The long-time professor of biochemistry – now emerita – and associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Osteopathic Medicine loves to improve processes, to teach the often-esoteric aspects of biochemistry and to dig in the dirt.

Known for her effective teaching and infectious, booming laugh, she claims she’s “extremely shy,” due in part to her Air Guard father’s moving the family, when she was growing up, from California to Maine to Louisiana.

These seeming contradictions make up a much-relied-upon colleague, professor and friend, so valued that she’s been persuaded to postpone her official retirement until later this summer. “

We are what we are today in large part because of Diane Hills,” says Kendall Reed, D.O., FACOS, FACS, dean of the college. “She’s a wonderful educator – students love her teaching and counsel – with such great institutional memory. She’s one of those people I’ll look back and think I’m so lucky to have known her.”

Here are some things worth knowing about Diane Hills. She is:

• A born scientist. “I made the decision to be a scientist at age 5. We were in the car, I was looking out at the moon and I asked my parents, ‘What is the moon made of?’” she recalls. The type of scientist she wanted to be evolved from astronomer to veterinarian to particle physicist (“Then I took physics, and I realized, ‘NO’”), and came to reflect her love of math and chemistry.
• Organized beyond belief. In addition to teaching, Hills has helped shepherd DMU through countless improvement efforts, the type of heavy academic lifting many faculty run from. Among other responsibilities, she directs curriculum implementation and evaluation in the college, prepares and manages budgets and works with Registrar Kathy Scaglione to plan the COM course schedule.”She really looks at whether the schedule works for all the courses and students,” Scaglione says. “Her institutional knowledge and memory are supported by her willingness to go the extra mile, to get in there and do the work.”

  Geoffrey Hills, D.O.’06, one of Diane and husband Norm’s two sons, recalls his mother commuting to Iowa State University – 45 minutes from Des Moines – to earn her Ph.D. “Then she was home every day on time to make supper,” he says. “She demonstrated the value of planning for one’s goals and being organized.”

• Amazing in that she didn’t cause her son to die a thousand deaths. During his orientation at DMU, the COM dean at the time announced, “There’s a student among you whose mother is an administrator, but he won’t get special treatment,” recalls Geoffrey, now an attending psychiatrist at Abbot Northwestern in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. His very first DMU class was co-taught by his mom. He came to consider her “one of the best teachers.”"She knew how to present the curriculum and what you really need to know,” he adds. “And I heard from other students how organized her course was.”
• Mischievous. Hills was the inspiration behind DMU’s “Ladies’ Sewing and Terrorist Society,” monikered years before Sept. 11, 2001, an informal group of female employees. None of whom, incidentally, sews.”Diane has been the instigator and impetus for women to have a social network here, outside of work,” says Roberta Wattleworth, D.O.’81, M.H.A.’99, M.P.H.’04, chair of family medicine, who recalls a time when female employees were a minority at DMU. “She’s one who is your friend for life, not just for convenience purposes.”
• Deeply proud of DMU. “DMU keeps improving. We don’t have bats in the building anymore,” Hills says. “Our students are really strong academically, and we’ve worked hard to hire younger faculty who also are really strong. For alumni who haven’t been back to campus in recent years, they need to come back.”

Blame a fourth -year rotation in Pennsylvania for the reason you can occasionally find Roy Lidtke, D.P.M.’91, C.Ped., FACFAOM, in a full wool uniform under the summer sun. And blame service in the Army for the fact that Kendall Reed, D.O., FACOS, FACS, has a similar uniform displayed in his office.

“My interest in the Civil War began during my residency in surgery in the mid-1970s. I was in the Army and got interested in the history of surgery,” says Reed, dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine. “Modern military medicine basically began in the Civil War.”

During his Pennsylvania rotation, Lidtke, clinical associate professor in the College of Podiatric Medicine and Surgery, visited some of the state’s many Civil War battlefields. At the time, his wife, Alicia, became engrossed by filmmaker Ken Burns’ 1990 PBS documentary about the war. Later, back in Iowa, they observed a Civil War reenactment; that led to Alicia’s sewing her spouse a wool uniform, using fabric made by the same factory that produced it during the war.

Now, typically a couple times a year, Lidtke dons the vest, frock coat, slouch hat, sash and boots of a military physician and heads to the “battlefield.”

