National Academy

Kiecolt-Glaser elected to Institute of Medicine

An Ohio State psychologist has been elected to the national Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a professor of both psychology and psychiatry, was among the 60 new members announced Oct. 15 by the Academy in Washington, D.C. Membership in the Institute of Medicine, as well as in the NAS or the National Academy of Engineering, is considered one of the highest honors American researchers can attain.

Kiecolt-Glaser's career has led her to a position of international prominence in the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology -- the study of the impact that psychological stress can have on the immune system. She and her colleagues at Ohio State's Institute of Behavioral Medicine Research have made remarkable strides in the last two decades that have helped bring the field from infancy to its current status as a thriving area of study.

Janice Kiecolt-Glaser has been elected to the national Institute of Medicine     file photo

By examining the impact of normal, daily stress on people in different populations, she and her colleagues have shown that activities such as students taking major examinations, care-giving to the ill or elderly, divorce and death of a spouse can all cause a long-term dysregulation of a person's immune system, which can expose them to serious disease.

The studies she and her colleagues have conducted have shown that:

• Hypnosis and other relaxation techniques may counteract the negative effects that stress can cause to the immune system (see research brief, Discovery page);

• Stress can slow the pace of wound healing, a critical factor in surgical recovery;

• High stress levels can diminish the effectiveness of both influenza and pneumonia vaccines;

• Spouses who suffer chronic stress from caring for Alzheimer's patients or the elderly can have a weakened immune system for years after the care has stopped; and

• Even minor stress, such as that of students facing major exams or newlyweds having their first fights, can lessen a person's immune response.

"Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser is a model medical researcher who is at the cutting edge of her field," explained Fred Sanfilippo, dean of the College of Medicine and Public Health and ice president for health sciences at Ohio State. "For years, she has done important basic research that has direct clinical relevance and which has broadened our understanding of complex interactions of biomedical processes. Her work is the epitome of patient-oriented research excellence."

C. Bradley Moore, vice president for research at Ohio State, agreed, saying, "Dr. Kiecolt-Glaser has consistently demonstrated an ability to design innovative research projects that produce important new knowledge -- knowledge that may have a dramatic effect on improving human health.

"To be elected to the IOM is a great honor for any researcher and a grand acknowledgment of the importance of the work she and her colleagues have accomplished over the years," said Moore, himself a member of the NAS.

Kiecolt-Glaser is currently the principal investigator on five National Institutes of Health multiyear research grants totaling nearly $22 million and has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, the Dana Foundation and the Fetzer Institute.

"The work I do is very strongly interdisciplinary, reflecting crucial contributions from my distinguished colleagues and collaborators in immunology and endocrinology," Kiecolt-Glaser said. "Most importantly, I see this honor as an acknowledgment of the seminal immunological work from Ron Glaser, who shares the primary responsibility for the design and conduct of our studies. Additionally, Bill Malarkey has made pivotal contributions in endocrinology. Without their efforts, and those of others in our group, the research would simply not have been possible."

She has served as a peer reviewer of research proposals for both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She currently serves on the editorial boards of three international research journals and has held similar posts with at least seven others.

She has been elected a fellow in both the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research and the American Psychological Association, is the immediate past president of the Division of Health Psychology in the APA and has been a council member in the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society.

She has been the author, or co-author, of 161 book chapters or papers published in some of the leading scientific journals, including The Lancet, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and the Psychological Bulletin. She is also the author of two books of fiction, both mystery novels published by Avon.

Kiecolt-Glaser received her bachelor's degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1972 and her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Miami in 1976. She joined the Ohio State faculty in 1978, rising through the ranks to her current position as professor of psychiatry and psychology. She also serves as the current director of the Division of Health Psychology in the University's Department of Psychiatry.

New members of the IOM are elected by a vote of the current membership. Candidates are nominated based on their major contributions to health and medicine, although researchers in the fields of social and behavioral sciences, law, administration and economics may be proposed as well. Members are told their election is both an honor and an obligation since they often are asked to serve on national committees investigating major issues of health research or policy.

Before this year's elections, there were 745 members of the Institute of Medicine. Only two other current Ohio State faculty members, Charles Capen, professor and chair of veterinary biosciences, and Clara Bloomfield, director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center, are on the IOM rolls.

