Transcript

Derek Smith:

Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors and more, discussing important topics in higher education, research and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we are visiting with the new Dean of Baylor's Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences. Dr. Carter was appointed last year as dean of Robbins College. He comes to Baylor from Montana State University, where he served as vice president for research, economic development and graduate education. A graduate of Michigan Tech, he spent 14 years on the faculty as alma mater before moving to Montana State. An active researcher, his highly funded work, focuses on neuro control, the cardiovascular system, and the role of sleep in cardiovascular disease, and I'm sure we're just barely scratching the surface of all that you've been able to do that you bring to Baylor. Dr. Jason Carter, it's great to visit with you and great to meet you. Thanks so much for joining us on the program today.

Jason Carter:

Oh, thank you so much, Derek. It's great to be here.

Derek Smith:

Well, it's great to have you here. And let me start with the obvious question. Your last few months here at Baylor, how have they been? What's it been like for you coming here?

Jason Carter:

It's been great. My family and I have felt absolutely welcomed here. Been spending most of the fall semester getting to know the leadership team, getting to know faculty and staff and our remarkable students, and I just couldn't be happier with it.

Derek Smith:

Well, if we were to eavesdrop on you and your families, you're getting to know Waco and Baylor, have there been some places in the community or on campus that have proved to be favorites of y'all so far?

Jason Carter:

Well, the campus is so beautiful. It's hard to say where our favorite spot is as we walk through campus. It was so wonderful to see the entire place lit up over Christmastime, we're not used to seeing that necessarily on all campuses I've been to before. But I think if there'd be one spot, you'd probably see my family and I at the most it might be some Baylor basketball games. I played college hoops myself and so have really enjoyed getting to watch some of those games. I've also been to a lot of football games, so don't get me wrong, but we do like to watch those Baylor Bears.

Derek Smith:

You mentioned getting to know faculty and students. Take us a little more in depth with that, if you would. What is it about Robbins College specifically that you've been enjoying so far?

Jason Carter:

Well, Robbins College has grown so much in just a nine year span, it's been nine consecutive years of growth at both the undergraduate and graduate levels for the college, and so there's been a lot of hiring that has gone on with that. But what I've been really pleased is I get to know people is the remarkable balance that people have between bringing their A game, whether it's research or whether it's teaching, but also their faith. And that was really important to me. That was really what set Baylor apart. I was happy with where I was at and what we were doing, and it was really just a Christian R1 university that I was looking to try to make that final step two in my career if the right time opened up and the right opportunity opened up. And it's a special environment. So I just love being around top-notch scholars and teachers that also share that Christian faith.

Derek Smith:

Well, I think you answered part of my question then. What aspects were most appealing? The Christian R1 aspect and being a preeminent Christian research University. When you started looking at Baylor, that was obviously a draw, what were some things that stood out to you as Baylor talked to you and you talked to Baylor as you sort of investigated maybe, I don't know, if it's the claims Baylor was making or what, but looked to see what really is going on down here?

Jason Carter:

Well, it was funny, the firm reached out to me because I was referred by another dean that said, "I'm about to retire, but I got somebody you should call." And as I first learned about it, I remember thinking, well, I talked to my wife a couple years ago and I've got to take a peek at this. And it was silent for a little while. We had a couple calls and I was thinking through it, praying on it. And then Baylor, of course, last December hit the that R1 status and they called me that very day back and said, "Did you see?" And I said, "Well, I saw, because I was on the website this morning to make sure Montana State was still in there too." So I said, "Congratulations. And I have been thinking about this and I think I'd like to look at it a little bit more." And the more I got to know about Baylor and meet the people, I just saw a remarkable trajectory. I was so impressed. I told this to President Livingstone, I watched her inauguration speech twice, once I got serious about this. Because I had to watch the first time to say, okay, what type of leader am I going to be under? And the second time, I just was struck by the number of times that she balanced out wanting to be the preeminent research university for Christian university, but also that faith and still respecting the roots of Baylor's teaching mission. And that's really what I like. When I talk to my faculty and staff about what I value, it's the lopsidedness of people. I value people that are outstanding at their research, there are people that are outstanding at teaching. There are certainly people that are unbelievable at both, and I like that too. But what I like to do is try to maneuver people into where they should be so that they're succeeding and that, most importantly, they're meeting the mission of Baylor and we're doing our very best for our student body.

Derek Smith:

Health and human flourishing are two of the pillars of Illuminate, and you're in health and human sciences contributing to that. What does it mean to you and what role can Robbins play when you look at those pillars in advancing those objectives and Baylor's Christian mission?

