaction, and humans are inherently risk-averse, Richardson said. People may want to avoid not just the risk of disease, but the risk of shame, embarrassment or rejection that comes with putting themselves out there in the world. The longer people stay protected, the more comfortable they may become.

“I think that when this abates, we’re going to have a lot of work ahead of us reacclimating and coming to terms with the fact that we need one another,” he said, “and that is worth the risks that we take.”

The Weight On His Shoulders

March 6, 2020 by Derek Dillon

A student’s journey through college, cancer and others’ kindness

This fall, University of Nebraska at Omaha senior Michael Brooks posed for photos with a group of students much like himself: smart, driven, hardworking.

These students are part of the College of Business Administration Scholars Academy, a community of ambitious and high-achieving students.

But, unlike other academy students, Brooks also is a member of a more exclusive group, one he joined at age 11 and is still a member of today.

In 2008, Brooks was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer — so rare, in fact, he was one of only five children in the United States with an inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor at the time.

He was in sixth grade and embarking on a tender age.

“I was just kind of hitting adolescence, when you start to care about your hair and your appearance, and I was basically a walking skeleton,” he said.

Brooks persevered through multiple rounds of chemotherapy and a clinical trial. He and his family were encouraged when the tumor, located in his shoulder, began to shrink. But after 18 months, the reduction plateaued.

Brooks dealt with the pain caused by the tumor and thrived. He went on to Creighton Preparatory High School in Omaha, where he was captain of the speech and debate team and played soccer. It’s also where his interest in business and law took hold.

During Brooks’ senior year in high school, he applied to the UNO CBA Scholars Academy, a fairly new entity at the time. He was selected as one of 20 in the academy’s second cohort, which made him eligible for a renewable annual scholarship.

“I wanted to stay local for college, especially for my undergraduate work,” he said. “Financially, my family wasn’t in the best place, so the fact that I was offered a scholarship and could be part of this program made the decision easy.”

Brooks likes the sense of community that the academy offers and how hard the program pushes him.

“What’s really nice is they make the classes harder, and they expect us to be at that level,” he said. “They want to set us up to succeed later on.”

Brooks made the most of his opportunities the first two years. He interned at a long-term investment firm and worked as Creighton Prep’s speech and debate coach while taking a full load of classes. But his path took a sharp turn just before his junior year.

In the summer of 2018, Brooks went in for an annual scan of his tumor. The doctor found that the tumor, which hadn’t grown in three years, had almost doubled in size, spreading into his back.

“I had noticed more pain, but it’s one of those things where it’s affected me for so much of my life, I didn’t think much about it,” he said.

Brooks underwent a sectional biopsy to remove part of the tumor, but it quickly grew back. He started chemotherapy, again.

While he was able to maintain a full class load, he had to quit his job. “Once I restarted chemotherapy,” Brooks said, “it was a whole different beast for me to manage both a job and school.”

But the reality of losing the income he earned concerned him. His mother had just lost her job, his insurance didn’t cover all of his medical expenses, and he had to maintain a strong GPA to keep his scholarship.

Brooks reluctantly reached out to the academy’s director, Bethany Hughes, for assistance.

“I’m not one who likes asking for help,” he said.

Hughes was able to find financial assistance, thanks to the generosity of donors, who had established a scholarship fund at the University of Nebraska Foundation to help CBA students at UNO facing unexpected circumstances.

“No one, when dreaming of going to college to be a lawyer or an accountant or a CEO, thinks, ‘Man, in college I’m going to have this really unexpected turn of events that’s going to impact my pursuit of a dream,’” Bethany said.

“These scholarships are helping students who would otherwise not be able to get an education because they’re facing scenarios that they couldn’t have planned for.”

Brooks remains grateful for the support.

“When I was going through chemotherapy and also trying to maintain a good GPA (he earned a 3.75 that semester), it was a weight off of my shoulders knowing that because I couldn’t work that semester, I wasn’t going to lose everything,” Brooks said.

“I want to express my gratitude to these donors, but I’m also going to prove that I deserved it,” he said. “Success is how you can ultimately show your gratitude.”

Brooks is now focused on graduation and applying to law schools. His sights are set on a career in litigation, ideally in Nebraska.