“What I like most are the friends you meet, the camaraderie – sitting around the fire, singing period songs with my group,” he says. “Then there are the magical moments when there’s nothing modern around. You get transported back fast, when you can imagine what it was really like.”

What is unimaginable is the carnage of the four-year conflict. The approximately 625,000 lives lost in the Civil War exceed the number of American soldiers who have died in all the other wars America has fought in since, combined. The huge numbers of soldiers and casualties, says Frank Freemon, M.D., in Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War, “represented…a gigantic petri dish.”

“Many of the major advances in today’s medicine are a direct result of lessons learned in wartime,” Reed says. “As tragic as it is for the lives lost, at the end of the day we come out better.”

Infectious diseases killed two-thirds of the soldiers who died in the Civil War. Despite its battlefield horrors – for example, the coneshaped “minié balls” used as bullets ravaged flesh and bone in ways that practically guaranteed amputation – American medicine at the time did not understand what caused infections or the spread of disease. Dysentery, malaria, typhoid fever, measles and wound infections were just some of the soldiers’ grim realities.

“They had no idea what bacteria was. Cleanliness was not emphasized,” Lidtke says. “Some doctors felt that pus was a natural part of healing. You hear stories, in fact, that if a soldier’s wound did not produce pus, the doctor would apply some from another wounded soldier.”

Military leaders did learn from a horrific error in the first major Civil War battle, the so-called First Bull Run near Manassas, VA. Sixty years earlier Dominique-Jean Larrey, Napoleon Bonaparte’s chief medical officer, had impressed upon his boss the importance of transportation for wounded soldiers, “but we ignored that,” Reed says. ”

After the [First Bull Run] battle, the carnage was incredible,” he adds. “There was a 20-mile stretch of road with a mass of people trying to get to a hospital. That’s a long way to walk, particularly if half your leg has been blown off.”

Military leaders came to recognize the need for mobile, well-equipped hospitals to provide medical treatment as quickly as possible to injured soldiers. “That’s just one example of how military medicine has had an impact on today’s soldier,” Reed says.

Library displays bring war realities to life

A wooden stethoscope, bullet extractors, medical kits and an unpleasantlooking tooth key – used to wrench out rotting teeth – are among the items Roy Lidtke and Kendall Reed loaned to the DMU Library to commemorate the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. The items are on display with some of the library’s medical journals from the period.

The DMU Library also will mark the war’s anniversary with a traveling exhibit from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, titled “Life and Limb — the Toll of the Civil War,” on display from Oct. 3 to Nov. 12. The exhibit explores the experiences of injured soldiers during the conflict and as disabled veterans in the years afterward.

Library displays are free and open to the public, with viewing hours Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The library is located on the second floor of the DMU Student Education Center, 3300 Grand Ave.

DMU student Phong Trac, wearing the red feathered bird head, top right, and his teammates constructed a super soapbox that conquered the Red Bull ramp, left, and finished second in the crazy competition.

Among the world’s wackiest competitive events, the Red Bull Soapbox Race is an Ironman: Competitors in this year’s race, held in Los Angeles May 21, included kilted Scotsmen, glory-seeking Spartans, a rolling sushi bar, a group of Lady Gagas and a feathered car inspired by the crazy-popular video game, Angry Birds. Phong Trac, a student in DMU’s public health program, was on that team, which – to his surprise – took second place.

“I’m so happy and exhausted as the past three days I have not slept much,” he e-mailed from California after the race. “We have been running around for media coverage this past week, and last-minute changes and modifications to the soapbox were brutal.”

But apparently effective: Over several months, Trac and other members of team Angry Bird Droppings assembled a steel cage made of discarded construction-site materials and then hatched their “biggest challenge”: building the bird’s frame out of a giant foam block acquired from a retired surf board designer.

“We felt that we should build a soapbox out of recycled parts so as to be environmentally friendly,” Trac says. “Our secret weapon was doing just hours and hours of testing. We pulled the soapbox with my truck and pushed it down a lot of hills. This afforded us the opportunity to fine-tune the chassis and put the shell and frame to the test.”

The team appended “Droppings” to its name to avoid lawsuits from Rovio Mobile, which launched Angry Birds in December 2009. Since then, more than 12 million copies of the game have been purchased from Apple’s App Store – the largest mobile app success in the world so far, according to MIT Entrepreneurship Review.

