Newsroom
The UT Health campus shuttle Green Route will not be available from Monday, Dec. 16, through Friday, Jan. 3. The Brown Route will run its regular operating hours.
There will be no shuttle operations at all from Dec. 23 through Dec. 27, and on Jan. 1. Open parking will be available on these days.
Normal shuttle operations will resume on Monday, Jan. 6.
Did you know that UT Health San Antonio sends more than 500 faculty, staff and students abroad for academic and business trips every year? Managing the logistics of international travel for hundreds of personnel can prove to be a difficult task. But there’s one staff member who you can count on to help ensure a safe, successful journey.
Meet Chris Fuglestad, M.F.S., education abroad coordinator in the Office of International Services at UT Health San Antonio. Fuglestad develops and oversees education abroad activities, including international agreement development and management, international travel to high-risk areas, requests for the International Oversight Committee (IOC) and information on resources for university representatives traveling abroad.
“I work with the schools to help students travel to countries like the United Kingdom, India, Colombia, and Uganda,” Fuglestad said. He also works with faculty on travel logistics and makes sure that every journey adheres to institutional policies.
“I also collect traveler’s emergency contact information, and provide detailed pre-departure orientations,” he said. Serving on the university’s newly formed International Crisis Response Team (ICRT), Fuglestad is one of the primary contacts in the event of an emergency abroad.
Fuglestad is a Wisconsin native who has visited more than 30 countries, He speaks French fluently and is conversational in Norwegian and in Wolof (an indigenous language of West Africa). He received a Bachelor of Arts in French and International Studies from the University of Oregon, and then went on to earn a master’s degree in French and international education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Professional French Master’s Program. During his master’s internship at Université Laval in Québec City, he found his calling for helping undergraduate students with study abroad programs.
Fuglestad said an increase in global health education initiatives has raised the need for international travel at health-related institutions across the country. The position of education abroad coordinator was created at UT Health San Antonio in 2018 to meet the demand for international travel. Fuglestad is the first to serve in the post and he is glad to be part of the university’s efforts to promote diversity and international education among its student body.
“Travel is very important for everybody. And it’s especially important for those in the medical field,” Fuglestad said.
While living and studying in Senegal for a year, he learned a valuable lesson in cultural humility. “Cultural humility can provide insights on how to understand people better despite language and cultural barriers,” Fuglestad said. He believes that learning cultural humility helps medical professionals treat patients from a diverse background with newfound sensibility and compassion.
Along with his vast travel expertise, Fuglestad credits his experience as a theater actor to overcome challenges in his position at UT Health San Antonio.
“I performed in professional and community theater productions of Oklahoma, The Phantom of the Opera, and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,” said Fuglestad. “When a mistake happens on the stage, you must improvise and adapt as the show must go on.”
His ability to adapt and improvise helped Fuglestad overcome roadblocks and emergencies that students and faculty face at a moment’s notice.
He also recognizes teamwork as another crucial factor for success. “As an actor, you have a tendency to focus on your character as an individual. But every successful play, film, and theater must come from teamwork,” said Fuglestad. Recently, he helped the Office of International Services implement comprehensive travel emergency protocols. Fuglestad believes that he could not have been a part of such an achievement without the support of co-workers, managers and the faculty.
A famous African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Thanks to the efforts of people like Chris Fuglestad, UT Health San Antonio is building a brighter future around the world.
Faculty, staff and students at the UT Health San Antonio Regional Campus Laredo kicked off the holiday season Dec. 4 with a tree-lighting ceremony, seasonal songs, kids’ activities and photos with Santa.
City leaders, the United Independent School District choirs and the Mariachi Palomino from Laredo College participated in the event that was meant, in part, to thank the Laredo community for its support of the regional campus.
A device for organ and limb preservation developed at UT Health San Antonio, and being commercialized by a San Antonio startup company, is the grand prize winner in the 2019 Create the Future Design Contest.
The Universal Limb/Organ Stasis System for Extended Storage, or ULiSSES™, was developed by Leonid Bunegin, B.S., associate professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, UT Health San Antonio. The technology, which is property of The University of Texas System Board of Regents, is exclusively licensed by UT Health San Antonio to Vascular Perfusion Solutions (VPS) Inc.
Rafael Veraza, M.P.H., Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anesthesiology, is assisting Bunegin in laboratory studies testing the technology as part of a U.S. Department of Defense grant. Dr. Veraza is listed on the award with Bunegin, who is chief scientific officer with VPS, and Tom DeBrooke, M.B.A., VPS chief executive officer.
Lab tests indicate that the ULiSSES™ device can preserve tissue for more than 24 hours, far longer that current methods. Extending organ and limb viability could vastly improve the numbers of successful transplants and organ replacements.
The Create the Future Design Contest was launched in 2002 by the publishers of Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. There were more than 700 entries from 60 countries in this year’s competition.
UT Health San Antonio researchers, working with collaborators at the University of Florida, have discovered a safe and potent next generation of drugs to fight multiple types of leukemia and lymphoma in adults and children. The journal Nature Medicine reported the findings Dec. 2.
“This is a new class of drugs called PROTACs that target an essential survival protein in cancer cells called BCL-XL,” said research co-author Robert Hromas, M.D., FACP, professor of medicine at UT Health San Antonio and dean of the university’s Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine. “The previous drugs that have targeted BCL-XL decrease platelets dangerously, with a high risk of bleeding. Our drug markedly reduces that risk, and thus would be potentially far more useful in cancer patients.”
The PROTAC reported here would treat T-cell malignancies such as T-cell acute leukemia and T-cell lymphoma, said Dr. Hromas, a noted hematologist and oncologist.
T cells are produced by a gland in the upper chest called the thymus. These cells are very important participants in the body’s immune response. When they turn cancerous, they rely on BCL-XL for survival.
Dr. Hromas is joined on the paper by several co-authors from the Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute at UT Health San Antonio.
“PROTAC drugs degrade the BCL-XL protein rather than merely inhibiting it,” said Peter Houghton, Ph.D., professor of molecular medicine and director of the Greehey Institute. “Potentially this class of drug can be developed against certain childhood cancers that have been untreatable.”