“Right now, I’m fine,” he said. “I’m healthy. I’m taking 18 credit hours and working 60 hours a week to make sure I have saved up money in case this happens again.”

But, as Brooks has done since sixth grade, he’s not dwelling on his medical challenges. Instead, he’s looking to his future, which appears to be bright.

UNO’s CodeCrush program for young women will enhance and expand with additional support

October 23, 2019 by Derek Dillon

Encouraging more young women to pursue STEM education, careers the focus of private giving need

The Peter Kiewit Foundation has awarded a challenge grant of $225,000 to the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) College of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) for its CodeCrush program, a series of events designed to introduce 8th- and 9th-graders to iSTEM, an integrated approach to studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The funds, which are committed to the University of Nebraska Foundation, will specifically be used to help continue the program’s biannual immersion experiences and the annual Summer Summit for CodeCrush alumnae, teachers, mentors and other stakeholders. As part of this matching grant challenge, the University of Nebraska Foundation will work closely with UNO to secure an additional $225,000 in contributions over the next three years.

“The college’s programs are bigger, and more diverse, than ever before. We know this positive shift is thanks to efforts like CodeCrush,” Deepak Khazanchi, Ph.D., associate dean at the College of Information Science & Technology said. “Today, more and more students know that they have a place in information technology thanks to the continued support from the Peter Kiewit Foundation. As we look forward to the next chapter of CodeCrush, we hope to help eliminate the gender gap for good.”

CodeCrush is part of the college’s Women in IT Initiative, a community task force of IT leaders dedicated to finding actionable solutions to close the gender gap and meet the local and national workforce deficit in IT.

“We’re honored to offer our continued support to the College of Information Science & Technology and its efforts to make the tech workforce a more inclusive and diverse space,” Wendy Boyer, director of programs at the Peter Kiewit Foundation said. “This is an urgent call to the Omaha metro to support programs like CodeCrush, and together we can help inspire a diverse student population to pursue IT and help address the critical talent shortage our community is fighting.”

This fall’s CodeCrush will be held October 23–25, with the summer CodeCrush summit and spring CodeCrush immersion experience dates to be announced soon. For more information or to contribute to the program and help meet its fundraising challenge, see codecrush.unomaha.edu.

CodeCrush combats the challenges and negative perceptions that may keep girls from pursuing IT education and careers. The immersion experience takes place over three days and three nights. Participating students take part in half-day educational workshops illustrating the diversity of IT with exposure to areas such as bioinformatics, cybersecurity, mobile application design and IT innovation.

Afternoon and evening sessions show IT in action through experiences such as tours of local Fortune 500 headquarters and an Omaha start-up company crawl, illustrating the vibrant community that is being nurtured and grown in Omaha. CodeCrush students also hear panel discussions and keynote speeches from leaders, current students, UNO alumni and many others who are mentors and role models in this domain.

Additionally, a major component of CodeCrush requires students to bring along a teacher-mentor who attends parallel workshops on how to infuse IT concepts into their current curricula and champion such skills and content in their schools.

During the summer, CodeCrush hosts an annual Summer Summit, which brings together all past CodeCrush participants, students who may not have been able to attend the immersion experience and the IT community. The day-and-a-half conference celebrates diversity in IT and helps introduce the audience to even more role models with varying tracks centered on leadership, technology and inclusive spaces.

CodeCrush has made significant strides in helping bring more awareness of IT careers into classrooms:

Nearly 300 students and teachers have participated in the CodeCrush immersion experiences.
More than 200 attendees have registered for the CodeCrush Summer Summit.
90% of attendees said CodeCrush showed them that they could consider computing as a career.
90% of attendees said they intended to take further computer technology classes.
Nearly 90% of participating teachers said they will incorporate more computer science ideas in their classrooms.
25% of CodeCrush students from 2014-2016 have reported going into an iSTEM program at a four-year university.
36% of students from 2014-2016 have enrolled at a University of Nebraska campus.
40% of students reported that they are from rural communities.
20% of students reported being in free- and reduced-price lunch programs.
30% of students are underrepresented minorities.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs in computing and IT are expected to grow 13% from 2016 to 2026, faster than the average of all other occupations. The bureau reports the median annual wage for IT positions was nearly $90,000, compared to $40,000 for all occupations. Despite this expected growth, the number of available, qualified IT professionals is low, and women comprise just 26% of all computing-related occupations in the United States. According to Girls Who Code, the largest drop in participation of girls in computer science happens between the ages of 13 and 17.

