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Outstanding Young Alumni 2006

The Outstanding Young Alumni Award is presented to up to two alumni of Stetson University who are 35 years of age or younger. The award recognizes contributions to society, to a profession, or to Stetson University. Recipients must demonstrate significant accomplishment or promise in their fields; leadership; or civic, cultural, or charitable involvement.

Bryan C. Haines '95

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A 1995 graduate of Stetson, where he was a member of Beta Beta Beta Biology honorary, Bryan C. Hains majored in Biology and Chemistry, earning a Bachelor of Science degree. He moved to Boston University, receiving a master’s degree in Neurobiology, and then to the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he earned a doctorate in Neuroscience.

An assistant professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Regeneration Research at Yale University School of Medicine, he studies chronic neuropathic pain, secondary injuries after traumatic spinal cord injury, and applications of cell-based therapies to spinal cord injuries. He also teaches Chemistry at Quinnipiac University.

Author of two books, Brain Disorders and Pain, he has published more than 30 journal articles and given many invited lectures, including a 2005 talk to the International Association for the Study of Pain in Sydney, Australia. He has jointly presented more than 30 papers at conferences around the world, most recently to a combined meeting of the German Society of Physiology and The Federation of European Physiological Societies.

His current work is funded by a two-year Pfizer Scholar’s Grant in Pain Medicine, and he has also received support from the National Institutes of Health and the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation. In 2003 he won the Young Investigator Award of the Central Nervous System Section from the American Physiological Society.

 

Laura Dunifon Kicklighter '95

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A religious studies major at Stetson, where she was named to both Omicron Delta Kappa and Phi Beta Kappa honoraries, Dr. Laura D. Kicklighter received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1995. She went on to earn a master’s degree in Theology at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and a doctorate at the University of Texas Medical Branch’s Institute for the Medical Humanities, focusing on Religion and Medicine, as well as Bioethics. In 2002, she won the Ransom Dissertation Award in the Medical Humanities from the University of Texas Medical Branch.

Now an assistant professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies departments at Lynchburg College, she has also taught at Baylor University’s College of Medicine, the University of Houston and the University of Texas Medical Branch. Her specialties are Philosophical Ethics, Bioethics, Religion and Medicine, and Religion and Democracy. She is also interested in Women and Medicine, Feminist Theology, Medical Ethics and Religious Ethics.

She has presented papers and led panels at several international and national conferences, most recently a panel on “Religion and Spirituality in Medical Education” at the 2003 joint meeting in Montreal of the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities and the Canadian Bioethics Society. Writing for a more popular press, she published the article, “Age Control,” in U.S. News and World Report on Nov. 11, 2000.