2024-26 Edward A. Dickson Emeritus/a Professorship Award Three Recipients Announced

DorAnne Donesky, RN, PhD, NP	Michael Harrison, MD	Jacqueline Leung, MD, MPH

Vice Provost Alldredge awarded the 2024-26 UCSF Edward A. Dickson Emeritus/a Professorship to three UCSF Emeriti/ae professors: DorAnne Donesky, RN, PhD, NP; Michael Harrison, MD; and Jacqueline Leung, MD, MPH. Their two-year terms begin July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2026.

The UCSF Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professorship Award honors UCSF emeritus/a professors whose outstanding research, scholarly work, teaching, or public service activities have continued since retirement. The highest priority will be to support activities that benefit the campus and for which funding is not available from other sources. Each award is for a maximum of $20,000 and is made to the Emeritus/a Professor for the upcoming two (2) fiscal years.

DorAnne Donesky, RN, PhD, NP
Professor Emeritus
Department of Physiological Nursing
School of Nursing

• Project Title: Sustainability of Practice-PC: Interprofessional Continuing Education in Palliative Care
• Summary: Practice-PC is a nationally recognized interprofessional continuing education (CE) course, sponsored by UCSF Division of Palliative Medicine (DPM), that provides 50 hours of palliative care interactive instruction during nine monthly full-day in-person sessions. This is the only CE course in the country that has been fully designed by interprofessional faculty for interprofessional learners, provides top-quality interprofessional palliative care education for the UCSF workforce, promotes UCSF as a leader in CE, and addresses the palliative care workforce shortage throughout Northern California. The course was placed on hiatus due to changes in post-Covid demand and preferences for hybrid educational delivery. The purpose of this two-year project is to reinstate Practice-PC by developing a sustainable business plan that includes (1) a cost/curriculum analysis, (2) a strategic plan to maintain a sustainable, financially self-supporting course, (3) a marketing plan focused on UCSF and Providence clinicians as a model for other health systems and employers; and culminates in the enrollment of at least 28 learners annually, beginning with the 2026-27 cohort. Funding from the Edward A Dickson Emeritus Professorship Award will support the ongoing evolution of Practice-PC to meet the new challenges of the current interprofessional workforce and develop a community of practice for Practice-PC alumni to meet the needs of every seriously ill patient in Northern California.

Michael Harrison, MD
Professor Emeritus
Department of Surgery, Pediatrics, Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences
School of Medicine

• Project Title: Magnetic Correction of Pectus Excavatum in Children
• Summary: Pectus excavatum is a mechanical defect where the young person's anterior chest wall is sunken, often requiring surgical repair between 8-16 years of age. We have designed and tested a novel minimally invasive repair that uses an implant attached to the sternum that contains a rare earth magnet. A second magnet worn on the patient's chest gradually and painlessly pulls the chest wall forward, correcting the defect. We have proven safety and efficacy in older children, but many surgeons have asked that we develop magnetic treatment for children 5-9 years old who are too young to have the Nuss procedure. This requires downsizing the implant by at least 50%, modifying the design, and creating and testing prototypes. This 20K grant would allow our team to develop and test this new magnetic implant.

Jacqueline Leung, MD, MPH
Professor Emeritus
Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care
School of Medicine

• Project: Clarifying the Relationship Between Postoperative Delirium and Alzheimer's Disease
• Summary: The increasing prevalence of cognitive decline and dementia is a global health care crisis. While the underlying causes are multi-factorial, major elective surgery is a widely known risk for postoperative delirium (POD) and accelerated cognitive decline. The overarching goal of my research program is to better understand the associations between surgery and Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders (ADRD) through biomarker discovery. The justification of studying the surgical cohort is that at least one in five older adults who undergo major elective surgery develop POD with further risk of long term cognitive and functional decline, hallmarks of AD/ADRD. Elective surgery provides an ideal setting to identify abnormal biomarkers in older persons with subclinical or prodromal neurodegenerative processes that are unmasked by incident delirium. Our proposed work is innovative because it specifically addresses the knowledge gap of whether delirium unmasks brain vulnerability as determined by pre-existent abnormalities in plasma biomarkers, and that are otherwise unrecognized through conventional clinical assessments. This will be the first large-scale study of older surgical patients at risk for delirium that uses state-of-the-art proteomics tools to pursue biomarker discovery for unbiased screening of the human proteome via 7,000 biomarkers.

For more information, visit the award website or contact Abby Draper.