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Dr. Alvaro Gurovich, associate professor and director of the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program, has been selected to receive a 2021-22 Mentoring Award. The award, co-sponsored by Â鶹¹ÙÍø’s academic colleges and the Building Scholars Program, is open to all full-time faculty members on campus who have served in a mentorship role to undergraduate and graduate students. Gurovich was selected as the College of Health Sciences’ awardee this year and will be recognized at the spring Research Forum, hosted by the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects.

From the time he was recruited to direct the DPT Program in 2017, Gurovich has demonstrated his commitment to student learning, professional development, and research productivity. To date, he has mentored 50 Â鶹¹ÙÍø students: two post-docs, 20 graduate students (PhD and DPT students) and 28 undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines, including Biology, Chemistry, Kinesiology, and Rehabilitation Sciences. Students are essential to the research productivity of his Clinical Applied Physiology (CAPh) Laboratory, a team he built from the ground up with the help of his first PhD student, Dr. Francisco Morales Acuna, and Jozelyn Rascon, a former BUILD Scholar who graduated as a 2020 Top Ten Senior and who is currently a second-year DPT student.

Under Gurovich’s direction, the multi-disciplinary CAPh Lab team has produced one patent (pending), nine manuscripts, and 39 abstracts which were presented at local, state, and national conferences. For three years in a row, the lab’s undergraduate students were also responsible for the oversight of PhUn Week activities, an outreach program that used simple hands-on activities to introduce area elementary and middle school students to physiological concepts. The students later presented data collected from PhUn Week at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research and Experimental Biology Conference. 

Gurovich says he is honored to have been selected for the mentorship award and attributes the success of his lab to a shared team philosophy. “The CAPh Lab is open for student creativity and hard work,” he said. “We have a common goal: do research, a common area of knowledge: physiology, and mutual respect. Using this simple approach has made the CAPh lab productive, but also a good and safe place to think and discuss.”

To learn more about the CAPh Lab, email Dr. Gurovich at agurovich@utep.edu.  

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