22 December 2024

UP VOICE VOL.58 – February 2021

The Official Newsletter of the University of Puthisastra (UP)-Vol.58 February 2021 Download

On Wednesday 27th January, UP welcomed the new addition of the Wall of Fame for our top-ranking students that have delivered extraordinary results for academic year. The UP “Wall of Fame” was created to provide recognition for those who have earned the most prestige academic achievement. The “Wall” will preserve the school’s history of educational excellence while motivating future new generation to work hard at learning.

This includes 81 outstanding students that come from all of the entire faculties and departments in the University of Puthisastra. The students can find the Wall of Fame board located at the Hallway at Building B leading the UP library.

Mak Sangdor, earning the top rank in the faculty of dentistry, commented “I was honored to get in here, and to be standing amongst the Wall of Fame students”. “It’s undeniable exceptional to be there. Also it’s another opportunity for me to thank myself for working very hard in the past”, he said. “There were 3 principles that have propelled myself towards my goals and ambitious in life”, he added.

“First of all, I always did everything consistently, and it is not just working but also practicing and learning. Not matter what the small progress or big progress is. The key point is to work on it consistently”, He continued. “We should always raise higher standard for our expectations because if we thought that we could get high score, we would work even harder”, he claimed. “Lastly, never compared myself to my peers. However, I often do compare my present time self to my past self, especially the change I made, the knowledge I have, and the progress I have done”, he concluded.

The installment of the Wall of Fame features inspirational quotes and eye-catching portraits of the hard-working future generation of doctors, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, midwives, and lab techs; and the next generation of the prodigies in the ICT field.

This newfound fame shall embark them in a new journey to unprecedented successful careers, and leaving footprints for their juniors to follow.

WHAT’S UP ON CAMPUS – 08 March 2021, International women’s day

Professor Sandro Vento, UP Dean of Medicine,is among the top 2% world’s most impactful scientists in the field of Microbiology.

Professor Sandro Vento, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, is among the top 2% of the world’s most impactful scientists in the field of Microbiology according to a recent study by John Ioannidis and other researchers at Stanford University in California (“Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators”), published in PLOS Biology.

The list of the scientists whose publications have been most influential in different scientific fields during their career can be found in the Mendeley database (Table S6, Career, 2019). The list contains the names of the 159,684 most impactful authors in any scientific field from around the world, classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 sub-fields. Professor Sandro Vento is the only scientist currently residing/working in Cambodia included in the whole list.

Professor Vento has not only done impactful research. He is a physician and specialist in Infectious Diseases who has been the Head of an Infectious Diseases Unit in Italy and of a Department of Internal Medicine in the main referral hospital of Botswana, and Medical Director of a complex of four university referral hospitals in Nur-Sultan, the capital city of Kazakhstan. He has also been the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Botswana and the Chair of the Department of Medicine of Nazarbayev University, the only international university of Kazakhstan.

Professor Vento, based on his decades of experience, firmly believes that the integration of clinical care, teaching and clinical research is essential for any medical school, and that Cambodia urgently needs modern university hospitals with all the necessary specialties and expertise to ensure that students learn the modern skills required for 21st Century healthcare

What’s new from the Learning Centre?

Welcome to the new academic year 2020-2021 from the Learning Centre, QLTS! In the year 2020, all schools and universities across the country including UP were closed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The schools and universities were closed, open, closed, open, closed, and opened. This was very disruptive to your studies. Anyway, schools and universities have been allowed to reopen with the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), for example, social distancing, cleaning hands, wearing masks, etc. UP reopened for all our students and staff, and we are complying with the SOP. Library and Learning Centre, UP, open hands to welcome you all to the services.

So, what’s new? We have a new photocopier to serve your studies, which you can photocopy, print, and scan. The price for the photocopying and printing is reasonable and comparable to the outsiders. The scan is free of charge. What’s more? Our Learning Centre service hours are extended from 7:30 am – 7:00 pm (Monday – Friday) and 8:00 am – 12:00 pm (Saturday).

The Learning Centre is ready to serve you all with our new photocopier and extended service hours!

UP Launches Assessment Working Group

Academic success is critical for students, schools, universities and communities. Despite closure and opening of all types and levels of classes, learning and teaching activities at UP is running smoothly through online, on campus and hybrid class.

Traditional assessment does not provide enough information and mainly focus on just memory (the lowest level of Blooms) rather than modern methods of understanding and achieving learning outcomes. Outcomes based assessment therefore gives lecturers a much more reliable framework for measuring tangible outcomes for students and communicating these outcomes to improve students performance.