Women at work

By Jo McCulty President's Council on Women's Issues Chair Jacqueline Royster addresses the crowd attending the Annual Reception for Women at the Ohio Union on Oct. 10. TWP Director Judy Fountain is seated, center, during Royster's remarks. The reception was structured to promote dialogue about the subject of the President and Provost's Diversity Lecture delivered on Oct. 10 by Joyce Fletcher, professor of management in the Center for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons Graduate School of Management, whose presentation was titled "Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work."

TWP, President's Council set agendas

Imagine a scenario in which a woman faculty or staff member at Ohio State contacts the offices of The Women's Place in Smith Laboratory with a need to develop strategies or solutions for a barrier she is facing at OSU. Imagine that this woman's concerns -- be they related to issues at work, in the classroom, or balancing personal and professional needs -- match similar concerns identified by a number of other women on campus. If a pattern emerges, women with similar experiences are invited to establish a support group so they can interact on a regular basis in a structured but informal environment. The Women's Place provides validation of the need to address the concern and provides administrative support for the group to meet. As one way to collect data about women's experience at the University, the group's institutional concerns are reported to the President's Council on Women's Issues, convened last spring. After researching and deliberating about that pattern of issues, the council makes a recommendation to the University president and provost for a policy that would remove a barrier to women's progress or otherwise confront the problem initially identified.

This scenario isn't fiction. It reflects the continuum of contact created by the structure of the new council and its relationship to The Women's Place (TWP), approaching the end of its second year in existence at Ohio State. With the council in place to identify issues critical to the environment for faculty, staff and student women, propose strategies to the administration and evaluate progress of women at the University, and The Women's Place poised to take on a multiyear research project and advance a number of goals designed to continue institutional progress toward a diverse university, the two entities are defining their place at Ohio State and setting agendas for the academic year.

TWP Director Judy Fountain describes the relationship structure as similar to that of a nonprofit agency: Fountain functions as an agency executive director who is advised by the council, functioning as a board of directors that makes policy recommendations.

"No other university has a model like this," Fountain said. "Some have a mechanism to identify women's issues, others have offices for women that provide programmatic support for women and some have councils devoted to women's policy issues, but there's no other integrated structure like this, where the macro advises the micro and vice versa."

In fact, the two entities' agendas cross paths regularly, because they both exist at Ohio State to advance the same essential mission: enhancing the capacity of the University and its individuals to more effectively deal with factors related to the recruitment and retention of women, most frequently through connecting and collaborating with existing services and resources. It's a lot of responsibility for a very small unit and a brand new council, Fountain acknowledges. But part of that responsibility is the duty to create processes that allow for shared responsibility across the University for improving the environment for women.

The Women's Place

Topping the agenda for the work of the council and The Women's Place will be a study that reverses the question often asked about women at Ohio State: Rather than seeking answers to why women leave, this study will analyze why women stay.

The New Faculty Women Cohort Project will follow approximately 25 new faculty women joining the University this autumn through their early years at Ohio State, and is tentatively scheduled to run through their fourth-year review, an element of tenure pursuit. The purpose of the project is to create interactions to enhance their connection to the University in ways that are meaningful; create strategies to increase retention of the group based on continuous feedback from them regarding what will keep them here; collect and analyze the most critical retention data to track the likelihood of departure; and, when possible, develop early intervention measures to prevent their departure.

Joyce Fletcher, right, converses with Carol Bowman, a member of the President's Council on Women's Issues, during the reception.

"The studies of women at Ohio State have tended to focus on failure, looking at where we've failed to keep women here. We wait until after the fact, through exit interviews, to find out what's wrong," Fountain said. "I see this study as a change agent piece that will make a difference in the long term. I honestly think it will start to set a pattern.

"These women could have gone anyplace, and could go anyplace. But they are here. Assumptions are constantly made about why people stay and go, but this study says we really want to know why those choices are made and what the University can do to reinforce in women that the right decision for them is to stay."

Expected outcomes of the project include nurturing faculty women who have a personal connection to Ohio State beyond the unit in which they work, and providing academic units and the Office of Academic Affairs access to current and ongoing data on which to base administrative decisions that enhance retention of women.

A similar analysis of new women staff is scheduled to begin next autumn.

The cohort projects fit into one of four principal goals TWP has outlined for the next two years: Expansion of high-tech services and information sources for women; increasing opportunities for women to connect; positively influencing policies and processes that affect women; and increasing financial support for women.

A number of strategies, typically designed around partnerships with other University entities, are proposed to reach these goals. They include:

• Enhancements to the TWP Web site to address faculty needs and to continually update the kinds of information available there.

