Jim Bakken
| This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.jimb@uab.edu • (205) 934-3887
Chief Communications Officer, Public Relations
Chief Communications Officer, Public Relations
As chief communications officer for the University of Alabama at Birmingham and UAB Medicine, Bakken leads teams that set and execute internal and external communications strategy. Prior to joining UAB in 2012, Bakken spent a decade working with a diverse client base at two full-service communications firms. Bakken spent eight years in Nashville at McNeely Pigott and Fox – one of the largest PR firms in the Southeast – prior to launching Peritus Public Relations in Birmingham in 2010. Bakken has served on the board of the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations, is accredited by the Public Relations Society of America and has been a Birmingham Business Journal Top 40 Under 40 honoree.
"Men are physiologically different from women, so preventive tips cannot be one-size-fits-all," explained Virginia Howard, Ph.D., co-author of the new scientific statement Guidelines for the Prevention of Stroke in Women, published from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association Council on Stroke in the AHA journal Stroke
A month-long celebration of African-American heritage is in full gear at UAB
Despite strokes’ being on the decline in the U.S., more women are dying from them than are men. Now the AHA and ASA have released guidance on prevention specifically for women.
Only one Alabamian has ever won a gold medal in a winter Olympic event. Do you remember her name? She won it a dozen years ago. Give up? She is Vonetta Flowers of Birmingham and UAB and she won gold in the women's bobsled in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.
It's rare to find a parent who hasn’t relied on the occasional bribe to extract certain behavior from her kid. Joshua Klapow, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist for the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public health, notes that not all bribery is bad. "'Bribe' has a very negative connotation, but bribing is basically offering a value proposition to do or not do a behavior," he explains.
During the height of last week's winter storm, some UAB doctors decided not to go home but instead chose to stay at the hospital and give others a second chance at life. Physicians and staff in UAB's transplant unit stayed three days and nights at the hospital to perform sixteen kidney operations. That included eight kidney donation procedures, and eight kidney recipient operations.
In October, UAB kicked off the walking bus program for adults, the first of its kind. The first paper associated with this project was published in the Open Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The newly opened Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at UAB opens its doors to the public for its first “Pop-Up Studio” event on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 14-15. Michael Tabie, of Two Arms Inc. in Brooklyn, N.Y., will present a free lecture and printmaking demonstration during his residency as he completes a commissioned silkscreen about Birmingham.
HCV — which affects more than 3 million people in the United States and is the leading cause of cirrhosis and liver cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — last saw guidelines released in 2011. Michael Saag, MD, professor of medicine in the UAB School of Medicine, served as co-chair of a panel of more than two dozen liver and infectious diseases doctors that created HCVguidelines.org, a new online resource.
An unexpected winter storm paralyzed nearly all of Birmingham and much of central Alabama last week, but it didn't stop doctors at UAB Hospital from continuing the Southeast's largest kidney transplant chain. The chain, which has been coined by the hospital as the "Pair Share Program," continued the week of Jan. 27 as doctors performed 16 operations, including eight donor nephrectomies and eight kidney transplants.