Upstate Medical University will award 430 degrees, certificates during Commencement May 5.

The event will be held at the SRC Arena and Events Center, 4585 W Seneca Turnpike, Syracuse. Doors open at 8:30 a.m. and ceremony starts at 10 a.m. Live stream of the Commencement will be available here.

Upstate Medical University will confer degrees on graduates from all four Upstate colleges: Graduate Studies, Health Professions, Medicine and Nursing.

Upstate President Mantosh Dewan, MD, will preside over the Commencement ceremonies and be assisted in awarding the degrees by the college deans: Mark Schmitt, PhD, Graduate Studies; Katherine Beissner, PT, PhD, Health Professions; Lawrence Chin, MD, FAANS, FACS, Norton College of Medicine; Tammy Austin-Ketch, PhD, FNP-BC, FAANP, College of Nursing.

The College of Graduate Studies will award 21 degrees (20 doctoral degrees, including 5 in biochemistry and 1 master’s degree).

The College of Health Professions will award 155 degrees (49 bachelor of science, 3 bachelor of professional studies, 67 master of science and 36 doctorate of physical therapy). Programs in the college include behavior analysis studies, clinical perfusion, medical imaging, medical technology, medical biotechnology, respiratory care, physical therapy, physician assistant and radiation therapy.

The Norton College of Medicine will award 152 degrees (134 doctor of medicine and 18 master of public health degrees.) Two students will receive MD, MPH degrees.

The College of Nursing will award 95 degrees and certificates (3 doctorate in nursing, 67 master of science, 18 bachelor of science degrees and 7 post-master certificates).

Four students—Jennifer Cheung, Oak Hill, Mich.; Michael Edward Garone, Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.; Nicholas Hoai Van Nguyen, San Diego, Calif.; and Brandon Lee Wyman, Shirley, N.Y.—will receive both an MD and a PhD.

Honorary degree recipients

Upstate will present three honorary degrees at Commencement.  The honorary degree recipients are:

—Jose Jalife, MD, PhD, professor emeritus of internal medicine and of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Michigan, and Distinguished Senior Investigator at the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research.

—Katelyn K. Jetelina, MPH, PhD, founder and publisher of “Your Local Epidemiologist” and senior scientific consultant at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

—Nader Rifai, PhD, professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, the Oprah S. Platt Chair in Laboratory Medicine and director of clinical chemistry at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Jetelina will offer the Commencement Address.

José Jalife, MD, PhD, widely considered a leader in his field, has been focused on bringing sophisticated mathematical and biophysical concepts to increase the understanding of the mechanisms of life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias, from the molecule to the bedside.

He joined Upstate as a postdoctoral fellow in 1973 and later joined the Pharmacology faculty, ultimately serving as the department’s chair. While at Upstate, Jalife created Upstate’s Institute for Cardiovascular Research, growing it to more than 40 faculty, staff, post-docs, and students.

His innovative research and more than 350 peer-reviewed articles “wrote the book” on cardiac electrical impulse propagation and the mechanisms for the initiation and maintenance of cardiac arrhythmias. He is co-author, with Drs. Douglas Zipes and William Stevenson, of “Cardiac Electrophysiology: From Cell to Bedside,” now in its seventh edition. It is but one of the 15 books Jalife has authored or edited.

A native of Mexico, Jalife earned his medical degree at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. After clinical training in Spain, he returned to Mexico to conduct research in cardiovascular pharmacology and physiology at the Universidad Nacional and the National Institute of Cardiology.

Other contributions include studies on the cellular mechanisms of dynamic vagal control of heart rate and atrioventricular conduction and the mechanisms of pacemaker synchronization in the sinoatrial node; non-linear dynamics of excitation and propagation in isolated cardiac tissues and the application of video-imaging techniques.

His work has led to major advances toward understanding molecular and cellular bases of the initiation and propagation of electrical impulses in the heart and the fundamental mechanisms of complex life-threatening arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death.

For more than 30 years, his research has been funded by National Institutes of Health R01 and Program Project grant funding. Across the years, he has trained more than 120 scientists for research careers at almost every educational level.

As an instructor in the College of Medicine at Upstate, Jalife was personally dedicated to providing outstanding pharmacology training to students, through his teaching, and by leading a continuous quality improvement with faculty.

While the program was under his leadership, it was consistently rated by medical students as most outstanding.

