Currently, Dr. Reichel and Barbara N. Samuels, MD, MPH, Clinical Associate Professor, ECU Brody School of Medicine, are the center’s medical staff, ably assisted by Laticia Speight, Administrative Support Specialist, and Amanda Smith, RN, Clinical Nurse Specialist.

The Mission Statement for the FAC reads, “Our Mission is to serve as an interdisciplinary training center to assist patients and professionals in our region in learning to navigate complex systems of diagnosis, behavioral and educational care, and social and community supports. We intend to share and promote effective evidence-based treatments and programs across the lifespan.”

In his 13th year at ECU, Dr. Reichel teaches residents, medical students, and psychiatry fellows. “In clinic each year, we were seeing more and more autistic patients. Approximately seven years ago, Dr. Ronald M. Perkin, M.D., Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics, Brody School of Medicine, and I began the discussions to create a center dedicated to autistic patients, rather than just seeing them in clinic,” Reichel states.

Last year that dream was realized with the opening of the FAC on May 13 in South Hall Professional Center, located at 108 West Firetower Road, Suite B in Winterville, NC. Prior to the center opening, parents had no single-source ECU service for their children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), other than relying on their health care providers, autism advocacy groups, and feedback from other area parents in like-minded situations.

“In my 40 years as a physician, I’ve seen many needs and transitions challenge my profession, and I’ve sought out specialized training to understand what parents, children, and colleagues need and what might be helpful. When Dr. Perkin and I first began our discussions, we set goals and attracted allies, generating a Planning Team whose initial document declared our intentions as “Creating An Autism Center at ECU: Translating Needs and Dreams into Reality.” And that theme continues to fuel our mission," Reichel says.

Although monitoring systems vary for Autism Spectrum Disorder, it is estimated that more than 2 million individuals worldwide are affected. Latest figures reported by the Autism Development Disability Monitoring Network (ADDM) and released in March of 2014, with data from the calendar year of 2010, report that 1 in every 58 eight-year old children in North Carolina appear to have some form of ASD, with 1 in 35 being boys. “This particular system surveys a minimum of 8,000 8 year old children in cohorts every two years. While there is no one single instrument to diagnose ASD, their statistical data are now used to estimate its prevalence, and our center would love to join this network in the future.”

Autism is a complex condition to diagnose and to generate evidence-based treatments for; accurate and timely services are crucial for families, and many enduring successes and knowledge come from collaboration across disciplines at the university and community levels, in partnership with statewide organizations such as the Autism Society of North Carolina (ASNC) and TEACCH, plus national initiatives supported by government-sponsored research and treatment networks.

The FAC provides developmental testing and screening tools that are designed to help identify children who may have developmental delays, pragmatic communication disorder, autism spectrum disorders, ADHD and related behavioral and developmental conditions.

In order to use the FAC services, parents must either have a medical home referral, or be referred by a primary care health care provider from another clinical setting. “The majority of our current patient base are children age 3 years or older, although we do see a few under the age of 3. We also serve many teens, and have a few young adult patients currently, with another of our goals to have staffing in place to allow us to see more adult patients in the future,” says Reichel.

“The impact of this $1 million gift will allow us to make revisions to the center, including installation and use of remote access video and smart-boards, and perhaps one smart-table. These physical and staffing changes will also promote the use of planned additional diagnostic and assessment tools needed to expand our clinical services and capabilities,” he said.

Reiterating, Dr. Reichel states, “We are humbled and grateful that someone’s anonymous, generous community support now allows us to pursue original service and staffing goals for the ECU Family Autism Center.”

Individuals interested in making a gift to the Family Autism Center, should contact ECU Medical & Health Sciences Foundation Interim President Marcy Romary at 252-744-3057, or email romarym@ecu.edu. Physicians or families wanting more information about the FAC can contact Dr. Reichel at 252-328-3221.

 

Dr. Michael Reichel

 

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Being named a distinguished professor is one of the highest honors in academic medicine. Not only does it honor the achievements of the person for whom it is named, but it helps to recruit and retain faculty, of the highest caliber, for the Brody School of Medicine.

Dr. Paul Camnitz, one of the fundraising committee’s co-chairs, when asked why this professorship is being created said, “Dr. Pories is a leader and educator who paves the way for his colleagues and students to reach their full potential. He uses a combination of humor, common sense, and analytical thought to get to the bottom of any problem.”

Dr. Pories joined ECU in 1977 as the first chair of the Department of Surgery. Currently, at age 83, he is not only a professor of surgery, but also of biochemistry and kinesiology, leading the Bariatric Surgery Research Group. He has been widely recognized for his discovery that diabetes was no longer a hopeless disease, but one that could be cured by the Greenville Gastric Bypass, an operation he helped to develop.

