SAN ANTONIO (May 1, 2013) — Charleen M. Moore, Ph.D., FACMG, a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the School of Medicine at the UT Health Science Center San Antonio, today was announced as a 2013 Piper Professor by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation. She will receive a $5,000 honorarium, certificate and gold pin, to be presented at the foundation’s request by William L. Henrich, M.D., MACP, president of the UT Health Science Center.
Only 10 faculty members statewide from institutions of higher learning are honored annually as Piper Professors. Dr. Moore is the 13th Health Science Center professor to receive this award.
Dr. Moore joined the former anatomy department, now the Department of Cellular and Structural Biology, on July 1, 1982, transferring from the UT Health Science Center Houston where she had been employed since 1973. She has taught generations of medical, graduate and health professions students about medical genetics and structures of the human body, both healthy and diseased. In doing so, she has impacted health care and research in uncountable ways.
In 2010, The University of Texas System bestowed upon Dr. Moore the honorific designation Distinguished Teaching Professor. The following year, she was inducted into the UT System Academy of Health Science Education.
Dr. Moore received her Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1971 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in human cytogenetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1973. After joining the Health Science Center, Dr. Moore directed the former cytogenetics laboratory jointly operated by the cellular and structural biology and obstetrics and gynecology departments while Drs. Barbara Bowman and Carl Pauerstein were the respective chairs.
Her role in educating students broadened over time, said Chris Walter, Ph.D., a Moore protégé who is professor and chairman of the Department of Cellular and Structural Biology.
“One of her most distinguished accomplishments was her ability to reinvent herself from a human geneticist boarded by the American Board of Medical Genetics (ABMG) into one of our best anatomy instructors,” Dr. Walter said. “I am proud to say that I trained in human cytogenetics and was boarded by the ABMG with Dr. Moore as my mentor.”
Preparing the next generation of clinicians has been a true passion for this new Piper Professor, who is never content with the status quo in courses but seeks innovative ways to impart genetic and anatomic principles.
“She developed a medical genetics course for fourth-year medical students that utilized team-based learning in the ’90s, long before it became as popular as it is today,” Dr. Walter said. “More recently as an anatomist, she has developed a course on the history of anatomy as a discipline and has taken medical students to Italy to see many of the original drawings from studies on human anatomy. She publishes her innovative educational activities in peer-reviewed journals.”
Dr. Moore, a founding fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics (FACMG), recently was honored for 40 years of service in The University of Texas System. She said: “I am still teaching after 40 years because of my opportunities to introduce students to the wonders of the human body, the human genome and the history of medicine. My students are my inspiration; interacting with them in and out of the classroom and anatomy lab is one of my greatest joys. The ability to teach from the bodies of our generous body donors and from the rare medical texts in our P.I. Nixon Medical Historical Library is a true privilege.”
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, one of the country’s leading health sciences universities, ranks in the top 3 percent of all institutions worldwide receiving National Institutes of Health funding. The university’s schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, health professions and graduate biomedical sciences have produced approximately 28,000 graduates. The $736 million operating budget supports eight campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. For more information on the many ways “We make lives better®,” visit www.uthscsa.edu.