“We believe it is the equivalent of Pac Man for the current generation of children who play it,” Trac says. “All of the team members are also very addicted to the game.”

Since the first Red Bull Soapbox Race took place in Belgium in 2000, more than 40 – 10 in America – have been held in almost 30 countries. It’s absurdity on adrenaline: In addition to the crazy cars and costumes, teams typically perform skits or dance routines before hopping in their boxes. Still, there are rules: Each soapbox must be powered only by gravity and imagination, measure less than six feet wide and 20 feet in length, be no more than seven feet high and weigh no more than 176 pounds (not including the driver). Drivers must be at least 18 years old. Teams are judged on the criteria speed, creativity and showmanship.

Trac, who’s also pursuing a degree in physical therapy at a local university, was his team’s only non-engineer. But his experience in building vintage motorcycles and interest in extreme sports helped make feathers fly on race day. With more than 110,000 spectators lining the streets, Angry Bird Droppings, steered by team member Nathan Nguyen, conquered the course’s hairpin turns, steep drops and bone-jarring jumps to finish second out of 37 teams. Their prize: ride-a-longs in a 750-horsepower vehicle, in the California desert, with Trophy Sport truck driver and Red Bull athlete Bryce Menzies.

The team used the race to raise awareness about neurofibromatosis, a set of distinct genetic disorders that cause tumors and can affect the development of non-nervous tissues such as bones and skin. As part of that effort, team members raised more than $500 for the Children’s Tumor Foundation prior to the race.

The team’s only disappointment on derby day was that Red Bull dashed their plan to launch Angry Bird plush toys into the audience with a feather canon. In the video game, players use a slingshot to launch birds at smiling pigs, with the goal of destroying the swine.

“Instead, for our on-stage skit, we danced around and chased the pigs after they stole our eggs,” Trac says. “We had a remix of the original theme song build up to the climax until we pushed the soapbox down the ramp.”

From left, faculty honorees Steele, Wilson, Delaney and Vardaxis.

One of DMU’s hallmarks is its exceptional faculty. In June, they honored four of their own.

Laura Delaney, PA-C, M.P.A.S., assistant professor in the physician assistant program, earned the faculty service award for, among other activities, providing health care to the underserved in the community and on global health service trips with other DMU faculty and students.

Tim Steele, Ph.D., chair of the microbiology and immunology department, received the outstanding teacher honor. In addition to maintaining a productive research program, he’s known among students for his effective teaching and his care for their well-being.

Wayne Wilson, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry and nutrition, received the excellence in scholarship award. He is consistently rated by students and other faculty as one of DMU’s best basic science teachers and scholars.

The recipient of the distinguished researcher award was Vassilios Vardaxis, Ph.D., professor of physical therapy and research director in the College of Podiatric Medicine and Surgery. He has published peer-reviewed papers, served on national grant review panels and editorial boards, held leadership roles in national scientific meetings and organizations, and mentored students and colleagues in their research.

In May, Fernandez was appointed as the national legislative affairs representative on the executive board of the Council of Osteopathic Student Government Presidents (COSGP), a council of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM) that is the official national representative voting voice of osteopathic medical students.

“I want to help make policy relevant to the non-policy wonk,” says Fernandez, who earned his master of public health degree at the University of Iowa. “Medical students have to understand why policy and business aspects are important and why they have to be advocates.”

Des Moines University and Joe Case, senior technician in DMU’s Iowa Simulation Center for Patient Safety and Clinical Skills (second from left), were honored in May for activities in support of military personnel. Case, a staff sergeant with the U.S. Army Reserve, was recognized for helping to train medics and nurses of the 4224th U.S. Army Hospital. DMU was recognized for providing that training in its Simulation Center and for supporting Case, a reservist for more than 18 years, and other DMU employees in the military. From left: Capt. Teresa Rader, operations officer of the 4224th U.S. Army Hospital; Case; DMU Provost Karen McLean, Ph.D.; College of Osteopathic Medicine Dean Kendall Reed, D.O., FACO S, FACS; and Dick Rue, state chair of the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserves.

Presenting her research poster stoked Maram Said's passion for women's health.

One of Maram Said’s dreams is to work in women’s health. The May graduate landed her first-choice rotation at St. Vincent Women’s Hospital in Indianapolis. She also explored women’s health through research during a rotation at Mid-Iowa Fertility, P.C.