UP has been developing and improving a variety of assessments for both formative and summative assessments aligning with appropriate measure of cognitive level in Bloom’s Taxonomy.

UP has established technical teams called ASSESSMENT WORKING GROUPs to ensure assessment improvement across all Faculties. This team will deeply review, and provide feedback and advice on the assessment plan, tool, technique, scoring criteria, marking, and learning outcome alignment to all faculties and lecturers. So far we have met twice. This working group is scheduled to meet every week from now.

UP launches Curriculum Review Working Group

Curriculum is a set of planned tasks, learning experiences and behaviors achieve predetermined goals in form of behavioral change, academic achievements and learning outcomes within a particular time.

It is important to update and amend the curricula and make required improvements as the world changes so rapidly – for example medical knowledge doubles every year.

Curricula review provides teachers, students, parents and accreditation bodies with a blue print of how students will achieve success in learning outcomes. On other words, curricula review provides a roadmap allowing comprehensive planning in learning and teaching activities responsive to modern practices and provide best outcomes for students in a modern world.

The issue of curriculum development is very challenging but UP has created CURRICULUM WORKING GROUP to review and develop the curriculum and new program across all Faculties.

For example, this working group will review pharmacy program curricula which dates from 2007 to bring it upto date ready for 2021 and beyond. Working groups will meet every week from now on to review the current curriculum and make improvements for the beginning of next school year. The new curricular will produce highest quality graduates with knowledge, skills and good attitudes to serve the Cambodian community.

UP recognized as official pharmacy CPD provider

University of Puthisastra (UP) is officially recognized as one of CPD providers for pharmacists in Cambodia through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the University of Puthisastra and the Pharmacy Council of Cambodia. This allows UP to provide training and training series for Cambodians pharmacists.

It will help pharmacists to maintain appropriate experience in the pharmacy practice, keeping up-to-date and professional competency and undertaking appropriate development and training opportunities that are relevant to the pharmacy practice. Beside this, the training will build their confidence and credibility, allows pharmacists to showcase their achievements and equips them with tools to cope positively with change. In January and February 2021, UP provided several training series for Cambodian pharmacist from many fields both in public and private sectors.

They have covered topics such as Good Pharmacy Practice (GPP), Good Distribution Practice (GDP) and Good Storage Practice (GSP). In March, UP keep provide the training focused on inventory control for drugs and medical supplies.

Moreover, UP still provide both online and on campus trainings so that the participants will have choice based on their preferences and availability. Up to today, UP Pharmacy is the first leading university of the country in providing CPD for the pharmacists.

UP LECTURER WINS POST-DOCTORAL SCHOLARSHIP AT CHULALONGKORN UNIVERSITY

Dr. Seang Sonntana is a lecturer in oral pathology at the UP Faculty of Dentistry. He has a DDS from Cambodia and a PhD from Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. His area of research involved tissue and vascular regeneration. Evidence from his recent publications show that angiogenesis and healing in a damaged dental pulp tissue could be promoted using an angiogenic agent called Iloprost (a Prostacyclin Analog), both in vivo and in vitro.

Dr. Sonntana is currently working at the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital as a surgeon in the Department of Maxillofacial and Reconstructive Surgery. He has been concerned that some of the large local and microvascular free flaps used for facial reconstructive surgery fail as a result of vascular occlusion (thrombosis), which remains the primary reason for flap loss. His curiosity led him to wonder whether his previous studies during his PhD on promoting dental pulp angiogenesis could be further developed to help improve outcomes after major facial flap surgery. This idea was submitted to “The Second Century Fund (C2F)” as a high potential postdoctoral fellowship at Chulalongkorn University, and was successful.

Dr Sonntana has now been invited to return to Thailand to conduct his post-doctoral research into this area. The research will involve using a 3-dimensional organ culture system (in vitro), as well as an animal model (in vivo) for angiogenesis and wound healing assessments. He will use innovative techniques such as Injectable Hydrogel and poly (lactic-co-glycolic) acid (PLGA) microspheres as a drug delivery system for a better controlled release of Iloprost in order to achieve better revascularization of the tissue/flap in the postoperative period.

His post-doctoral study could have important clinical translational benefits for both dental and maxillofacial surgical procedures in the future, and could lead to the development of commercial products which promote angiogenesis. We wish Dr. Sonntana every success as he embarks on this exciting new project.

Congratulations Dr Horn Sereybot!

