The Medical Center is proud to announce the following additions to its faculty and leadership staff.
J. Michelle Palokas, DNP
Palokas
J. Michelle Palokas, director of inpatient services for UMMC Hospitals and Health System, has joined the Medical Center faculty as an associate professor of nursing.
After receiving her BSN cum laude from the Mississippi University for Women in 2002, Palokas joined UMMC as a senior staff nurse in pediatric hematology/oncology. In 2006, she moved to Mississippi Baptist Health Systems in Jackson, where she served as a hospital education coordinator while earning her MSN cum laude from UMMC. In 2007, she joined UMMC as a pediatric staff nurse and quickly became a nurse manager in pediatrics. In 2012, she was named director of inpatient services and earned her DNP at UMMC two years later.
An active member of the Mississippi Nurses Association, Palokas is a member of the Theta Beta Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau International and of Phi Kappa Phi. She has served on several committees at the Medical Center and has chaired the Nursing Communication Quality Improvement Team, the Patient Care Value Analysis Team, the Nursing Administrative Practice and Standards Sub-council and the Batson Practice and Standards Sub-council.
Stuart Aaron Yablon, M.D.
Yablon
Dr. Stuart Aaron Yablon, medical director of the Brain Injury Program at Methodist Rehabilitation Center, has joined the Medical Center faculty as a professor of neurosurgery.
After receiving his BS in biology from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1983, Yablon earned his M.D. at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in 1987. He then had an internal medicine internship at the Oral Roberts University School of Medicine, Tulsa, Oklahoma, from 1987-88; a residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation from 1988-91 at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey/New Jersey School of Medicine, Newark, where he was academic chief resident from 1990-91; and a brain injury/rehabilitation research career development fellowship from 1991-93 at the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research and the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas.
In 1993, he became an assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and served as co-director of the Brain Injury Program at the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research. In 1996, he moved to Jackson to become director of the Brain Injury Program at Methodist Rehabilitation Center.
In 2009, he returned to Texas as director of rehabilitation research at the Baylor Institute for Rehabilitation in Dallas. Two years later, he moved to Canada and joined the University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry as an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, while also serving as medical lead of the Brain Injury Program at Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta. He returned to Jackson in 2015 as medical director of the Brain Injury Program at Methodist Rehabilitation Center.
An associate editor for the journal PM&R, Yablon has been listed among the Best Doctors in America for several years. A member of the American Academy of Neurology and the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, he has received more than $5 million in cumulative research funding for scientific projects by federal granting agencies and the pharmaceutical industry.
The author or coauthor of 75 articles in peer-reviewed academic publications, more than 130 abstracts and six book chapters, Yablon has given numerous invited presentations at scientific meetings and conferences internationally.