International ties influence education and science at UF
It's a small world ...
It's no secret. With hundreds of faculty members and students who hail from everywhere from Berlin to Brunei, the HSC is an international community. The question is what does this conglomeration of cultures, ideas and influences mean for education and science? A lot, actually. Julie Henderson of the College of Pharmacy puts it like this: "I think the main benefit is perspective. If you are raised and live and work in monocultural space, you have the same life experiences and draw similar conclusions. Within the HSC and UF at large the mix of people brings a greater perspective on a range of things." With this in mind, this month the POST met with a select few of those faculty, students and staff who come from other countries to learn more about their experiences and how their backgrounds shape their work and lives at UF. Here are some of those stories:
Mission: malaria
Bernard Okech, Ph.D., a Kenyan native, contracted malaria three times as a child, at ages 5, 8 and 12.
"I was lucky," Okech says. "My dad could afford to drive me to the hospital to get me treatment. But what about the guy who doesn't have a car and has to walk 20 miles or more to a clinic that doesn't have the medication he needs? Malaria, as with many other tropical diseases, is closely associated with poverty."
A mosquito-transmitted disease, malaria is highly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organization estimates there were 247 million cases of malaria in 2006 and 881,000 deaths.
As a researcher at UF's Emerging Pathogens Institute and the Whitney Laboratory, Okech is looking for methods to kill mosquitoes when they are in the larval stage, before they mature and become malaria carriers.
"By understanding the basic biology of the mosquitoes, it will be possible to develop insecticides that only kill mosquitoes without harming the environment," said Okech, a research assistant scientist in the College of Public Health and Health Professions' environmental health program. "With every new discovery we are getting closer and closer to the silver bullet."
Okech's work became deeply personal a few years ago when his teenage brother in Kenya died of malaria after a broken pipe outside his school remained unfixed and created standing water, a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
"I feel that malaria is one of those diseases that we shouldn't even be talking about anymore," Okech says. "We have all the tools to control it, and it has been done in developed countries for years. It is sad that people can die from a disease that we can control." — Jill Pease
Help from afar
At first, when a colleague told her about the earthquake in China's Sichuan Province, Guilian Xu, Ph.D., didn't think anything was wrong.
"There are always earthquakes at that part of Sichuan," says Xu, a researcher in the College of Medicine McKnight Brain Institute who hails from Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province. "He told me it was a 7.9, and I said ‘It should be OK, nobody lives there.' Then he said a high school had collapsed with 900 kids inside."
Shocked, Xu scanned the Internet for more information. The number of reported deaths kept growing rapidly, and Xu started calling her relatives. The phone rang, but no one answered any of the numbers she called that day.
"I didn't get anything done that day, I was just worried and scared," says Xu, who studies mouse models on neurodegenerative diseases in the lab of David Borchelt, Ph.D. "I don't want to feel that way again."
Her family and friends were safe, but almost 70,000 people were killed, including many children who were crushed when school buildings collapsed. Xu says shoddy construction at these schools may be more to blame than the earthquake itself.
"My friend told me, hundreds of kids were asking for help when the building collapsed," Xu says, shaking her head. "It's terrible."
With the leader of the Friendship Association of Chinese Students and Scholars, Xu helped set up a fund to collect money for relief efforts. With two other universities, the group was able to send almost $70,000 to China to aid in rebuilding efforts.
The money will help rebuild a school. — April Frawley Lacey
Three years and 35 minutes
After graduating high school in 1999 and spending a year in Cuba's mandatory military service, Leo Pena didn't do anything for two years. No work. No school. It was too risky.
"With the Cuban government, you have to play it really safe," says Pena, a UF medical student who was held in his native Cuba for three years after his family won U.S. visas through the Department of State's visa lottery program. "I ended up wasting three years doing nothing."
Even worse, his mother, father and sister were already in the United States living in Miami. Only Pena was held back. But in 2002, Pena boarded a plane bound for Miami. Thirty-five minutes later he was in the United States.
