Latest News, Uncategorized, WVPA Sharing

Marshall University gets $3M from court settlement

By FRED PACE

The Herald-Dispatch

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — A Christmas gift that will keep on giving – that’s the way officials at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine and the Byrd Center for Rural Health described the more than $3 million in court settlement funds the university received Thursday.

“This money came completely by surprise to us,” said Jennifer T. Plymale, associate dean for admissions. “We are looking at this as a wonderful Christmas gift that will be used to help so many others.”

The money came from the more than $6 million in funding that was left over from a medical monitoring case regarding a chemical that is used to clean coal, officials said.

The entire $6 million was slated to go to West Virginia University, but Judge David W. Hummel, a Marshall graduate, ordered the funds to be equally split between the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute at WVU and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Rural Health at Marshall.

Hummel ended the decade-long class action court case, William K. Stern, et. al. v. Chemtall Inc., et al., with his order.

“We are all West Virginians, so these funds should go to help people in southern West Virginia as well,” Hummel said.

Along with Wheeling attorney R. Dean Hartley, claims administrator Edward “Ted” Gompers and E. William Harvit, Hummel traveled to Morgantown and Huntington to present checks for $3,087,500 to each school.

“The case, which obtained class status, sought and obtained medical monitoring for coal preparation plant workers and wastewater treatment workers who had been exposed to a chemical neurotoxin,” Hartley said.

At Marshall, funding will be used to continue work in rural health, specifically tackling barriers like isolation that many rural providers and rural people encounter, Plymale said.

“With modern technology and these resources, we can go a long way to ensure better access to health care for our citizens in southern West Virginia and beyond,” she said.

“Additionally, we can build on innovative educational efforts that have been successful in graduating quality primary care physicians practicing in areas of need throughout West Virginia and the surrounding Appalachian region, as well as continuing our work with community partners on the center’s outreach endeavors that are designed to encourage the development of new and innovative health care delivery systems in rural communities that lack essential health care services.”

These efforts are coordinated through the Center for Rural Health in concert with Marshall’s department of family and community health and other primary care departments, officials said.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for the rural health program at Marshall University, which resides in our department of family and community medicine,” said Joseph I. Shapiro, M.D., dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. “I have absolute faith that Dr. Steve Petrany, the chairman of this department, along with Ms. Plymale and their colleagues, will put these funds to excellent use toward research and education related to rural medicine.”

At WVU, the funds will support the research programs in Alzheimer’s disease and other neuroscience fields.

The Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute recently announced a recruitment push in quantitative neurosciences that will bring bioscientists, mathematicians, physicists and engineers together to study the complex structure and function of the brain.

“These dollars will directly support our research program and make WVU even more competitive on a national level,” said George Spirou, Ph.D., co-director of the institute. “We are taking aim at diseases of the brain that have an impact on thousands of families in West Virginia every year, and this will push that work forward.”

See more from The Herald-Dispatch

Comments are closed.

West Virginia Press Newspaper Network " "

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

And get our latest content in your inbox

Invalid email address