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Faculty

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Overview

Clinical minds and gifted hands

Our professors have decades of experience in emergency and operating rooms, family practices and medical labs. Outside of the classroom, they are committed to the wellness of the populations they treat. Inside the classroom, their focus is on instilling that commitment in you.

In addition to teaching you, they are trusted leaders in the communities they serve, as well as respected voices in their fields and specialties. They are teaching physicians who practice what they publish. For them, research doesn’t end at discovery — it includes applying those discoveries to solve the challenges facing today's health care landscape, from lowering infant mortality rates and improving patient recovery times to making immunizations accessible to at-risk communities at home and all over the world.

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A professor in scrubs shown in the operating room at St. Vincent’s in Bridgeport.

Under the bright lights

Christine Van Cott in the operating room at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport.

Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Christine Van Cott

Professor Christine Van Cott accepts her Excellence in Teaching Award on stage during an awards ceremony.

Honoring excellence

Christine Van Cott accepts her Excellence in Teaching Award in September 2016. Honorees are nominated by members of the university community. The award recognizes professors who foster high quality academic programs, a student-oriented environment and a sense of community.

Out of the classroom and into the operating room

What was the best time in Dr. Christine Van Cott’s life? Spending a year in New Zealand with her family while doing a surgery fellowship. The second best? Interning at the FBI. But developing the surgery curriculum and teaching students at the School of Medicine ranks pretty high.

A surgical oncologist affiliated with St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport, the primary clinical partner for the School of Medicine, Van Cott encourages her students to build relationships with patients.

“It’s an honor to know these patients and to hear their stories. It’s also OK to cry with your patients and for your patients. They day you stop feeling is the day you should no longer be a doctor,” she says. 

Realizing that she cannot save every patient, she’s come to measure success differently.

“My successes are getting somebody to their daughter’s wedding or getting them to the birth of their first grandchild.”

Van Cott acknowledges that she’s not a “classroom” educator. “My students learn in the trauma bay, in the operating room and in the emergency room. They learn in my office, they learn on the fly, they learn in the hallway.”

Research and Publications

Guiding lights in the world of medicine

Our faculty are award-winning physicians with decades of practice experience in multiple specialties, as well as passionate educators who have taught in numerous universities, hospitals and other institutions. They have recevied prestigious fellowships, served as chaired members in international societies and even host nationally syndicated radio shows.

Both clinicians and scholars, our professors contribute to the advancement of medicine through groundbreaking medical research, and regularly publish their work in trade journals and magazines.

Our faculty regularly contributes to the advancement of medicine through groundbreaking research in subjects as diverse as renal disease, veterans’ health issues, public health community program planning and cannabis pharmacology.

Associate Professor Carolyn Macica's, PhD research on metabolic bone disorders, namely the most common form of familial childhood rickets, X-linked hypophosphatemia (XLH), led to the creation of Quinnipiac’s XLH Day program, a patient advocacy event and symposium held at the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine.

Journals and Publications

  • Advances in Physiology Education
  • Connecticut Medicine
  • Clinical Science
  • American Journal of Physiology
  • The Physiologist
  • Academic Medicine
  • Journal of Molecular Signaling
  • British Journal of Pharmacology
  • Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics

Societies and Memberships

  • Alpha Omega Alpha
  • National Institutes of Health (NIH)
  • Association of American Medical Colleges
  • American Physiological Society
  • American Society of Nephrology
  • Society for Neuroscience (SfN)
  • British Pharmacological Society (BPS)
  • International Cannabinoid Research Society (ICRS)
  • United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) 

Radio

  • Medical Discovery News

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A professor working with a medical student on a sonogram technique in an examination room.

Tools of the trade

Professor Thomas works with Cameron Harrison MD ’17 on a sonogram technique. Thomas teaches an ultrasound course and has been hard at work developing an interdisciplinary ultrasound curriculum with the School of Health Sciences' Diagnostic Medical Sonography department — something not offered at many medical schools.

Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Listy Thomas

Patient-centered care, student-centered learning

In emergency rooms and urgent care centers, physicians must draw upon an array of expertise. Beyond physical exam skills, they must employ patient-centered communication skills to arrive at an accurate diagnosis. This is something that Professor Listy Thomas, an emergency physician and Assistant Director of the Clinical Arts and Sciences course knows very well, and something she instills in all of her students.

“We’ve been moving away from the physician-centric interview for a little while now, but in practice, it’s still something people fall back on,” Thomas said. “That’s something we address in my course.”

A medical professor at the front of a classroom speaking to students about procedures.

Holistic approach

Professor Listy Thomas speaks with first year medical students about organ systems before leading a small group of students through a role playing exercise of a patient and intake doctor exchange.

The course teaches a mix of hard clinical and interpersonal skills, and emphasizes small group learning in a hands-on environment, matching about 8 students with a single faculty member. “We do a lot of faculty development to make sure that preceptors and students are on the same page,” Thomas said.

When she isn’t expanding the toolsets of future physicians, Professor Thomas dons the role of academic career advisor, working closely with third- and fourth-year med students to match them to the right specialty both during and after residency. “It’s a year-long process of growth,” Thomas explained. “It takes a lot of mentoring.”

This process consists of more than just skills assessments and one-on-one meetings. Thomas and other faculty review students’ personality tests, gauge their career outlooks and personal goals, review their strengths their actual performance during their clinical rotations.

“Students come to us younger and younger now, and they come in with aspirations,” Thomas said. “We try to match those expectations and ideals with reality to find what and where they will be most successful and happy.”

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A medical student speaks with a practicing phyician in the hallway of the Center for Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.

Crossing paths

Second-year medical student Samantha Moore, left, talks with Dr. Traci Marquis-Eydman in the hallway of the Center for Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.

Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Traci Marquis-Eydman

A gift of hope and wellness

For their spring breaks, medical students Claire Barton ‘20, Katherine Vaillancourt ‘20, Brian Wasicek ’20 and Michalee Mayers ’20 wanted to take a break — from studying medicine to applying it. The four students approached Dr. Traci Marquis-Eydman about their desire to take part in Quinnipiac’s Alternative Spring Break program. Marquis-Eydman set them up with House of Hope, a Warwick, Rhode Island-based non-profit organization dedicated to preventing homelessness and addressing the personal and social trauma typically related to it.

“Many of these people often don’t have the resources to even get to a free clinic,” said Barton. “The homeless are so often treated like second-class citizens — or worse, are ignored.”

At first, Barton and her peers were unsure of what kind of impact they wanted to make. They quickly turned to Professor Marquis-Eydman as a mentor and consultant for their group. “They originally had several ideas for services that they wanted to provide,” said Marquis-Eydman. “My goal was to help them narrow down which ones were most clinically relevant to the population they’d be serving.”

Marquis-Eydman also invited the group to her home to prepare for their outreach. They went through various drills and run-throughs, interviewing volunteers from several age groups, including teenagers. “There are just so many variables with street outreach,” Marquis-Eydman said. “It’s not all clinical. You need to know how to communicate, when to push and when not to push.”

Armed with a game plan, Barton and her peers took to the community streets, providing outreach and assistance to the homeless of Warwick. They took their medical histories, conducted VI-SPDATs — surveys that prioritize the homeless in Rhode Island for placement in permanent housing — and held foot clinics at 3 homeless shelters in Providence and Cranston. 

Due to the trip’s success, Marquis-Eydman and the medical school plan to continue their collaboration with House of Hope, extending volunteering opportunities to both M1 and M2 students, and expanding the program to offer trips with different focuses.

“We are so proud of our students who went to House of Hope,” Marquis-Eydman said. “They truly exemplify the kind of students that we look for here at Quinnipiac.”

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