Said and Brian Cooper, M.D., wanted to explore the association, suggested by previous studies, between endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), the two leading causes of female infertility among Mid-Iowa’s patients. Their thorough review of the electronic records of 330 patients revealed that only 31, or 9.4 percent, had both conditions, significantly lower than the 21 percent rate they’d expected. They also observed that patients with both conditions had more regular menstruation cycles.

“Taken together with our findings, it suggests that cyclic menstruation may be an important mechanism in the development of endometriosis,” they said in their abstract.

They presented a poster on their research at the 59th annual meeting of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in May in Washington, DC. Said says getting to attend the event “was one of the best experiences I’ve had.”

“I got to mingle with people from all over the world. Just on the elevator, I met people from Greece and the UK,” she says. “I’ve never been so pumped about obstetrics and gynecology.”

Jenell Stewart

Stewart was one of 20 graduate students from across the country to be selected as a Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholar for 2011-2012. Starting this summer, she will spend a year in Lima, Peru, providing patient care and conducting research on women’s health, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

“This is such an incredible opportunity. I feel like I just won the global health lottery,” says Stewart. “It will be a mentored research experience with significant cultural exchange as well.”

The Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholars Program, headquartered at Vanderbilt University, places students with topranked research centers, funded by the National Institutes of Health, in developing countries. Stewart will work with researchers, policymakers and local care providers at two universities and the Ministry of Health National STD and HIV Strategy Offices in Lima. While her award is for one year, the program endeavors to keep its scholars and mentors connected during their careers.

“I’ll pick up where past trainees have left off. We become part of this group of people who feel as passionate about global health as I do,” says Stewart, who’s already participated in online discussions with her mentor and other scholars. “It’s been so energizing and stimulating for me to meet the other students and researchers.”

Stewart applied to the Fogarty Scholars Program at the encouragement of Yogesh Shah, M.D., DMU’s associate dean of global health. Her DMU mentor – a Fogarty Scholars Program requirement – is Mary Mincer Hansen, Ph.D., R.N., director of DMU’s master of public health program.

“The faculty at DMU has been incredibly supportive of my career goals,” Stewart says. “Dr. Mary Mincer Hansen and Dr. Yogesh Shah have encouraged my dreams of working in global health and assisted me in finding opportunities, such as my WHO internship and this Fogarty Scholars grant, where I have already encountered more inspiring mentors.”

Man on a mission: DMU student Matthew Treat runs in the world's oldest annual marathon.

In this competition, Matthew Treat was perfectly happy placing 291st. In fact, he was happy just to get in the race.

A student in DMU’s physician assistant program and president of his class, Treat was among 26,907 runners to compete in the Boston Marathon in April. In addition to finishing in the top two percent among participants, he did so in two hours, 43 minutes and .03 seconds, shaving nearly 10 minutes off his time at the Des Moines Marathon last October. He also kept a steady pace, running the last five kilometers of the race in about the same time as the first five.

“The Boston Marathon was on my bucket list,” he says. “I wrote my name on my jersey, so it was great to hear people cheering on ‘Matt.’”

Qualifying for the world’s oldest annual marathon is tough, but the experience is unforgettable. The 26.2-mile course begins in rural Hopkinton, MA, then winds through six more towns and cities before Boston.

“It becomes more and more urban along the route. Near the end, you see the Prudential Building, one of the city’s tallest, so then you know you have two miles left,” Treat says.

Spectators made the race memorable, too. Treat passed partiers at a biker bar, accepted oranges from children and streaked through the so-called “scream tunnel,” a section lined by the women of Wellesley College. He also attempted to take drinks from fans without slowing his pace too much. “That was interesting,” he notes. “I got some Gatorade in my eye.”

At mile 20, Treat met a runner from Poland; they cheered each other over Heartbreak Hill, an 88-foot climb from beginning to end considered the race’s toughest challenge.

“You get to mile 24 and you feel terrible, but you’ve put so much time into it by then,” says Treat, who suffered a number of leg cramps. “After the race, I made the mistake of sitting down. I had to have someone help me up.”

That didn’t change the next item on his bucket list: competing in an Ironman, the grueling competition that combines a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike race and a 26.2-mile run.

“I like those challenges,” he says. “Medical school gets kind of crazy, so running is also good stress relief.”