Bangor Daily News features COM Dean Marc Hahn's meeting with Michelle Obama on a veterans' health initiative; Ed Bilsky's research also highlighted

The Bangor Daily News on Jan. 12, 2012 featured a story on a meeting with First Lady Michelle Obama that Marc B. Hahn, D.O., senior vice president for health affairs and dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, attended along with a select group of other medical school deans.

The deans visited Virginia Commonwealth University on Wednesday to launch a program, spearheaded at a national level by Mrs. Obama and her Joining Forces initiative, focused on better serving military veterans and their families.

The Daily News explained that "as a veteran and former chief of pain management at Walter Reed (Army )Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Marc Hahn has seen firsthand how the stresses of war affect America’s military personnel. Now, as dean of the University of New England’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, he’s leading the Maine school into a new initiative to prepare the next generation of doctors to better understand the needs of veterans.”

Edward Bilsky, Ph.D., UNE associate provost for research and scholarship and director of the Center for Excellence in the Neurosciences, was also interviewed for the article. He cited work performed by medical student Jacque Reynolds  in both his laboratory and the laboratory of UNE Professor Ian Meng. The research proposed a novel animal model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that won an award at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. The full article has now been published in the journal Life Sciences. Read the entire Bangor Daily News story.

Associated Press, the Portland Press Herald, the Boston Globe and other media outlets also covered UNE's involvement in the veterans' initiative.