Suzanne Higgins, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Marshall Dispatches Mobile Clinic, Treats Flood Victims, Helps Local Providers

The Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine’s mobile medical unit is preparing to return to Huntington after a week’s service in…

The Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine’s mobile medical unit is preparing to return to Huntington after a week’s service in flood-ravaged Rainelle.

“This was our first deployment,” said Charles “Chuck” Clements, M.D., professor of family and community health and faculty advisor for Marshall Medical Outreach, a volunteer-staffed program providing health care to homeless people in downtown Huntington since 2011.

In response to the historic June floods in southern West Virginia, a partnership formed among the medical school, Marshall’s School of Pharmacy, Marshall Health, and Cabell Huntington Hospital to delivered much needed health care to the these devastated communities.

Clements led a team of about two dozen volunteers and the mobile medical unit on the 130-mile journey to Greenbrier County.

Under a series of white tents and in the mobile unit’s two examining rooms, they treated wounds, administered tetanus shots, offered counseling services, and secured medicines for prescriptions that were lost in flood water.

“The big thing with disasters is people lose what we take for granted – water, electricity and heat,” said Clements. “We deploy (to downtown Huntington) every month without any of that, so we came prepared to operate without those necessities,” he said.

“We have lights that are battery operated, we have propane heaters, we have portable water containers. We are self-contained and can move very quickly.”

CEO of Rainelle Medical Clinic, Kristie Rader, said she appreciated the reinforcements.

“Our staff has been running nonstop, running on fumes since we were first flooded,” said Rader.

“It’s giving our staff a break to tend to their own families and clean-out their own homes, many were damaged and destroyed. So it’s been a huge help to us.”

Marshall Medical Outreach is an initiative started by med students in 2011. Medical student volunteers worked throughout the mobile clinic effort in Rainelle.

Logistics for the effort were handled by Brian Gallagher, R.Ph., J.D., Chief of Government Relations and Health Care Policy for Marshall Health. Gallagher worked with state and local officials who helped identify Rainelle as a high-priority area.

“These are our colleagues in Greenbrier but it stretches statewide,” said Gallagher. “Marshall Medical Outreach will go wherever in the state that we’re needed.”

“The two prime directives that we’re trying to follow is to see that there are no redundancies, so we don’t want to double up on efforts. The second thing is we don’t want there to be what I call dark corners, somewhere where we’re not shining a light and people aren’t getting services,” he said.

Cabell Huntington Hospital provided personnel and the medical supplies for the temporary clinic.

Marshall’s Medical Outreach program was started by med students, has expanded, and now includes pharmacy students and providers of multiple disciplines, all volunteers.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.

Community to Get Sneak Peek of National PBS Coal Wars Film

If you’re a West Virginia history buff, West Virginia Public Broadcasting and the National Coal Heritage Area had you in mind as they arranged a preview of a national documentary in southern West Virginia. A special sneak peek of The Mine Wars, a new documentary from the PBS AMERICAN EXPERIENCE series, is scheduled Thursday, Jan. 21 at 6:30pm, in the Hulett C. Smith Theater at Tamarack.

The evening will include extended program excerpts, refreshments, and conversation led by the series’ Executive Director and former West Virginia Public Broadcasting filmmaker, Mark Samels. The idea for the film came from Samels, who spent a significant period of his career in West Virginia. He says he learned firsthand how deeply the Mountain State is connected to coal mining.

“This is a truly American story about people fighting for their dignity and the rights they believed had been promised by their government, but which had been denied by their employers,” said Samels, now at WBGH-TV in Boston.

“The Mine Wars shows a different side of the miners, who were willing to do a back-breaking and dangerous job, yet who were often dismissed and denigrated by the rest of the country,” he said.

At the dawn of the 20th century, coal was the fuel that powered the nation. Yet few Americans thought much about the men who blasted the black rock from underground and hauled it to the surface. The Mine Wars tells the overlooked story of the miners in the mountains of southern West Virginia — native mountaineers, African American migrants, and European immigrants — who came together in a protracted struggle for their rights.

Labor Organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones came to West Virginia to convince coal miners to join the United Mine Workers of America. Photo circa 1910-1915.

“We are proud to bring back Mark Samels, who cut his teeth doing award-winning work while he was at WNPB, our station in Morgantown, like West Virginia: A Film History, the Different Drummer series, and several co-productions with the BBC,” said Scott Finn, Executive Director of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

“We know those in attendance will find the evening both informative and fascinating.”

The Tamarack preview event is free and open to the public.