For information about the Women in IT Initiative, or how to support it, contact Amanda Rucker, communications specialist for the College of Information Science & Technology, at 402-554-2070 or visit codecrush.unomaha.edu.

Dreams, Failures and Breakthroughs

October 9, 2019 by Derek Dillon

UNO students make advances in cancer research, discover their career passions along the way.

Jacob Robinson’s dream of being a major league pitcher didn’t pan out. Something better did: He teamed up with fellow University of Nebraska at Omaha biology graduate student Nik Stevenson and together, this past year, made a breakthrough in cancer research — one that could make a major impact in the lives of people around the world who are fighting a rare type of lymphoma. And along the way, the two say, they discovered passions that could make a major impact in their own lives and careers.

They credit the supportive culture at UNO.

“You can fail 10, 20, 100 times, and the faculty here will help you succeed. It’s an environment where you feel confident that even if you fail, you’re ultimately going to succeed, and that’s pretty important to help you flourish,” Stevenson says.

The cancer they’re studying is called splenic marginal zone lymphoma, or SMZL. It’s a type of white blood cell cancer that hasn’t been studied a lot because it’s so rare. SMZL cases have an overall survival prognosis after diagnosis of eight to 11 years, so it’s a rather slow-progressing cancer.

“People here, especially the science faculty, are so willing to help students that I really felt like my education here was great. Because I was willing to put in the effort, people were always willing to provide opportunities for me to go as far as I wanted to go."

Jacob Robinson

But anywhere from 10% to 15% of those cases progress to a much more aggressive form in which the overall survival prognosis drops to three to five years. Their research has shown promise in predicting how aggressive a person’s cancer will be based on specific genetic markers, a breakthrough that could lead to a way to more easily diagnose this cancer.

Stevenson did the “wet bench” side of their research — the hands-on work with the cancer cells themselves. Robinson did the big-data side, studying the genetic profiles of patients with SMZL and looking for patterns for this specific blood cancer vs. other similar lymphomas.

“It’s not a terribly lethal (cancer), unless it transforms,” Robinson says. “What my research did is, I found a grouping of markers that is pretty highly predictive for the basis of diagnosis for this SMZL patient.

“Instead of having to go through a bunch of different tests, ideally you would be able to just have this panel of genetic markers from a biopsy, and you’d say yes or no, this is the lymphoma that they’re afflicted with.”

If patients have the slow-growing type, they wouldn’t have their lives disrupted as much with frequent biopsies, along with the waiting around for results, which can be scary. It also would provide more accurate diagnosis and information on the outcome of the disease’s progression.

“It would allow them to pretty much have a better quality of life for the time being,” Stevenson says

The two conducted their research in Allwine Hall in the lab of Christine Cutucache, Ph.D., a rock star professor who holds the Dr. George Haddix Community Chair in Science at UNO. They call her “Dr. C.”

Dr. C, they say, gave amazing guidance and support (and coffee and doughnuts and a box overflowing with healthy snacks, which sits in the corner of the lab’s small conference room).

She served as the liaison between them and physicians and other medical professionals at the University of Nebraska Medical Center as they tried to determine the real-world usefulness of their research.

“It’s been sort of the perfect mix to have UNO as a home base but still be able to access a world-renowned med center right down the street,” Robinson says.

UNO, they say, helped them make major breakthroughs in their own lives, too.

Back in high school at Omaha North, Robinson says, he was mainly just interested in baseball, not school work. He struggled in chemistry. His dad connected him with a friend who was a retired UNO chemistry professor, James Wood, who became his tutor.

“He basically showed me how cool chemistry could be,” Robinson says.

That ignited his love for learning. (It also helped, Robinson says, smiling, that he fell in love with a great student his senior year — a young woman who is now his wife.)

At a UNO chemistry department awards night a few years back, Dr. Wood was given an envelope with a name inside. He was asked to open it and announce the chemistry student who’d be named the latest recipient of the James K. and Kathleen Wood Scholarship.