Dr Sereybot joined UP in November 2016. He has been one of the UP Dental Clinic managers since that time, overseeing the operations of the dental clinic, supervising students and providing treatment for some patients.

In recent years Dr Sereybot has had a growing interest in orthodontics, and encouraged by Head of Orthodontics, Assistant Professor Anand Marya, he applied for and was accepted into a Diploma of Orthodontics program through the City of London Dental School. Recently Dr Sereybot graduated from the 2-year part-time course, and is now treating a growing number of orthodontic patients in our clinic.

Congratulations Dr Sereybot! We greatly encourage academic staff at UP to pursue higher education in whatever field they are interested in. UP is in discussions with Octacademy (the SEA representative for City of London Dental School) to offer the same Diploma of Orthodontics course here at UP, in addition to our new Master’s program which we hope will start soon.

NEW MURAL FOR LUNAR NEW YEAR!

The UP Faculty of Dentistry recently commissioned a mural for the outside wall of the dental clinic. The mural was designed by Mexican visual artist Frida Falcon.

We wanted the mural to depict dentistry and education, and be colorful. We think Frida has achieved all of these in the mural which took Frida and her colleague Rodrigo Garzon two days to paint during Chinese New Year.

We look forward to having students, staff and visitors take their photos in front of the mural. Along with the colorful display of recently planted flowers, the mural is helping to brighten up the campus, especially as we prepare to welcome the new intake of Foundation Year students next month.

UP Medical Laboratory Students joined the Declaration of Southeast Asia Medical Technology Student Association

The Medical Laboratory Technology Student Conference (MSC) 2021, hosted by Indonesian Student Association of Medical Laboratory Technology, held in January 2021. The four Medical Laboratory Technology students, UP had been invited as the delegate and joined the panel discussion of MLT education topics. Moreover, our students also joined the declaration of establishment of Southeast Asia Medical Technology Student Association (SEAMTSA).

The SEAMTSA is aimed to:

  • Communication of MLT students in Southeast Asia
  • Useful for Medical Laboratory Research
  • Share new skills, methods, and discoveries
  • Disseminating information
  • Traditional and cultural awareness

We do proud of our students and our university that have performed well as an internationally. Our students are definitely ready and they are looking forward to any upcoming events!

Biography: Mrs. Sorn Sreylen, Medical Laboratory Assistant in the Faculty of Medicine

 

 

Mrs. Sorn Sreylen studied Midwifery and graduated from the University of Health Sciences. Prior to joining the University of Puthisastra as Medical Laboratory Assistant in April 2019, she worked as a nurse and midwife at Aurora Clinic and Maternity in Phnom Penh for fifteen months.

She is happy to work in the Faculty of Medicine where she has gained considerable experience in laboratory organization and teaching, and has also contributed in other areas.

Dr Pisal attends OSAP course

Recently Dr Khom Pisal, the Business Development Manager for Dentistry attended (online) the 2021 OSAP annual “Boot Camp”. OSAP was founded in 1984, and is the “Organization for Safety, Asepsis and Prevention”. It is the leading provider of infection prevention and control education, training, and credentialing in the USA.

OSAP advocates for the safe and infection-free delivery of oral healthcare. For the first time this year the meeting was held online and this allowed UP to send Dr Pisal, the first Cambodian to ever attend an OSAP meeting.

The course was held over 4 days, and because it was conducted in the US, Dr Pisal had to stay up from 11pm until 5am each night to attend the lectures. More than 400 people (mostly from the US) attended the bootcamp, with Dr Pisal being the only participant from Cambodia. Cutting edge information was shared by a team of leading experts in the field, and the latest guidelines related to Covid-19 were shared. Following the course Dr Pisal said: “I have gained more knowledge of disease transmission and the principles of infection prevention and control in a variety of oral healthcare settings. It is crucial for me and my team to apply the latest infection control regulations, guidelines, standards, and best practices for the safe care of the dental staff, patients, and our students here at UP. Furthermore, the quality assurance measures that were described at the bootcamp, such as how to carry out direct observation in the clinic and how to give feedback, will be useful tools which can be applied in our UP dental clinic”.

Thanks Dr Pisal for attending this important course, and for helping the UP Dental Clinic to become the best clinic in Cambodia for demonstrating good cross infection control.

Talk Show “Let’s Talk Pharma”

A wonderful talk show called Let’s Talk Pharma was created by Faculty of Pharmacy with the support from pharmacy students and alumni. This talk show aims to share high school graduates and pharmacy students learning experiences from senior and alumni students on pharmacy program at University of Puthisastra.

