S. Lynn Knox, MD,
School of Medicine, Dept. Anesthesiology

I joined the faculty of the Anesthesiology Department in 1998 after completing my internship and anesthesiology residency right here at UTMB. Prior to that I attended the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. I was what we call a non-traditional student as I had trained and worked as a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist for years prior to medical school.  This also makes me a perpetual student and probably explains my interest in adult education.

As the Anesthesiology Residency Program Director and the Vice Chair for Education for our Department, I am very involved with graduate medical education. I am honored to be a member of the UTMB Academy of Master Teachers. I am an active member of the Graduate Medical Education Committee and serve on the GME Education sub-committee and the Sub-committee on Operations and Working Environment. I also serve on the SOM Educational Research Committee. I am a member of the Society for Education in Anesthesiology, the Texas Society of Anesthesiology and a member and elected delegate to the American Society of Anesthesiology.

Over half of my time is dedicated to clinical services and clinical teaching of residents and medical students. While formal classroom (or on-line) didactics are an essential part of resident education, I believe clinical teaching is the heart and soul of any residency program. Our anesthesiology program is known for a strong didactic program with a high level of faculty involvement. With residents scattered on away rotations after Hurricane Ike, many residents are not located at UTMB and able to attend didactic conferences, lectures, case discussions, etc. We have also set up off campus anesthesiology electives for the medical students at locations with our residents. There is a need for faculty development at these off-campus sites. I have very limited technological skills, but recognize these applications could solve many of our problems and provide new opportunities to improve how we deliver the didactic side of training.

I am married to Steve Billotte and although we have no children, our dogs think they are children. We have a ten year old mostly Lab (D.D.) and a two year old Giant Schnauzer (Schnauffy). We like to be outdoors as much as possible, and spend a lot of time looking across at Galveston from our deck on Tiki Island.

One of my recent areas of research focuses on an innovative joint parent-child educational intervention program for early adolescent pregnancy prevention, for which I received a National Institutes of Health RO1 grant award. The curriculum resulting from the project, PARE: Parent-Child Relationship Education, was published in 2008 by ERT (Education, Research, and Training) Associates.  For the past 34 years I have maintained a funded research program focusing on reproductive psychophysiology, on perinatal health outcomes, and on maternal psychosocial adaptation during pregnancy and the postpartum in different cultural populations.  A third edition of my book, Psychosocial Adaptation in Pregnancy: Assessment of Seven Dimensions of Maternal Development, is in press for publication by Springer.  My Prenatal Self-Evaluation and Postpartum Self-Evaluation Questionnaires on maternal adaptation have excellent psychometric properties and have been widely used in the United States and abroad by researchers in nursing, psychology, and other health science disciplines. The instruments have been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Norwegian, Italian Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai.  I have been past North and South American editor of the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology. 

I also conducted a worldwide workshop on psychosocial adaptation to pregnancy for the heads of 89 Family Advocacy Clinics of the United States Air Force. I have published in both nursing and medical journals, and have received several grants and awards for my research. I was invited to participate in an Institute of Medicine Committee, National Academy of Science, to study the effects of professional liability on the delivery of maternal and child health care.  I have been a past-president of the multidisciplinary North American Society for Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Great Salt Lake

I have been a faculty member at UTMB since 1991. My husband, Joe, and I have two children. Annie is 10 and David is 13, and their activities are what keep us active between our busy work lives.

I am Director of Undergraduate Education in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Director of the UTMB Academy of Master Teachers.  In addition to an intensive teaching schedule, I maintain an outpatient practice within the Psychiatry department with a specific interest in mood and anxiety disorders.  

I was born in Albany, New York, but I have lived in Texas since I was 7 years old. I moved to Galveston when I was 9, and have either lived or worked here ever since. Both my parents worked at UTMB, so it was natural that I would join the “family business.” My bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts was received from the University of Texas in 1983. My MD was received from UTMB in 1987. I completed a one-year internship in Internal Medicine at UTMB, followed by a three-year psychiatric residency at Boston University’s School of Medicine.

