Wei Honored as Distinguished Faculty Scholar
| Nov. 16, 2016 | If someone piled all the research journals, research reports and documents resulting from or associated with the professional life of Jeanne Wei, M.D., Ph.D., then it might have been as high as the Pauly Auditorium stage on which she stood Nov. 9.
Wei asks for a show of hands in response to a question while delivering a lecture as part of the College of Medicine Dean’s Distinguished Lecture series.
She was on the stage to be honored as the College of Medicine’s Distinguished Faculty Scholar for the year and to give the audience of more than 100 faculty members and friends an overview of some of her research and work. Wei is the chair of the college’s Department of Geriatrics and the executive director of the UAMS Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging.
“I can’t express how much this means to me, but especially to faculty members and everyone in the Department of Geriatrics,” Wei said. “I am accepting this award, not just for me, but mostly for all of the faculty who work so hard day in and day out. They really are the role models and the ones who inspire all the rest of us. We look up to them every day.”
Wei has more than 30 years of National Institutes of Health-funded experience in leading cardiovascular research. She has authored more than 240 publications, including more than 160 peer-reviewed original research paper, 80 reviews and six books. One of those books, “Geriatric Medicine: A Case-Based Manual” has been used as a textbook in medical schools in the United States and the United Kingdom.
“We are a community of scholars,” said College of Medicine Dean Pope L. Moseley, M.D. “We are here as scholars to teach the next generation of caregivers, to teach investigators to create new knowledge. We are here to recognize Jeanne Wei as one of the leaders of that community of scholars.”
Stavros Manolagas, M.D., Ph.D., briefly addresses the audience to begin the award presentation and lecture.
The Distinguished Faculty Scholar lecture is part of the College of Medicine’s Dean’s Distinguished Lecture series. Since 1993, the lecture series has brought researchers, clinicians and leaders in academic medicine from around the world to UAMS to discuss their work and advances in their fields. Each year a special lecture honors one of the college’s own faculty members as the Dean’s Distinguished Faculty Scholar. Faculty members from throughout the college are invited to nominate colleagues, and a committee of faculty members evaluates comprehensive nomination packets to select the honoree.
In beginning her lecture, Wei said she was going to use the broad topic of cardiovascular health among older patients as “a paradigm” for talking about a number of connected but diverse areas in age-related research. Over the course of the hour, she discussed many of them, describing her scientific investigations into ways to rejuvenate the heart, maintain heart health, assess how patients are taking their medicines and even developing a gait monitor similar to the now popular Fitbit fitness device.