In the News

Dianne Galgana focuses on well-child care and management of common pediatric acute illnesses.

You look at a photograph of UNLV Medicine pediatric nurse practitioner Dianne Galgana and her daughter, Penelope, both dressed in red graduation regalia, and you can’t help but be reminded that a single image can carry a lot of power.

There’s pure joy in the photos. Pride of accomplishment. Love for each other. Love for life.

Healthcare Students Learning Around Big Obstacles

For students in Medicine, Nursing, and Dental Medicine, those furthest along heading to front lines while classmates cope with rearranged clinical work.

As many of us sit alone in our spare rooms, our home offices, our converted garages, as we perch on our couches doing what we can to find a kind of equilibrium of normalcy in the midst of the greatest public health crisis of the past 100 years, there are UNLV students already counting the days to when they will be on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Working with cadavers provides medical students with valuable experience.

Inside the Oquendo Center, a large medical event space near McCarran International Airport, eight human cadavers lay on individual operating tables, each one surrounded by an array of surgical equipment.

Dr. Joseph Carroll says the opportunity to be part of the medical
school’s team at the UMC Trauma Center was too good to pass up.

It was when he was in the seventh grade that Dr. Joseph Carroll, now an assistant professor in the UNLV School of Medicine’s department of surgery, first thought about becoming a physician.

Helping Children and Adolescents with Mental Health Difficulties

UNLV Medicine’s Mojave Counseling Youth Clinic offers assistance to some of Nevada’s youngest patients.

Responses to the questions below reflect input from the entire mental health team at the Mojave Counseling Youth Clinic, which is under the direction of Dr. Alison Netski, chair of the UNLV School of Medicine department of psychiatry and behavioral health.

How are the challenges different between helping adults and helping children?

The story that ran in the Las Vegas Review-Journal last May was compelling. Mary Kay Duda’s life was saved by UNLV Medicine’s Dr. Charles St. Hill.

St. Hill, one of only three fellowship-trained surgical oncologists in Nevada, performed a complex 10-hour surgery known as a Whipple procedure to remove a large tumor that enveloped her pancreas.

“I’ve been given the gift of life,” a grateful Duda would later tell St. Hill and reporter Jessie Bekker.

Inspirational Goals

Dr. Robert Wang — he completed his residency in otolaryngology at Harvard, one of the nation’s most celebrated medical schools, and his head and neck fellowship at M.D. Anderson, the world’s most renowned cancer institute — is upbeat on a recent early April morning.

Yes, on this day where the sun had yet to make its first appearance, no one could accuse the chairman of the UNLV School of Medicine Department of Otolaryngology- Head & Neck Surgery of not accentuating the positive.

For children with rare conditions, UNLV Medicine surgeon restores the ability to show happiness. It’s a procedure that leaves both the patient and the surgeon with smiles on their faces. Surgery to correct the effects of Moebius syndrome – a rare congenital condition that can paralyze a person’s entire face and affect muscles that control back and forth eye movement – can make it impossible for a person to show that sign of happiness that most people take for granted.