He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut and the University of Rochester, where he attended medical school and completed his residency in general and cardiothoracic surgery. He retired after 24 years in the military with the rank of colonel, after serving as a commander in the first Gulf War in which his unit received a Presidential Citation.

Dr. Pories has received, among many awards for his work, the ECU Lifetime Achievement Award for Research and Creative Activity for his discovery that zinc is an essential element for animals and plants, an advance that led to sharp improvements in animal feeds and nutritional supplements for patients. In 2013, he was awarded the prestigious John P. McGovern Complete Physician Award for his work with diabetes and gastric bypass surgery.

The committee, which began fundraising in March, has raised over $138,000 towards the goal. Many former Brody School of Medicine surgery residents, colleagues, and friends from across the nation have contributed to this effort to honor Dr. Pories and his distinguished career. Dr. Joshua Sonett, a 1988 Brody School of Medicine Graduate and Chief of Thoracic Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Columbia University Medical Center recently made a gift to the professorship and said, "It is my honor to help Dr. Pories continue his legacy as he has done so much for so many."

For more information and to support this effort please contact Kathy Brown, Senior Major Gifts Officer for the Brody School of Medicine at 252.744.6265 (office), 252.341.8526 (cell) or brownka@ecu.edu

 

Dr. Walter Pories

 

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The Davidson County center is located between Lexington and Thomasville, NC, and sits on state donated land at Davidson County Community College. The Davidson County site, opening this fall, is among the eight to 10 dental education centers designed to provide hands-on experience for students and primary care for residents in rural and underserved areas of the state. Other centers are located in Ahoskie, Elizabeth City, Sylva, Lillington, Spruce Pine, Lumberton, and Brunswick County.

The program at Davidson is funded by state appropriations to ECU. Through this program, Davidson County Community College will also establish a dental assistance and dental hygienist program.

North Carolina ranks 47th in dentists per 10,000 residents. Three counties, all in eastern North Carolina, have no dentists. Twenty-nine counties have fewer than two dentists. Seventy-nine counties in the state are recognized as federally designated dental shortage areas. At least one-third of the dentists practicing today are 55 years or older.

The very first groundbreaking occurred at the Ahoskie center in August 2011. The Davidson County center is slated to open in the fall of 2014. “All the dental centers follow the same 7,700 square foot floor plan, with 16 operatory stations,” says Kristen Ward, director of development for the ECU Dental School. “Full-time and part-time faculty dentists and residents will be working on-site. Plans call for fourth-year dental students to complete three rotations of approximately eight weeks each at three different centers.”

“Mr. Smith’s endowment is the first such Patient Care Fund to be established to benefit patients at just one of the dental centers,” states Marcy Romary, interim president of the ECU Medical and Health Sciences Foundation. “We hope this will be an outstanding example for others to follow, and we are certainly grateful to Mr. Smith for his generosity.”

In addition to the Smith Fund, which is only to be used for patients at the Davidson County center, a separate Patient Care Fund was established by the Medical and Health Sciences Foundation to help assist patients across the centers. The Patient Care Fund primarily offers monetary assistance between the cost of dental procedures and the patients’ ability to pay. The result is two-fold – financial assistance is provided to patients who are often in need of extensive dental work (and can’t afford it), while offering dental students the educational opportunities of serving patients’ specific needs. The centers offer services at reduced costs and accept insurances including Medicaid.

“At this point, the four community service learning centers in operation, Ahoskie, Elizabeth City, Sylva, and Lillington, have seen patients from 52 North Carolina counties,” says Ward. “This exceptional arm of our gift-giving program directly fulfills our mission of serving the underserved and truly captures the heart of our program.”

Funds may also be allocated to support outreach initiatives, such as free dental screenings/instruction in local schools. Donors can set eligibility criteria, such as restricting use to residents from a certain geographic area or limiting funds to only pediatric patients. For further information, please contact Kristen Ward, director of development for the School of Dental Medicine at 252-744-2239, or email wardk@ecu.edu.

