Merry Christmas from the LMU Department of Health and Human Sciences! It has been a very productive fall semester. We are beginning year number two in the Life Sciences Building. If you haven’t made it to campus since the building opened, stop by sometime, we’d love to show you our new home. We have had a couple of changes within the department over the past six months. Hawley Almstedt completed her three year assignment as the Department Chair and we all owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude and thanks for the tremendous leadership she provided over that period. The Department has moved forward in leaps and bounds these past three years and is headed in the right direction. I am very happy to be back working with this talented and dedicated group of faculty and staff. I was in the initial cohort when the Department of Natural Sciences was formed and the positive changes that have taken place over the years have been truly outstanding. I am looking forward to spending the next three years with the Department. We also brought in a new Visiting Faculty member, Michael Prevost, PhD, who is teaching our Exercise Physiology classes and labs. Mike brings 20 years of Navy experience as an Aerospace Physiologist, training Navy and Marine Corps aviators in the physiology of flight operations to the Department along with his academic background as an Exercise Physiologist.
Liam Shorrock (‘14) who served as our lab associate over the past year was accepted into the Medical School at Georgetown University and began his studies this fall. We want to thank Liam for his dedicated service during our move from North Hall to the Life Sciences Building. His dedication helped make the transition exceptionally smooth. We hired Caitlin Jennings (‘09) into that position, where she has come in and is doing great things in keeping the labs in top shape and supporting the myriad of lab classes that are taking place this fall. Most recently, Caitlin was an assistant coach with the LMU cross-country team. We are extremely pleased to have her experience with us. We were given approval to hire another tenure track position into the department and that search is currently taking place. We hope to report on a new faculty member for the department in the spring newsletter.
Our research production continues to grow. We were extremely well represented at the Southwest Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine this fall, with 10 poster presentations by our students and Todd Shoepe delivering a presentation on educational technology use in the classroom. In May, Hawley, Todd, and Bill McCormack presented two posters at the National Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine from our longitudinal study of the cross-country team. Hawley and her team continue in the data collection phase of her study examining the impact of drinking on bone mineral density in college-aged adults. The team has one more bone scan to complete early in the spring semester before they begin the data analysis phase of the investigation. Heather Tarleton and the team working the IMPAACT study continue to publish the findings from their intervention study with women cancer survivors.
We hope that everyone has a great holiday season and we hope to see you around campus soon. Please send us a note of what you have been doing since graduation; we want to share it with the other alumni from the department. Should you be interested to learn of ways to financially support the Department of Health and Human Sciences, please contact Lynn Witherspoon, Director of Development (lynn.witherspoon@lmu.edu; 310 338-7856). If you have any questions or want further information about the department, please do not hesitate to contact us at (310) 338-7885 or via email at hhsc@lmu.edu.
Jim Landry
Department Chair