"I was like, that's it? That's how far I have been? Thirty-five minutes?" Pena says.
As happy as he was to be with his family and in the U.S., pursuing an education in a new country created its own set of challenges. Most schools wouldn't accept him without a permanent resident card, and one of the institutions that did wanted him to take English as a second language classes. But his English was fine. So he enrolled at a Broward Community College and then at Florida Atlantic University, driving 100 miles each day to get to class. He wanted to be a doctor, but without his permanent resident card, he wouldn't be able to enter medical school, so he majored in math.
"I lost hope," he says. "I was going to be an actuary. But then I got my permanent resident card."
Now a second-year medical student, Pena became a U.S. citizen in October in a ceremony with 1,200 people in Miami. Half of them were Cubans.
"I wanted to vote, but I missed (the deadline) by a week and a half," Pena says. "I'll vote next time." — April Frawley Lacey
The meaning of saudade
"Many aspects of my own culture that I had never thought about as important not only became apparent, but I also felt saudade (this Portuguese word for a feeling of melancholy cannot be translated to English). I felt saudade for things such as having my first name pronounced correctly, being hugged, socializing with colleagues, being approached naturally instead of having to approach everybody, expressing myself in my own language, talking with people over the phone instead of with answering machines, having time for lunch instead of eating during meetings, and wearing my jeans to work."
For Brazilian-born Jeanne-Marie Stacciarini, Ph.D., R.N., an assistant professor in the College of Nursing who moved to the United States in 2000, adjusting to American culture has been a bit of a challenge. While serving a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Stacciarini wrote a paper on the cultural differences she experienced, referenced above.
Although the paper took some fellow faculty members aback, it helped to open up dialogue on ways to respect and welcome those of different cultures into the working environment.
Stacciarini has been at UF since 2006 and says its multicultural environment gives people an opportunity to discover a variety of perspectives. She admits she misses the stronger sense of community she felt in Brazil but has been able to forge her own ties in UF and in Gainesville.
This sense of community has driven Stacciarini's research. She received a grant to conduct a community-based participatory research study on depression in Latina women. Her respect for the community is why she was attracted to the CBPR approach, which enlists community members in the research. In fact, her working with and listening to community members led her to expand her research not only women to but children as well.
Despite the differences, Stacciarini enjoys immersing herself in other cultures. UF is a good place to be for that, she says.
"I look forward to working with people from around the university and the Health Science Center, not only of different cultures but of different disciplines as well." — Tracy Brown Wright
Classroom culture clash
Gainesville was a familiar place to Emel Ozdora, who spent summers here with her cousins when she was growing up. But moving from Turkey to attend graduate school at UF still wasn't easy.
"It took some time to adapt," says Ozdora, a communications assistant in the College of Dentistry and a UF doctoral student. "Adapt to being alone away from home, adapt to being a student in the U.S. where people have a really different approach to education."
First of all, relationships between professors and students in the U.S. and in Turkey are very different, Ozdora says.
"Professors here are so much more friendlier and are much more helpful. There is not such a high power difference, which took some time to adapt to, but I really enjoy it now. I can just talk to my professors and discuss issues much more comfortably."
In Turkey, college is similar to high school. Professors lecture, students listen and there is little discussion, Ozdora says.
"Here, the first thing I needed to adapt to as a graduate student is that professors don't go over the material chapter by chapter," she says. "You have to come to class having done the reading and be ready for class discussion."
Ozdora seems to have adjusted well to the change. She recently won the UF Outstanding Interntational Student Award.
And though she feels she has adapted to living in the U.S., she still reads Turkish newspapers online and keeps a Turkish blog, where she talks about her experiences living here. She is also an active member of the Turkish student community in Gainesville, having served as vice president and president of the Turkish Student Association. — Karen Rhodenizer
Accent limbo
The summer she graduated from high school, Julie Henderson walked the Green Line of Beirut, visited the West Bank and toured a garbage dump in Cairo where the collectors lived, worked and raised families. Basically, your typical summer vacation.
