Current Award Recipients

Virginia Aita, PhD

Both a nurse and a scholar, Dr. Aita's areas of expertise are in health care, humanities and ethics. Dr. Aita is an Emeritus faculty member in the Department of Health Promotion, Social, and Behavioral Health at the UNMC College of Public Health.    

Dr. Aita earned her PhD at UNMC in 1995, in the MSIA program with a focus on Preventative Medicine.  Her passion lies in the arts and humanities and the intersection with medicine – and how it leads to becoming a more compassionate provider.   

While at UNMC, Dr. Aita was involved in two areas of research including exploring the integration of the arts and humanities with clinical care and exploring ideas that shaped the history of nursing care.  

Some of her research projects include the “Portraits of Care” Project and the “Teaching Observational Skills Project.” In both projects, Dr. Aita worked with artist-in-residence Mark Gilbert. In the portrait project, Aita and co-investigators studied the relationship and dimensions of care between patients and caregivers as depicted in portraits done by Gilbert. In the observational skills project Aita, Gilbert and co-investigators studied the effectiveness of teaching medical students' observational skills using methods drawn from the arts. A third research project employs historical methods and is entitled, “History and Philosophy of 20th Century Nursing Ideas about Care.”  
  
Thorughout her career, Dr. Aita held many professional memberships, including in The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, The American Association for the History of Medicine, The American Nurses' Association, The Nebraska Nurses' Association and Sigma Theta Tau. In retirement, she has stayed active with the UNMC Retiree Association, serving on its coordinating committee since its founding in 2015. 
  
Dr. Aita’s husband, Dr. John F. Aita, is an alumnus of the UNMC College of Medicine.  The Aita’s made a philanthropic gift to the Wigton Heritage Center by naming the balcony the John A. Aita, M.D. Family Balcony in honor of Dr. John F. Aita’s father. Both Aita’s grown children and their granddaughter are also College of Medicine alumni.

Jason Wilken, BS, PhD’04, MPH

Jason Wilken joined UNMC through the Eppley Cancer Research Training Program in 1998 and completed his PhD studies in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2004. His PhD advisor was Dr. Elliott Bedows, and his thesis focused on the intracellular folding pathway of chorionic gonadotropin and resulted in seven published papers.  

After a brief stint helping found a startup with UNeMed, Dr. Wilken began a postdoctoral fellowship in late 2024 at Yale School of Medicine under the mentorship of Dr. Nita Maihle, evaluating the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) family of receptor tyrosine kinases as diagnostic, prognostic, and theragnostic markers in women’s cancers. From 2004–2012, he was awarded six research grants and published 12 papers because of these studies. By 2010, when he was appointed Associate Research Scientist, Dr. Wilken had adopted a population-centered approach with a goal of translating findings from bench to bedside. He enrolled in Emory School of Public Health’s distance-based part-time Master of Public Health program in Applied Epidemiology in 2010 and studied with Yale School of Medicine’s 2011 Robert Wood Johnson Community Based Research Scholar cohort. 

In 2012, Dr. Wilken transitioned from academia to applied public health. He was recruited by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) into the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the world’s premier applied epidemiology training program. Though epidemiology was a new discipline for Dr. Wilken, he was able to build on the rigorous scientific training provided by his doctoral studies at UNMC. He investigated major outbreaks of hantavirus and of coccidioidomycosis (a fungal disease endemic to the Southwestern United States), and the wet bench was replaced by patient interviews, environmental investigations, and statistical software. For his efforts during his two years as an EIS officer, Dr. Wilken was recognized with CDC’s 2014 Honor Award for Epidemiology-Domestic. 

Since 2014, Dr. Wilken has served CDC as a field officer supporting multidisciplinary emergency preparedness and response for the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). His portfolio of work includes surveillance and epidemiology for natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes, wildfires, droughts, floods), chemical incidents (e.g., accidental releases, unusual poisonings), and several communicable diseases. He earned certification from the State of California as an Emergency Operations Center Director and is an alum of the Executive Leaders Program of the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School. He served at international public health emergency responses, including for Ebola virus disease in Liberia, Zika virus disease in American Samoa, and COVID-19 in the Federated States of Micronesia.  

Dr. Wilken also serves his country as a Commissioned Officer in the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and has deployed for multiple domestic responses. He supported >400 USPHS Scientists as the 2020–2021 Chair of the USPHS Scientist Professional Advisory Committee.  

Though he is no longer in academia, Dr. Wilken has published >20 papers/book chapters and given >100 scientific presentations since joining CDC. He is the recipient of numerous professional awards and recognitions, including the 2024 USPHS Scientist Mentor of the Year, the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States (AMSUS) 2023 Education and Training Award, AMSUS 2024 Communications Award, and a citation from the United States Department of State.

Keenan Hartert, PhD

Keenan is from Western Colorado and found his passion for science and teaching during his time at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. After graduating in 2013, he pursued a Cancer Research PhD at UNMC, graduating in 2018 under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Green.

After learning how to utilize bioinformatics to identify areas of genomic needs in patients, investigate mechanistic foundations, and apply translatable therapies to cell lines, he continued his lymphoma research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester under the mentorship of Dr. Anne Novak.

He joined the faculty at Minnesota state in the fall of 2020. Since then, he's sought to help his students be resilient by providing them with a challenging class paired with a supportive environment where they can not only learn the content but also believe that they can excel. He is dedicated to finding the best ways to support his students using evidence-based practices to help close the gaps for his students. He's won college-wide and university-wide educator of the year awards. He continues his cancer research and education research with a team of two graduate students and six undergraduates. In between classes, he loves to hike, travel, read, and walk his dogs Scout (Pomeranian) and Ranger (GSD).