Jalife’s honors are numerous and include the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American College of Cardiology, the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Heart Rhythm Society, the Lucian Award for Research in Circulatory Diseases from McGill University, and the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

Katelyn K. Jetelina, MPH, PhD, is an epidemiologist, data scientist and a skilled scientific communicator, with expertise in health outcomes among vulnerable populations, diffusion of innovations in diverse community settings, stakeholder engagement, and scientific communication and knowledge translation.

She previously has served as director of Population Health Analytics at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, as an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and as scientific advisor to the White House.

Over the past decade, Jetelina has conducted research on topics with vulnerable populations exposed to violence: victims of child abuse, human trafficking, intimate partner violence, gun violence, and police officers.

As part of her research portfolio, she has developed interventions using smart and personal technology and analyzed “big data” from health systems. Her current research interests are improving health access and outcomes for vulnerable populations, characterizing social factors related to healthcare quality outcomes, scientific communication, and combating misinformation and disinformation.

Jetelina started a public health blog/newsletter in March 2020 to update students, faculty, and staff on developments of the COVID-19 pandemic. She posted about topics including epidemic modeling, vaccine mechanisms and approval processes, the utility of masks, policy decisions, variant monitoring, the genetic and biological features of the SARS-COV2 virus and antiviral medication. Millions of followers were drawn to the broad, deep and accessible-to-the-lay-public blog.

Jetelina’s e-newsletter “Your Local Epidemiologist” has grown to serve an international audience of more than 200,000 subscribers.

She has been invited to share information and discuss approaches to communication at the White House, in interviews on the PBS News Hour, the New York Times Ezra Klein Show, “When Science Speaks” and other public outlets, as well as at numerous universities and at conferences across the country.

She has served as an invited panelist at the National Academy of Medicine and Science meetings, one on scientific translation, and another on addressing inaccurate and misleading information. She served on the board of directors for the Society for Advancement of Violence and Injury Research and as an expert advisor to the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.

Jetelina is a senior scientific advisor to several government and non-profit agencies, including the White House, the CDC, and Resolve to Save Lives. She has received numerous national awards for her communication through “Your Local Epidemiologist,” including the National Academies Award for Scientific Communication, the Public Health Practice Award from the American Public Health Association, and the Emergency Management and Medical Operations Field Operations and Response Medal from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Nader Rifai, PhD, is a researcher whose contributions to medical science are complemented by his effective dissemination of scientific knowledge, capitalizing on advances in technology.

Rifai’s research focused on the development and evaluation of assays for biochemical markers of cardiovascular disease and myocardial injury, initially on lipid and apolipoprotein testing in a variety of pathological and physiological conditions. Several of the assays he developed were adapted into commercial kits in clinical use worldwide.

Rifai’s work has also changed the practice of clinical chemistry, moving the FDA to clear several high-sensitivity C-Reactive Protein assays for clinical use. He represented the U.S. clinical chemistry community in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention—sponsored international effort to standardize the assay and to participate in writing the new CDC/American Heart Association-sponsored national guidelines for the use of inflammatory markers in cardiovascular disease. Rifai’s work has been cited more than 90,000 times; 19 of his papers have been cited more than a thousand times.

Rifai’s focus has shifted to the dissemination of scientific information and E-learning. In 2015 he embarked on an online, cloud-based teaching platform designed to teach pathology and laboratory medicine. The initiative is a collaboration between the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, and Area9, a leader in education technology.

When completed, it will contain some 120 courses in all disciplines of laboratory medicine including clinical chemistry, hematology/coagulation, molecular diagnostics, microbiology, clinical immunology and transfusion medicine. More than 100 faculty members from thirteen countries are currently involved. Launched in February 2017 under the name NEJM Knowledge+/AACC Learning Lab for Laboratory Medicine, more than 100 courses have been released free of charge. It is expected to become the de facto backbone of all residency and fellowship training programs in laboratory medicine — and the main source of continuing medical education.

In the past decade, Rifai has been the editor-in-chief of the journal Clinical Chemistry, the most cited journal in laboratory chemistry. Along with enhancing the stature of the journal, he built a solid educational program with multiple features including Clinical Case Studies, Journal Club, and podcasts. He also launched a program called Reaching Out to the World, in which articles from the Journal are made available to scientific societies for translation to their members. More than 2,500 articles have been translated into one or more of fifteen languages. These efforts led to the launching of the Chinese language version of Clinical Chemistry.

He has been honored with the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine’s Howard Morris Distinguished Clinical Chemist Award. The American Association for Clinical Chemistry honored him with the 2020 Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2015 Award for Outstanding Contributions.

Caption: Honorary degree recipients are, from left, José Jalife, Katelyn K. Jetelina and Nader Rifai.