 

Pictured from left to right: Maggie Wilson, DDS, MBA, Vice Dean & Associate Dean for Student Affairs, ECU School of Dental Medicine; Mary Rittling, EdD, MA, MSN, President, Davidson County Community College; Bridgette Jones, Third-Year Dental Student; Travis Moore, Second-Year Dental Student; Diana Luckhardt, Third-Year Dental Student; Christin Carter, Third-Year Dental Student; Phyllis Horns, PhD, RN, FAAN, Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences, East Carolina University; Greg Chadwick, DDS, MS, Dean, ECU School of Dental Medicine

 

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Through her donations towards areas such as Academic Affairs, the Colleges of Allied Health Sciences, Business, Fine Arts and Communication, Health and Human Performance, and Student Life, she has continued to give back to the university. She joined the ECU Medical and Health Sciences Foundation Board of Directors in February and spoke at the ECU Women’s Roundtable event in October, delivering her perspective on leadership and service where she was also recognized as an Incredible ECU Woman.

Dasha and her husband Kirk, along with their company Apogee Solutions, recently committed to endowing a scholarship in the Department of Addictions and Rehabilitation Studies in the College of Allied Health Sciences. The Apogee Solutions Endowed Scholarship Fund will support graduate students pursuing a master’s degree in Rehabilitation and Career Counseling

“We chose the Department of Addictions and Rehabilitation Studies because it is my area,” said Dasha who worked in the vocational rehabilitation field for 20 years. “It’s what I love – helping people reach their potential, watching them face obstacles and overcome their adversities.”

Apogee Solutions and the Little’s are focused on growing the workforce with capable practitioners and believe that scholarships are a vital way to accomplish that goal.

“Students are our future, and they’re especially the future in the substance abuse and rehabilitation field. The need for competent professionals to work in that field is growing and students must be able to earn advanced degrees to become efficient,” said Dasha.

Without the fully credentialed and top-of-the-line professionals needed for the addictions and rehabilitation field, Dasha said that strides that need to be made in helping patients have a quality of life, return to work, and establish happy families will not occur. Through their scholarship, the Little’s want those professionals to be trained “at home.”

Dasha, who majored in art education, graduated from ECU, along with her husband Kirk in 1981 and 1982, and founded Apogee Solutions, Inc. in 2002. Following graduation, Dasha decided to continue her education in a different area.

“I wanted to lean forward and use my creativity to venture into the counseling and student services career field,” said Dasha, “I received my Master of Science degree in Counseling as a wife of an Air Force Officer. At that time I knew that having a portable degree and skills would make me employable in many duty sites and in many work situations. My love of people and serving led me to the Vocational Rehabilitation career field.”

When asked about her favorite memories from her time as an ECU student, Dasha is quick to say that meeting and marrying her “ECU sweetheart” Kirk is at the top of the list along with the amazing faculty with which she had the opportunity to interact.

“I am very thankful for the excellent instructors and administrators at ECU who saw promise and leadership qualities within me, and called those capabilities forward to be my passion and vocational direction,” said Dasha.

Dasha now serves as the president and CEO of the company with Kirk as the vice president and chief operation officer. Apogee Solutions is a small business based in Virginia with over 160 employees in 13 states and the District of Columbia and provides allied health management, technology integration, and operations, training, and logistics consulting services to the U.S. government. Kirk has recently been inducted into the ECU Distinguished Military Service Society.

In its allied health management division, Apogee provides certified case management professionals who assist injured service members through counseling and job assistance. The division also helps assess patients’ potential benefit from rehabilitation services, vocational testing, vocational case management, and vocational earnings capacity assessments. Through their services, Apogee Solutions supports both the U.S. Government and private sector organizations in areas such as training and exercise support, medical training and education, and technology integration.

The Little family and their company make their focus and mission to “positively impact the delivery of professional services, exceed our customers’ expectations, provide qualified employees who deliver prompt achievement of customer requirements, and be priced at competitive rates.”

Despite their residency in Virginia, Dasha says that ECU has become a “destination and a lifestyle of living” that aids their business.

“It has helped Kirk and I learn to focus on the fact that people are important, relationships are to be valued, and leadership and influence are to be shared. We are grateful to be proud Pirates and sing ECU’s praises often,” she says.

The Little’s four children followed in the footsteps of their Pirate parents, Forrest Little graduated East Carolina University in 2009 followed by sister Meredith in 2012 and both Robert and Raleigh Little are current students.

For further information about giving to the College of Allied Health Sciences please contact Pat Frede, Major Gifts Officer at 252-744-3523 or email fredep@ecu.edu

 

Dasha and Kirk Little

 

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Cummings, second from right in the front row, in her nursing class photo.

 

“She adored children,” said her daughter, Sue Collier (BSN ’81, MSN ’91), who explained that even as she approached the end of her life at age 84, her mom drew others to her with the same engaging personality that so many of her patients loved.