“The Mine Wars” brings the history of the struggle to unionize the southern West Virginia coalfields back to life,” said Christy Bailey, Executive Director of the National Coal Heritage Area. “We are so pleased to co-sponsor this preview event and honored that some of the local historians who are featured in the film will be joining us to share their perspectives as well.”

The 2-hour AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Mine Wars premieres on PBS stations Tuesday, Jan. 26 at 9p.m.

Inspired by Her Mother, WV Woman Revolutionized Long-Term Care For Elderly

Keren Brown Wilson of War, WV says it all started with her mom, Jessie. At just age 55, Jessie had a stoke that confined her to nursing homes for the next decade.

“She was poor, so she was a Medicaid client, and that meant not very many choices for her,” explained Brown Wilson.

At the time Wilson told her mother she was planning on a career in gerontology, the study of older adults and aging.

“Well, why aren’t you doing something to help people like me?” asked Jessie.

This turned out to be a defining moment for the young woman who would go on and establish the assisted living model of long term care in this country – and the world.

Known in the field of elder care as the Mother of Assisted Living, Keren Brown Wilson, the McDowell County native, is one of 4 national leaders profiled in West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inspiring West Virginians radio special, airing Monday, Dec. 28 at 8pm.

Now 66-years-old, Wilson’s story is featured in the book Being Mortal by Boston surgeon Atul Gawande. It’s been on The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, and it tells the story of how Wilson revolutionized the way millions of older people live.

“Nursing homes were really stripped-down hospitals. People were in a ward. They were literally in a bed,” said Wilson. “They were told when to go to bed. They were told when to get up. They were told what to eat.”

“They were told what they could do and what they couldn’t do – and they really had no autonomy. They had no say in their lives. And that was very dehumanizing.”

After becoming a professor of gerontology at Portland State University, Wilson’s idea was to bring health care services to the elderly in low income housing – allowing those seniors to remain at home.

But she couldn’t get money from the state of Oregon to help pay for the services. The only services Medicaid would help pay were those in traditional nursing homes.

In addition, authorities believed that residents would be unsafe if they had more control of their lives.

But Wilson and her husband Michael DeShane, also a gerontologist, believed they could create a safe place for elders where they felt life was worth living. They borrowed several million dollars to build a facility.

“No one really believed it could be done. And no one thought that we could give nursing care in a
non-nursing setting,” remembers Wilson. “No one believed that people would be safe. I mean people were convinced that it would kill people.”

Against the odds, they succeeded. And the concept of assisted living – or more specifically Wilson’s vision of it – was born. Not only did that early facility serve lower income people for a flat rate, the pilot study showed that residents had better health outcomes than those who lived in nursing homes.

This new model of care for the elderly got lots of national media coverage. Shortly after, Wilson was approached by investors from Wall Street to take the idea public. For the next few years she oversaw the building of hundreds of assisted living facilities across the U.S., with 3000 employees in 18 states.

It’s now the model worldwide.

By the end of the 1990s, Wilson left the world of corporate assisted living and started a foundation. The Jessie F. Richardson Foundation is named after her mother and assists underserved elders in the U.S. and around the world.

“I would like to be remembered as someone who cared, who cared about those who had less than they needed to live comfortably,” said Wilson.

“From a religious perspective, there is the perspective that those for whom much is given, much is expected. That definitely is a lesson I learned in childhood,” she said.

“We always are able to do more than we think we can. And I just want to do as much as I can.”

Editor’s note: Enjoy the stories of more than 2 dozen Inspiring West Virginians during an encore presentation of all 6 programs, Dec. 29 – Dec. 31, beginning at 8pm on West Virginia Public Radio.

Mingo County Native Taking Huge Leaps in Quantum Computing and Networking

Rod Van Meter strolls the halls at Duke University in Durham, N.C., knowing his very satisfying year here as a visiting professor on Fellowship is wrapping up.

Soon he’ll be returning to Keio University in Japan, and Shonan Fujisawa campus, about an hour southwest of Tokyo near the coast.

Forty-nine year old Van Meter of Williamson, WV is one of just a few thousand scientists and engineers in the world working on the future of Information Technology – quantum computers and networks.

The very first book in the world on quantum networking, published in 2014, was written by Rod Van Meter.

This Mingo County native is one of 4 national leaders profiled in West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inspiring West Virginians radio special, airing Monday, Dec. 28 at 8pm.

Van Meter explains quantum computing is using individual atoms, electrons, and photons to calculate the results of certain functions that we can’t figure out how to calculate efficiently using the regular computers that are in cell phones, laptops, desktops, or what we call classical computers.