Dr. Wood didn’t know who it’d be.

It was Robinson, then a UNO junior.

Stevenson’s original dream for his career – to be a brain surgeon — also didn’t pan out.

He was a military brat, he says, born in Germany. He lived in Texas and South Dakota. He was only 8 years old and his family was living in Papillion, Nebraska, when his young mother was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer.

“It was everywhere when they first saw it,” he says. “It just socks you in the gut when you find out something like that.”

The cancer eventually spread to her brain, and she had brain surgery. Stevenson spent a lot of time in the hospital with her until she died when he was 12. He’d wanted to go to medical school, he says, but not getting in his first try made him reflect on that path, and he realized it wasn’t actually his main interest or career aim.

“That was a blessing in disguise because, through a little reflection, I realized I didn’t want to do that,” Stevenson says.

He met with Dr. C a year before applying to UNO and came to the university for his master’s degree because of the opportunity to join her lab.

Dr. C also runs a community outreach program called NE STEM 4U in which UNO students work to inspire middle school students in the community to consider careers in STEM fields down the road. (STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.)

Stevenson loves to coach soccer, too.

“Developing them as people, not just as athletes but just as people who can contribute to society, is a big thing I enjoy,” he says.

Dr. C noticed Stevenson’s strengths as a mentor and connected him to NE STEM 4U. He loved it.

He was its graduate adviser this past year and recently accepted a full-time job at UNO, where he will be doing science education research, continuing his role in the NE STEM 4U program and leading professional development opportunities for undergraduates and others.

“Developing people to excel in science so that one day they may pave the way for great development in the cancer research realm or in a plethora of other STEM fields,” Stevenson says, “is really my passion and my goal.”

He hopes to keep coaching soccer on the side.

This August, Robinson will start pharmacy school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Stevenson thinks he’ll stay in Nebraska.

“My fiancée is a farm girl from southeast Nebraska,” he says, “so I think we’re going to end up calling somewhere around Nebraska home.”

Stevenson smiles.

“Nebraska is pretty good.”

Quality of care is focus of new Nebraska Medicine, UNO collaboration

August 21, 2019 by Derek Dillon

University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) students who take advantage of on-campus health services this new academic year will benefit from streamlined access to the most comprehensive health network in the region.

Nebraska Medicine has assumed management of UNO Health Services in a new collaboration aimed at long-term enhancement of the quality of care available to UNO’s campus community. Nebraska Medicine is the primary clinical teaching partner for the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), which allows patients to benefit from one of the nation’s leaders in cutting-edge research and education. Nebraska Medicine also operates the University Health Center on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus.

“The time is right to make this exciting change,” says UNMC and UNO Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, MD. “The leaders at UNO, UNMC and Nebraska Medicine are dedicated to not only providing the best educational experience for students, but offering the highest-level quality of patient care.”

Nebraska Medicine – UNO Health Center remains in UNO’s Health and Kinesiology building and will continue its business hours of 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.

Apart from the new name, clinic staff says the most noticeable change will be the integration of an electronic patient health record system, which will allow patients to easily view medical records and request appointments. Patients will also experience increased ease of referral through the Nebraska Medicine health network.

“With more than 1,000 physicians, two hospitals and 40 specialty and primary clinics, we’re honored to bring the Nebraska Medicine-brand promise of ‘Serious Medicine. Extraordinary Care.’ to the UNO campus,” says Jill Lynch-Sosa, director of Student Health Operations. “Students and staff can have peace of mind, knowing we’re here to connect them with the services they need.”

Cathy Pettid, UNO assistant vice chancellor for student success and dean of students, says the change contributes to UNO’s ongoing efforts to support student wellness.

“We are fortunate to have access to the team at Nebraska Medicine, who not only bring tremendous expertise, but also an appreciation for higher education and a deep understanding of the specific needs of a campus environment,” Pettid says. “Our students’ health and well-being are very important to us and our students could not be in better hands.”

UNO’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) was not included in the Nebraska Medicine – UNO Health Services transition, and will remain a UNO-operated campus service.

This story was provided to the foundation courtesy of Nebraska Medicine.

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