It was designed into 4 episodes by using facebook live. The episode #1, #2, #3 and #4 respectively talked about the reasons to choose UP pharmacy, laboratory and research activities, extra-curricular activities, and achievement and success story from alumni. This program was regularly run on Saturday afternoon along with entwinement activity, game, fun etc.

This talk show was a great supporting program for our current pharmacy students and high school graduates who wish to choose pharmacy as their future career. These live shows are very informative for our current students to know their path to succeed well and also to inform high school students about what is special about UP Pharmacy.

UP A KEY PARTNER IN NEW DEMONSTRATION HEALTH PROJECT AT CHAKTAMOK SCHOOL


The UP Faculty of Dentistry has been sending dental students to Chaktamok School for the past two years to provide basic preventive care and some dental treatment, under the Healthy Kids Cambodia project. Last week the Dean of Dentistry, Prof Callum Durward, and the Deputy Dean, A/Prof Soeun Sopharith, were invited by the MOEYS and the School Health Department to attend a ceremony at the school to officially open a new integrated health program for school children which will serve as a demonstration project for the whole of Cambodia. The project will have several components including hand washing, tooth brushing, health checks (including hearing and eye checks), basic dental care, and health education, using newly developed resources.

The Guest of Honor at the ceremony was HE Hang Chuon Narong, Minister of Education, Youth and Sport. Others in attendance were representatives from the School Health Department, the Department of Preventive Medicine (MOH), City Hall, and several NGOs and organizations which will join forces in this project. During the proceedings, children from Chaktamok School demonstrated handwashing and tooth brushing drills, and the ribbon for the new Health Clinic was cut by the Minister. UP will be playing an important role in the project, and will be sending dental students and possibly nursing students who could provide health checkups for the children. UP is very happy to be collaborating in this important demonstration project, which has the potential to be rolled-out all over Cambodia in the future.

POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA OF IMPLANTOLOGY COURSE REACHES HALF-WAY POINT

17 dentists recently sat their end of year 1 barrier examination in the UP Diploma of Implantology course. Four of the examiners were from Australia, Dr Anthony Mak, Dr Cecila So, Dr Patrick Tseng, and Dr Ken Yuen. Dr Tak Ranuch, our own UP periodontist, was the local examiner. The examination was held at UP using ZOOM from 7am until 4.30pm.

30 minutes were allocated for each student. During the oral examination several implant cases were shown for discussion, with questions focusing on treatment planning and evidence based reasoning. Many of the participants scored highly, with 5 achieving over 90%. Course director, Dr Patrick Tseng, commented that “the performance of the Cambodian participants compared very favorably with students from Australia and NZ who have undertaken similar courses through Sydney University in recent years”.

During year 2 of the course, each dentist will need to complete 6 implant cases, closely supervised by the teaching staff. If you would like to get a high quality implant at relatively low cost, please contact Dr Khom Pisal from the UP Dental Clinic tel: 089-565664.

Midwifery Join Curriculum Update with MoH

Midwifery department of University of Puthisastra join the curriculum update project with MoH. It is a one year project which aim to produce the modern midwife that could work in both national and internationally. Here are some picture from the “Orientation workshop 2nd for the Technical Committee member for Associate Degree in Midwifery Curriculum update”.

PHARMACY MAJOR takes lead in receiving applications


Faculty of Pharmacy is one of the fast growing institutions in Cambodia which focuses on the quality as its first priority. Its mission is aimed at improving the health of individuals and communities by educating students, conducting research, and engaging in leadership and innovation in pharmacy education and clinical practices.

Its fast growing has been notified by several indicators: leading numbers of selling receiving applications across UP, high employment rate, high rate of passing national exit exam, low transferring rate, high number of students, high number of students involved in volunteer jobs, high number of students involved in international internship, high number of students in research activity etc. All of these successes have not happened by chance. Behind the scene, there are 11 facts about the UP Pharmacy, we sometimes overlook.

Inside the Introduction to Computer technology class

As part of the Introduction to computer technology course, our Foundation Year students learned about identifying, using and connecting hardware components and devices. This course prepares for the CompTIA A+ certification which includes topics such as: Operating Systems, Software, Networking, Security, Mobile devices, Virtualization.

UP research department joined workshop on “Introduction to R for Quantitative Data Analysis” organized by CDRI

In Siemreap province, from 2 to 4 February, over 30 participants from universities, TVET institutes, research think tanks, and government ministries were engaged in a mixture of lectures and hands-on practical exercises on handling, transforming and visualizing data with R. R is a world-known free software environment for statistical computing and graphics especially when it comes to manipulating large dataset such as census or to handling multiple survey datasets at once.