But even the months she spent traveling across the Middle East or the trips to third-world countries she took with her father could not prepare her for her first visit to China in 1990.
"It was so incredibly alien," says Henderson, an Australian native who now develops online cultural training programs for the UF College of Pharmacy's distance learning programs. "It was the year after Tianamen. It was backward. There were two different types of currency, one for the Chinese and one for foreigners. After two months, I figured I could never live there. It was too hard."
Eighteen years later, China is booming. Henderson, who has been to China three times, has teamed with UF engineers to create a virtual version of the country that lets visitors practice interacting in real situations before they go. The project, called Second China, is housed within the Internet program Second Life.
"I'm really interested in the cultural and communications aspects of these 3-D virtual worlds," Henderson says. "I believe there is a place for them in health-care education."
Before joining the College of Pharmacy staff, Henderson taught English to foreign students at her family's now-closed language school, the English House. From teaching and living in other countries for so long, only a wisp of her Australian accent remains, though it comes back when she talks to other Aussies.
"I'll get halfway through a word and not know how to end it," she says, laughing. "I'll get stuck in accent limbo." — April Frawley Lacey
Missing warm beer
Nick Bacon, Vet.M.B., never intended to spend more than a year in the United States. But after a fellowship at Colorado State University, the Englishman discovered the bourgeoning veterinary oncology program at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine.
"Suddenly I was interviewing for a surgery job at UF," says Bacon, a UF clinical assistant professor of small animal surgical oncology. "That was two years ago and here I am."
Bacon, who trained in veterinary surgery at the University of Cambridge, discovered he liked how the colleagues he met in the United States approached the practice of veterinary surgery. It was different than in the U.K., where tradition sometimes got in the way of out-of-the-box ideas.
"I don't know if this just the (U.S.) universities I have been to and maybe not across the board, but here, there's much more of a feeling of possibility and creativity. Because we don't do it or know how to do it is not an obstacle," Bacon says. "For oncology, that's brilliant."
Of course, there is one little thing some Americans do that still confuses Bacon — the reaction he gets to his British accent. He notices people sometimes focus on how he says something rather than what he says.
Although his stay here has been three times longer than originally planned, he still hopes to move back to England someday.
"You do miss warm beer and some of the foods, amazingly," he says. "But on the other side, I wear shorts most of the year and get to go to the beach. It's quite nice having palm trees in your back garden." — April Frawley Lacey
The decision to stay
After they had been in the United States two years, Elena Kurenova, Ph.D., and her husband, Sergei Kurenov, M.S., decided not to go back to Russia. It was a difficult decision. Adjusting to American life had been hard, but in Russia, after the Perestroika economic reforms of the late 1980s and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, being a scientist was even harder.
"The Perestroika time and the years after were very hard for scientists in Russia," says Kurenova, sitting in her office in the UF Cancer/Genetics Research Complex. "Many of our friends had to change their fields of interest completely. For us it was not acceptable. It was the main basis for our decision to come here. The other thing was how we will raise our child.
"We think we made the right decision."
The couple and their then 8-year-old daughter moved to North Carolina in 1993 after Kurenova was recruited to the National Institutes of Health and eventually to UF in 2003. Although they each stayed in their own fields—she in science and he in computer technology—their areas of interest have evolved since coming to the United States. In Russia, Kurenov developed military simulators and worked with a company retooling Microsoft Word for the Russian market. Now, he is the College of Medicine department of surgery's go-to expert for simulation. And although she once studied fruit flies at a genetics institute, she is now working with William Cance, M.D., to develop cancer drugs using focal adhesion kinase as a target.
The plight of scientists in Russia has improved in recent years, Kurenova says. Now, with so many Russian scientists in the U.S., there are more scientific collaborations between the countries.
"The Cold War was a really bad time for both countries," Kurenov adds. "Both have a good exchange with brainstorming and ideas, now ... Understanding other cultures is just avoiding a lot of problems and misunderstandings." — April Frawley Lacey