“So what we would like to achieve with quantum computing is to solve certain kinds of problems faster than classical computers, and by faster what we mean in this case is what we would like them to be exponentially faster,” said Van Meter.

Once they are built, quantum computers could be a thousand times faster, or a million times faster, or even a trillion times faster than computers are today.

According to Van Meter, quantum computing will be a dramatic paradigm shift that will open up new opportunities, new fields and applications that no one has yet even imagined. And in other cases, it will simply make solving big problems faster.

“Or it might help us understand the way molecules behave inside living cells, and that’s very exciting and has the potential to advance science a lot,” he added.

The commercial availability of quantum computers is still a decade away – and it’s going to take about a $1billion in investment.

“Because there are a lot of engineering problems that have to be solved that are difficult to solve in a small-scale research environment,” Van Meter explains. “When is somebody like Google or Intel going to come along and sink $1 billion into solving a lot of these problems?”

“They’ll do it when they see that the core technology has gotten there, and of course when they see that there will be a business advantage for them to actually do this,” he said.

And how computers are connected to share information and processing power will change too. That’s what Van Meter explores in his book Quantum Networking.

The man who is envisioning the future of IT has worked at Keio University for the last 10 years. On a previous work assignment there, he met and married his wife Mayumi. They have two teenage daughters.

But despite living 6000 miles away, Van Meter still makes it back to West Virginia every year. And while he was at Duke, he came home to Williamson every month.

“My family is very, very close, and we have stayed close despite the distance. It’s possible to do that. You have to put in a lot of effort. And we do,” said Van Meter.

Growing up, Rod was extremely asthmatic, repeatedly landing in the emergency room. Even so, he was always an excellent student, graduating Williamson High School at age 16.

On a recent trip home he pointed out the sound of the whistle train heard down the tracks.

“To me the sound of that diesel horn is really the sound of Williamson. I used to lie awake at night, on nights when I couldn’t sleep, and to me it’s kind of a lonely but comforting sound,” said Van Meter.

“You can leave West Virginia without leaving West Virginia behind. In that sense, I guess I will always carry both my family and West Virginia in my heart.”

WV Values and Appreciation for Education Helps This CEO Empower Women Worldwide

She’s so beautiful that after retiring as a global executive for IBM, she was pursued by the Wilhelmina Modeling Agency as a mature model, appearing in numerous ads for national commercials.

But today Marilyn Johnson is one of the most high profile African-American businesswomen in the country. She’s CEO of one of the most prestigious women’s organizations in the world – the International Women’s Forum headquartered in Washington, DC.

From the time she was very young, the middle child of 5 had a fire in her belly to succeed. She wanted to succeed at everything.

However, being from an African American family in the Kanawha Valley of the 1950s, there were hurdles to overcome.

The Kanawha County native is one of four national leaders profiled in West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s 2015 Inspiring West Virginians radio documentary, airing Dec. 28 at 8pm.

“If there was a spelling bee, I wanted to be one of the last ones standing. If we all had to go to the chalkboard to do math, I took my time to print neatly, check my work before they called on me to explain my problem,” said Johnson.

“I wanted to excel and I had educators that saw more in me than I saw in myself.”

After earning two Masters Degrees in education from Marshall University – while at one point working as the weekend weather girl at WSAZ-TV – Johnson taught briefly in Cabell County. But then she headed for California to interview with IBM.

“I knew from the very first conversation with the very first manager at IBM that if I invested in my career the way I invested in my education in West Virginia, it was a meritocracy,” said Johnson.

“The better or more skilled you were the more responsibility you would get, the better performance that you delivered, the more opportunities that you would receive. And with that comes leadership, compensation, escalation and success – defined by moving up that corporate ladder.”

Over a period of 35 years, while raising her two children, she went from showing customers how to use IBM business equipment, to Vice President in charge of developing IBM’s strategy for marketing to businesses that were owned by ethnically diverse people, and women leaders around the world.

In that role, Johnson expanded IBM’s market share significantly. When she retired in 2012, IBM had nearly 400,000 employees in more than 70 countries – and it remains an iconic leader in the IT industry.

“Marilyn is perpetually visionary, she’s a lifelong learner. She really is inspirational,” said Denise Evans, Johnson’s successor at IBM. “She’s always uplifting. Even when giving constructive criticism, it’s uplifting.”

Then, in 2014, came the biggest challenge of Marilyn Johnson’s career. She was invited to be the new Chief Executive Officer of the International Women’s Forum.