• Continued revisions to listservs benefiting women.

• Development of a communication plan with quarterly updates tied to the Academic and Diversity Action plans.

• Provision of both structured and informal opportunities for women to meet together, including the Annual Reception for Women and co-sponsorship of three lectures within the President and Provost's Diversity Lecture Series this year, as well as "lunch and listen" brown bag events.

• Staffing the faculty cohort project, and providing both private and public opportunities to assist women faculty and staff in navigating the University.

• Implementing the initiatives planned by the President's Council on Women's Issues and providing policy influence and content expertise on issues affecting women.

• Increasing the financial commitments for the Critical Difference for Women (CDW) program by more than $3 million. This program has funded re-entry scholarships for 100 women this year who are age 25 or older and who interrupted their education to meet family obligations. In addition, CDW provides professional development grants for faculty, staff and student women and research grants for faculty and doctoral students conducting research on women.

President's Council on Women's Issues

The council met for the first time last spring, and has held its autumn quarterly meeting, as well. But between meetings, work groups being established will carry on the work of the council, specifically pursuing information around which to develop a set of policy recommendations in an initial annual report to be submitted in spring 2002.

A council subcommittee already has analyzed data from four recent comprehensive documents assessing the climate for women and women of color at Ohio State: The Council on Academic Excellence for Women institutional data report -- FY 1988-97; 1998 OSU faculty data based on a national survey from the Higher Education Research Institute; the 2000 SRI Report on the Retention of Women and Minorities; and recommendations from Reports Addressing Climate and Related Issues at OSU from 1987-92.

From those reports, historical patterns surrounding overarching issues of hiring, retention and climate that have a negative impact on women have been identified for attention and potential policy review and recommendations. Categorized as affecting women as a group, faculty women, staff women, faculty women of color and/or women on regional campuses, the council's analysis to date has identified a wide range of issues: higher separation rates for women vs. men, management practices that affect the climate for women and minorities in particular units, women's struggle to balance family and career, salary disparities, concerns about advancement potential for women, and overall impressions that communication and participation to, among and by women could be enhanced.

"We're finding that anecdotal information we hear matches these studies, and the issues in this study resonate strongly right now," council Chair Jacqueline Royster said. "We're also finding that location matters. Where we are, who we're with, the disciplines we're in -- all of that matters."

Royster, associate dean for faculty and research in the College of Humanities, described the worksheets created from the analysis as a springboard, not a prescription, for subsequent council action. Work groups will identify where intervention needs to occur to address specific patterns of concern, and who within the University must be made aware of policy implications. Strategies and recommendations will follow.

The groups include a data identification and analysis group, which will determine the most critical quantitative and qualitative data for systematically tracking women's progress and participation at Ohio State; a core evaluation group for The Women's Place, which will design and implement an annual evaluation of TWP; a faculty cohort project support group, which will design and implement the research component of the study and provide advice and support to the new faculty women; a staff cohort project support group, which will begin planning the project for new women staff scheduled to launch next year; a fiscal impact group, which will develop recommendations for institutional leaders about how fiscal decisions affect women at the University; and a communication group for the report on the institutional progress of women, which will identify and develop appropriate mechanisms for sustaining effective communication networks that supplement the council's annual report.

In addition, as part of ongoing identification of best practices in relation to recruitment and retention of women, the council also will begin looking at successful women working in Ohio State units in which women are underrepresented, and assessing what those units are doing to contribute to those successes.

In progress

Among the subjects affecting women that the council and TWP have addressed is the co-sponsorship of the Oct. 10 diversity lecture by Joyce Fletcher, who spoke about relational practice in the workplace -- sharing information and fostering teamwork and collaboration -- usually attributed to women, and sometimes identified as a weakness among workers, but also increasingly identified by researchers as a necessity for organizations to achieve their goals.

"Relational work is invisible. But it will play a major role in something like the faculty cohort project, which then has the advantage of carrying forward something very visible that can make a difference," Fountain said.

And though a number of items are still to come, TWP and the council are contributors to a number of activities already in motion. A few examples: A printed flier has been produced that lists more than 20 women's groups on campus, with descriptions and contact information; a University of Michigan video titled "Through My Lens," describing experiences of faculty women of color, has been distributed to interested units to start dialogue about diversity; and a 30-member Working Mothers Support Group is in full swing.