Dr. Barbara A. Smith is a Professor at Florida State University and University of South Florida Colleges of Nursing, and Adjunct Professor at Michigan State University, College of Veterinary Medicine and University of Malawi Kamazu College of Nursing. She was a visiting professor at FON CMU for 7 weeks throughout January and February 2019.
You are a professor in Schools of Nursing and in Veterinary Medicine. How does your work interconnect the two disciplines?
I have an interest in infectious diseases of zoonotic origin, particularly HIV. In Tanzania I did a cross species study in how brucellosis in cattle was transferring to humans. Brucellosis causes miscarriages. In humans it has similar symptoms to malaria. Clinics in Tanzania have very limited diagnostic equipment so when anti-malarial treatments were not having an effect on the patients, the assumption was that the patients were resistant to the anti-malarial drugs. We researched the use of blood spot testing for more accurate diagnosis and found that many of the patients with malarial symptoms had brucellosis.
What connects you to CMU FON and kind of work are you doing here?
I am teaching and helping faculty and PhD students with their research manuscripts. I am giving a talk on Physiological Theory in Nursing and Related Research and the importance of using bio markers to support research outcomes. I’ve known Dr. Wipada for more than twenty years. She attended the University of Alabama where I worked.
Where are you from and how did you get started in your academic career?
I grew up in a small town in Ohio, USA and I did all my advanced education there. I worked there as a nurse for ten years before embarking on my academic career. I was asked to work on a project at the National Academy of Medicine. It was a consultation on what the government’s role should be in nursing and nursing education. That position introduced me to funders and so from there I decided to do a PhD in Physiology. I was interested in cardiac rehabilitation, helping people to recover after heart attacks so I gave heart attacks to rats! Bed rest was part of the received wisdom for treatment of heart attack patients at the time but my research showed that this was counterproductive and that it was more beneficial to get people exercising and moving as much and as soon as possible after surgery to aid healing. Rats have similar healing processes to humans so that’s how I gathered my data.
My interest in exercise led me to HIV research. When I was teaching at Ohio State University a student of mine approached me about working with her at an AIDS clinic to research the effect of exercise on HIV patients. We were awarded a grant by the National Institute of Health. The belief at the time was that exercise would speed up the wasting effect of the disease but our study showed that exercise was safe and helpful, both psychologically and physiologically. I saw this benefits of this approach again when I was at the University of Alabama where we conducted research on patients with HIV who were experiencing the side effects of new drugs being used to treat the disease. The drugs were causing visible physiological effects on the body that the patients were self-conscious about as they thought people could tell they had the disease and they would be stigmatized or lose their jobs. We found that exercise helped to mitigate these side effects.
How has your international career developed?
As a result of my work on HIV research in the US I was invited to Zambia to work with nurses and support their research. The nurses there were concerned about the occupational transmission of disease. A very high percentage of patients in hospitals there had HIV. My work involved helping to set up clinics and train nurse and doctors to recognize symptoms and side effects of HIV. As a result of this experience I was invited by the Clinton Foundation, as part of the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, to work with the Rwandan Ministry of Health. I worked on a project where six schools of nursing and six schools of medicine recruited forty medical doctors and forty nurses to spend a year training students in Rwanda. The project took place over a phased seven-year period where gradually the international training staff could be taken over by the staff they had trained and the project could continue sustainably without dependency on international support. Then the World Health Organization invited me to do consultations in Geneva to look at transforming global medical education in developing countries and now I have an Adjunct Professorship at the University of Malawi.
What have been the biggest lessons you have taken away from your international career?
As Mark Twain said, ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness’. People everywhere are the same. They have the same dreams for their children and themselves. It’s humbling and enjoyable to work in other countries and cultures. People who don’t go beyond their home start to fear people who are different.
Selected Awards and Achievements:
1996 Fellow American Academy of Nursing
1991 Fellow American College of Sports Medicine
1991 Fellow American Association of CVD and Pulmonary REHAB
1993 Success Story Award (Fostering multicultural teaching), The Ohio State University
1999 Yale University School of Nursing, Sybil Palmer Bellos Endowed Lecture
2008 Commencement Speaker, Yale University School of Nursing