This was a three-day intensive workshop instructed by Dr. CHEA Vatana and Dr. CHEA Phal, experts in quantitative data analysis, who are the senior researchers at CDRI and have authored and co-authored more than a dozen scientific papers. The training workshop was designed for junior scientists, faculty members, researchers and graduate students (master and PhD) who wish to strengthen their computer application skills or to gain more knowledge in utilizing R. The topics covered in the course were:

  1. An introduction to R and Rstudio, understanding data structure, type and class, and basic R functions
  2. Indexing and subsetting
  3. Static data visualization using ggplot2 package
  4. Manipulating and transforming data using tidyverse package
  5. Applying statistical and econometric techniques to analyze survey data in R

Ms. Eng Muyngim, the researcher from UP, who took part in this workshop, said that this was a great opportunity for her to brush up her R skill, which she first learned about it during her studies at University of Paul Sabatier, Toulouse III since 2015. The course was useful and inspired her to share with her colleagues and students to experience the new technology to compute a large variety of classical statistic tests (Student’s t-test, Wilcoxon test, Analysis of variance (ANOVA), Chi-square test, Correlation analysis) as well as to draw beautiful and visible box plot, histogram, density curve, scatter plot, line plot, bar plot by using R.

Inside the Computer Vision Master class

For their final assignment of their Computer Vision class (Master), a group of students (So Vengleab, Acmatac Seing, Sophea Phos, Voern Kimsoer) went to the field to take aerial photographs for mapping purposes. The objectives of their final project is to use computer vision techniques to process visual information from an drone HD Camera and automatically create a map by stitching together pictures captured. The final result will be a panorama which is a composite image which combines multiple images taken. We wish good luck to the students for their final assignment.

UP TRIP “High school students visit the Sunrise Japan hospital”


On the 5th February, 2021 The Nursing department of Puthisastra University prepared the tour visit to Sunrise Japan Hospital Phnom Penh. The Sunrise Japan hospital is the Japan standard hospital and the staff over there are fully competent because they have continued education either in hospital and sending to the training at Japan.

The Objectives of the hospital tour visit are: 1- Orient students about nursing as a profession, 2- Involve students in understanding the important role of nurses in the hospitals, 3- Guide students to choose the right career that inspires them for future growth. We use google link as our communication plate form for students who were interested in joining the hospital tour. There were 22 students, 3 nursing staff, and other 3 University staff went to Sunrise hospital with the students.

When students arrived at the hospital, they received a very warm welcome from the hospital and they were oriented and toured through the hospital departments such as emergency rooms, Paediatric department, ICU, ward (in-patient), and OPDs. During the tour in the departments the students were subdivided into smaller groups so that they could properly observe and talk to the staff. The students were shown the kindness and professional activity of the staff to patients, modern equipment, and technology. The students were inspired by our nurses, the Sunrise Japan hospital and the hospital tour which was arranged by UP.

The University of Puthisastra is the high quality of education for the Nursing Associated, Bachelor degree and bachelor bridging from associated degree. This is the best time for the high school students who are interested in nursing careers to apply to study nursing at this university.

Power BI (Data Visualization) and Prototyping short courses coming soon!

2 professional short courses are planned this March 2021:
Course 1: Data visualization with Power BI
Instructor: Mr. Oudom SEANG, Data Insight Manager at ADA (10 years experience in Business Intelligence)
Who is it for: Business analyst, Financial analyst, Data analyst, Report consumer…
Main Topics: BI concepts, Data structure, BI tools and Power BI, Query Editor, Relationship, Table Module, Data visualization

At the end of the course, trainees will:

  • Be able to perform data collection & aggregation
  • Develop Reports and Dashboards
  • Have a real BI project to show
  • Receive a graduation certificate

Course 2: Prototyping Web and Mobile applications with Axure
Instructor: Mr Bekzod RUZMETOV, Head of R&D at ABA
Who is it for: IT Business Analysts, Startups, IT companies, Students, Entrepreneurs
Main topics: Design thinking, Axure RP 9/8 (UI/UX software used by the top Fortune 500 companies), Create interactions, use of conditions and variables, Widgets and Libraries, best practices

At the end of the course, trainees will:

  • Understand about Design Thinking
  • Learn how to use Axure main features
  • Know about best practices in UI / UX
  • Have a real prototyping project to demo

The registration will open soon!

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