This global network of 6000 preeminent women leaders across all fields and professions not only comes together to help each other, but it also provides programs to develop future women leaders in law, government, business, science, education, media, sports and other fields.

“Our leadership development experience helps women in 33 countries in 24 time zones on six continents find their voice, find their network, educate on expert topics and raise their influence level around the world,” said Johnson.

Another draw to the new position in Washington, DC was that it brought Marilyn Johnson, the little girl from the Kanawha Valley, closer to home, and family.

“My parents are in their 80s. I can be HOME in just a few hours. I can wake up and know that I can have lunch, or dinner, or both – with my parents in West Virginia,” she said.

“There is a true benefit to being from a place that wants you to succeed, and wants you to represent the best of its values. So when I go home, I go to West Virginia.”

Global Science and Business Leaders Featured In Inspiring West Virginians Radio Documentary

Inspiring West Virginians tells the stories of West Virginians who are exceptional leaders in science and business. We visit them where they are, learn about what they do, hear stories of their childhoods and the influence of a West Virginia upbringing. Added to that are the perspectives of friends, relatives and colleagues.

Coming from small towns or modest means, they’ve all overcome hardships and hurdles on their way to the top of their fields.

These individuals credit their Mountain State upbringing and the values they were taught here as factors in their achievements. In return, they’re giving back to their home state in various ways.

Producer/Host Jean Snedegar of Elkins has profiled more than 2 dozen of these innovators from West Virginia throughout the course of the series, beginning in 2010. She’s traveled from Washington State to Washington, D.C., down country roads in McDowell County to a farm in Berkeley County.

“West Virginia has produced an amazing array of world-class scientists, engineers and business people, and their stories are part of the rich tapestry of this state,” said Snedegar. “I hope their journeys inspire people from all walks of life, but especially students who may say to themselves, ‘If that person can do it, so can I!’”

Featured in the upcoming December 28 broadcast:

Keren Brown Wilson, 66, an entrepreneur and world pioneer of the assisted living movement. Wilson is a McDowell County native and coal miner’s daughter. After becoming a professor of gerontology at Portland State University, she opened the first assisted living facility in Portland, then developed assisted living facilities throughout the United States.

Keren Brown Wilson of McDowell County, founder of assisted living model of elder care.

Keren Brown Wilson now heads a foundation – named after her mother, Jessie F Richardson – aimed at providing better care for under-served elders in the United States and abroad.

Rod Van Meter, 49, from Mingo County, a computer engineer who works at the forefront of the next generation of computing worldwide. A quantum computer and network architect, Van Meter recently published the world’s first book on Quantum Networking, the basis for the future of the internet.

Rod Van Meter of Mingo County is a quantum computer network architect.

Rod Van Meter is also an associate professor at Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus in the city of Fujisawa, Japan.

Brian Anderson, 37, the Director of West Virginia University’s Energy Institute. The Roane County native is a world authority in geothermal energy and gas hydrates, a champion of sustainable energy, and a tireless advocate for making West Virginia’s fossil energy resources – coal, oil and gas – both productive and environmentally sustainable.

Brian Anderson of Roane County is a world authority on geothermal energy and gas hydrates.

In 2013 Brian Anderson was the winner of the President’s Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the only person from West Virginia to receive that honor.

Marilyn Johnson, 62, leads the International Women’s Forum in Washington, DC, an organization of more than 6000 top women leaders around the world. A native of Kanawha Valley, Marilyn spent 35 years as an executive for IBM – rising to Vice-President of Market Development – making her one of the top African-American female leaders in the IT industry.

Marilyn Johnson, a native of Kanawha County, also serves on the boards of numerous organizations, including the National Council of Negro Women in Washington, DC.

A graduate of Marshall University, Marilyn Johnson led a group responsible for developing IBM’s strategy for, and marketing to, businesses owned or operated by Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and women around the world.

Executive Producer Suzanne Higgins of West Virginia Public Broadcasting is Senior Producer for Inspiring West Virginians.

-The series is made possible by the generous support of the Myles Family Foundation – inspiring West Virginians to soar.

– In December 2014, we featured four incredibly inspiration leaders in the Season 5 one-hour radio documentary. Click the player below to listen to the program.

This West Virginia Public Radio series is produced and presented by Jean Snedegar, an independent producer based in Elkins, and Suzanne Higgins, Executive Producer for West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

The series is made possible by the generous support of the Myles Family Foundation – inspiring West Virginians to soar.