Actively teaching learners in a variety of settings including both undergraduate and graduate medical education, I have been particularly involved in the implementation and dissemination of team based learning courses, and I am also known for my use of the cinema to teach about stigma. I enjoy participating in many organizations, especially the Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry and the Team Based Learning Collaborative. This year I will assume the Presidency of the TBLC.

I used to have a lot of hobbies, but now I spend most of my time enjoying (and enduring) my half grown kids. Together we go to music lessons, Tae Kwon Do, Hebrew School, scouts, and silly movies.  After they go to bed I like to read, watch movies for my “cinema seminar” course, and occasionally get some sleep.

Bill (Alan) Rampy, DO, PhD,
School of Medicine, Dept. Pathology
I started at UTMB in June of 98 as a Resident in Anatomic Pathology. Pathology was a reasonable place to start as I had spent the much of the previous 10 years in a combination of medical school, a doctorate program in neuroscience and working in a neurohistochemistry lab. After residency, I stayed at UTMB for a fellowship in Surgical Pathology. Other than a year spent in basic science research in toxicology, I have been a Clinical Instructor in pathology, one year in the Autopsy Division and the remainder as part of the Division of Surgical Pathology.

My primary activities as Instructor are, not surprisingly, to teach residents much of the fundamental concepts and skills necessary for the appropriate handling, sampling and reporting for surgical specimens. Most of this material is entirely novel for pathology residents as such topics are rarely, if ever, part of the medical school experience. Over, the years, as I have passed on the priceless, pearls of pathology, I have strived to integrate my interests in pathology informatics, technology and digital imaging as tools by which to further enhance pathology education as well as clinical practice. Several projects developed over the past few years are very much related to the notion of ADAPT. 

In 2004, I developed the Surgical Pathology website as a means to establish a Pathology web presence at UTMB, provide information for candidate residents/fellows and host the Photo of the Month results for our Division. Review of histopathologic slides is the foundation for learning the skills by which to become a diagnostic Anatomic Pathologist. Daily case sign-out, as well as “unknown” slide review conferences, provides this necessary experience. To afford the residents/fellows freedom to study their unknown and proficiency slides any time & place, I developed a gallery for the website to which I post dynamic digital scans (virtual slides) for review. Infopathic, a work-in-progress, is a pikipedia of sorts (a dictionary linked image gallery), designed such that pathology trainees may turn to a single resource to learn the seemingly endless catalog of descriptive terms which contribute to the pathology vocabulary. And my most recent project (in progress), Pathslides takes the concept of digital slides, and kicks it up a notch. Pathslides are narrated and annotated virtual microscopy movies derived to simulate the side-by-side mentored microscope experience.

As you can tell, I thoroughly enjoy exploiting all of our technology tools and toys to bring novel (and, hopefully effective) elements to educate our medical trainees. I look forward to the ADAPT project and hope to derive new ideas and learn new skills along the way!

Daneshvari (Dani) Solanki, MBBS, FRCA. 
School of Medicine, Dept. Anesthesiology

I joined the Department of Anesthesiology at UTMB in 1978.  I have been in the practice of Pain Management from its early days of 1980 and have seen the specialty evolve right in front of my eyes.  I am the director of Interventional pain service, which I started in 1992. The Pain Fellowship was then established at this department and since that time we have graduated a number of fellows who have established successful pain practices.  I am also the Director of Regional Anesthesia and this has allowed me to develop the acute pain service for adults where we provide postoperative pain control. 

I enjoy teaching and training new residents and fellows and have been a recipient of a few teaching awards.  We have one of the very best neurosciences divisions here at UTMB, which is involved in pain research.  I have had the privilege to work with them and mentor a fellow who has been able to secure a grant for her research so she can develop her career as a researcher.

One of the unique experiences I have had was doing pediatric anesthesia in El Salvador with limited resources.  It allowed me to improvise and call upon my anesthesia skills I had acquired while training in India and working in Africa.  I would recommend to all that if you get an opportunity to practice your craft in the third world countries, please do so.  The patients are eternally grateful to you and it is very satisfying!