President’s Message

Greetings members and colleagues,

It seems like a long time since Linda Ivany delivered the keynote at the conference in April. The fall semester is well underway and likely the honeymoon phase is over. Here at Jefferson Community College, we are just returning from the long Columbus Day weekend.

Dr. Monica LeClerc, professor of biology, is taking a sabbatical in spring 2019. She is planning to do some research on Ixodes. I am excited because it spans ecology and molecular biology. Bill McMahon, lab technician, has done some background research on safety protocols. Dr. LeClerc’s sabbatical research ideas are starting to gain some momentum and even though we will miss Monica in the classroom her research is going to be exciting.

The NABT Conference is quickly approaching, November 8 – 11th in San Diego, California. The HAPS annual conference is May 22 – 26, 2019, in Portland, Oregon. I hope many of us are able to attend these other professional conferences this year as we will not be holding an annual conference in 2019. Our next annual conference will be held in April 2020 at Dutchess Community College. I am looking forward to visiting Poughkeepsie again.

I will close with what I know best at this time of my life and that is the new clinical doctorate – Doctorate of Clinical Laboratory Science (DCLS). One student has already graduated from Rutgers University with their DCLS, and 7 of us are scheduled to graduate from University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in summer 2019. We are UTMB’s first cohort. Currently, only Rutgers and UTMB offer the degree, but Kansas University Medical Center will offer their first class in August 2019. For advising purposes, below is a list of program directors.

• Kansas University Medical Center – Dr. Renee Hodgkins, DCLS program director, rhodgkins@kumc.edu
• UTMB – Dr. Eddie Salazar, DCLS program director, jhsalaza@utmb.edu
• Rutgers – Dr. Nadine Fydryszewski, DCLS program director, fydrysna@shp.rutgers.edu

Follow this degree closely. I think it will be a paradigm shift in medicine and it will certainly impact how we advise our biology students into the Clinical Laboratory Science field.

I wish you all the best in this very busy time. I hope folks are able to connect at NABT or HAPS and certainly we will reconnect at Dutchess Community College in spring 2020.

Yours truly,

Jeffrey S. Kiggins

ESATYCB President
SUNY Jefferson Community College