To honor her mother’s lifelong commitment to nursing, Collier created the Dorothy Marshall Cummings Nursing Honors Scholarship. The new award will support full-time students who are enrolled in both the East Carolina University College of Nursing and the ECU Honors College. Students considered for the scholarship must, like Cummings, have an interest in maternal and child health care.

The award is one of two College of Nursing honors scholarships established this year. ECU alumni James and Selba Morris Harris of Alpharetta, Georgia, recently established the James and Selba Harris Honors Scholarship. That scholarship honors Selba Harris (BSN ’64), who graduated as part of the College of Nursing’s first class.

“It is the generosity of alumni like these that helps make the dream of becoming a nurse possible for our students,” said College of Nursing Dean Dr. Sylvia Brown. “We are so appreciative of their willingness to give back to their alma mater.”

It’s fitting that a nursing honors scholarship is named after Cummings, who embodied nursing’s motto of “service” long past retirement and years after learning she had Alzheimer’s disease. As a long-term resident at Golden Living Center in Greenville, she endeared herself to staff and other residents with her concern for the well being of others.

“If there was a resident who was upset across the room, she would try to get to them and comfort them,” said Tracy Taft, who cared for Cummings as an aide at Golden Living Center. “She still tried to help, even it was just holding your hand. That was her heart, that was the kind of person Dot was.”

Cummings’ love for nursing was so great that it inspired others to pursue it as a profession. Witnessing her dedication to helping others inspired Taft to go back to school and become a registered nurse.

“I knew she was a nurse and I wanted to give my life to helping take care of people, even if it wasn’t her,” she said.

 

Sue Collier

 

Collier herself was inspired by her mother to become a nurse, dreaming of entering the profession from the time she was a little girl. Today the ECU College of Nursing graduate serves as a performance improvement specialist for patient-family engagement with the NC Quality Center at the North Carolina Hospital Association.

The scholarship is a way of building the future of the profession that has been so important to both Collier and her mother.

“A scholarship like this can be the difference between someone not finishing the program or not going to school and becoming a future nurse,” she said, urging others with the means to join her giving efforts.

And the fact that the scholarship honors a wonderful woman at the same time? It doesn’t get much better than that for Collier.

“I think the greatest way to remember someone is to help someone else,” she said.

If you are interested in contributing to this scholarship or setting up your own, please contact Mark Alexander at alexanderma@ecu.edu or 252-744-2324.

 

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Sandy and George Reel

 

I grew up in Greenville and East Carolina College as I knew it then, had always been a part of my family’s life. So my decision was easy. I just didn’t know “the how” and “the where” to keep the promise that I had made to my dad. As a young boy growing up in Chicago during the depression, most of his free time was spent in the public library. He would tell me that the library saved him from the streets and propelled him to graduate from two universities and into the field of Economics and Psychology. Thus began a life-long love of reading and discovery for him. Later, he would tell the story of taking me with him to the library in my stroller when I was 10 months old, often checking out as many as 10 books at one time.

It wasn’t until I accidently ran into a Kiwanian friend, Dr. Dorothy Spencer, then Director of the Laupus Library, that I realized Laupus was a serious consideration. After our thoughtful discussion with Mr. Greg Abeyonuis, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Development, we contacted our attorney and drew up our estate plans. The final signing took place at the Laupus Library, where we toured this gem of a library with Dr. Richard Eakin, Associate Vice Chancellor and Laupus Health Sciences Library Director (Interim), and Mr. Dwain Teague, Director of Major Gifts for both Laupus and Joyner Libraries.

Nestled in the heart of the medical community of the university, is this powerhouse of digital technology. I thought of the students that entered these doors and the impact that these future heath professionals would make in the medical field. I also realized that Laupus must be ready to meet the needs of these students! One thing became critically apparent; Laupus would need financial support, not only from the university level, but also from the private funding sector.

Two things my father made me promise him. Number one, he wanted a Jewish funeral. Number two, because I had no children of my own, he requested that a portion of his estate be shared in such a way that many children could benefit. He often stated, “Education is the key to everything. It allows you to dream to be what you want to be.”

As I left Laupus the day of the final signing, I thought about the connection of the young boy in Chicago, sitting in a quiet nook in a library, and the final signing at Laupus Library. My husband and I kept our promise to my dad, and in doing so, we honored his memory. I am very happy that the library that was so important at the outset of his life, will now be perpetuated in his memory, for all the young adults and professionals who enter through those doors.

The Sandy and George Reel Endowed Fund is earmarked primarily for collections and materials in the health sciences field.

Should you wish to learn more regarding ways to include the Laupus Library in your estate plans, please contact Dwain Teague at teagued@ecu.edu or (252) 744-0248 for a confidential discussion.

 

 

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