Jason Carter:

Yeah, well that was one of the things I talked a lot about on the visit here, and it's a tremendous opportunity for Robbins to be not just a leader but a partner. I mean, we don't own health, that's first thing I want to always say is, is it Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences, but there's a lot of other sectors of this university that are passionate about health. You've got folks in research happening in psych, neuroscience, chemistry, all across campus, there's elements of mental health and social work and things going on in nursing. What I would love for Robbins to be as a catalyst, I believe that that's our mission, clearly. We're in the health field, we're delivering some of the best education for some of the allied health professions. Physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, public health, I mean, we're doing all that stuff. But what I'm perhaps most excited about is helping to build strategic partnerships. That's really, if I had to sum up what I've done for the last 15 to 20 years is I've always looked to try to build partnerships. I think we're much stronger together. And so that's been a lot of my time here trying to understand what is happening in other units, what are we doing in our unit and how can we accelerate together? I'm a, all boats rise with the rising tide sort of philosophy. And so I think that's where Robbins can shine is serving in that catalyst position, working across units. And even with the new Dean of Engineering coming in next year, we already have started talking about how much research and opportunities there are around the intersects between engineering and physical therapy with biomechanics and so forth. So that's what I really hope is that Robbins is viewed as a highly collaborative area that pushes the limits when it comes to teaching and scholarship.

Derek Smith:

This is Baylor Connections, we are visiting with Jason Carter, Dean of Baylor's Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences. And Dr. Carter, at the top of the show we share a brief rundown of your academic journey to Baylor. Would you take us inside that a little bit further? Michigan Tech and Montana State, what were some key highlights for you and your career journey?

Jason Carter:

Well, at Michigan Tech I spent so much time there, like you said, it was my alma mater and I started there as a department chair and worked my way up as an associate dean and was an associate vice president for research. And I think the thing I'm proudest of from my time at Michigan Tech is again, this idea of building partnerships. We worked with a local health foundation to really start to transform the way we delivered health across the university, across all colleges and schools. We developed three endowed professorships that spanned across three different colleges and schools. To the point where I was working with the president there and we got the legislature to fund a $40 million new health sciences and engineering building. And that was really, I think, the pinnacle of that. It served not only my own home unit of kinesiology where we study a lot of the applied health areas, but it was helping our biomedical engineering program, it was helping our chemical engineering program, our school of technology that did work. And so I think, again, that was a pinnacle moment because we really were working together. And I think that's one of those instances where you see you're stronger together than you are apart. Out at Montana State, I just really enjoyed representing the remarkable research there. When I left we had three consecutive years of research growth and hit the $20 million research mark for the first time ever as I was concluding things there. I loved interacting with remarkable faculty that were pushing the limits. During my time there, we welcomed in three new National Academy members, one in the National Academy of Medicine and two in the National Academy of Sciences. I mean, it was just really a fun time to be there, to get creative, to think of innovative ways, to support research, to build on our applied research realms and really represent those individuals. And I love the mountains. I love being out there. It was a lot of fun, but, I've said this many times, when I was at Montana State I started to feel a pull towards that Christian R1 because I had time to reflect on some life's situations and circumstances and adversities and I realized I had really been career chasing and I spent 20 years career building. I made that transformational switch to say, you know what, I want to spend the next 20 years kingdom building. And I had the talents and ability and background to do that within higher education. And I thought, what better way to serve Christ than to give some of what he has provided me, blessed me with, in higher education and apply that to a university like Baylor that is pushing the limits on wanting to be a preeminent research university with that Christian foundation to them. And so I'm excited because I feel passionate when I come in here every day for work because we're serving the greater mission of Christ.

Derek Smith:

Dr. Carter, as we talk about your leadership here at Baylor, you're also a researcher as we've talked about, and we're going to talk about that more in a little bit. But when you think about that intersection of research and faith, what does that mean to you? Whether it's personally through your own research or maybe what you've seen through others or even a little bit of both?

Jason Carter:

In this health arena, there are a lot of people doing cutting edge research on a chronic disease like cardiovascular disease, cancer, you name it, that have Christian hearts. And that they're doing that from a Christian point of view and perspective. But that doesn't necessarily intersect in any research way. But what we're looking for here at Baylor, at least in Robbins College, and I know that this is consistent with the philosophy of both President Livingstone and Provost Brickhouse, is we need to go out and find outstanding scholars that have deep, deep Christian hearts and values. And if we stayed focused on that, that's when we shift from getting over the R1 line to being firmly and sustainably in that Carnegie R1 status.

Derek Smith:

Well said. As we visit with Dr. Jason Carter. And Dr. Carter, let's talk about your research a little bit that you bring to Baylor. How would you describe your focus or the questions that drive your work, the problems you're trying to solve?

Jason Carter:

Well, that's a great question. I became fascinated with sleep early on in my career. I was trained as an exercise physiologist and so I studied typical things like strength training and how that affects blood pressure regulation and these baroreflexes that help us maintain our blood pressure. And I started to realize there was a lack of, I don't know if it was interest or just awareness of the impact sleep has on athletic performance, and that's something maybe we can get into a little bit as well. But I started to make this shift and I started to realize, wow, there's just such no data in this stuff. In the world that I lived in, the autonomic nervous system, there's just so little on sleep. And so we started doing some pilot work and looking at the impacts of sleep deprivation and looking at things like insomnia. And the granting agencies, the NIH, just really started to be interested in this area, and it just kind of brought me in a whole new direction. Even though I was trained as an exercise physiologist, I would now classify myself as a sleep physiologist. I still look at how sleep intersects with exercise and athletic activity, but I'm a lot more interested in just the fundamentals of how important sleep is for cardiovascular regulation and health of the body. So being sleep-deprived, chronically sleep-deprived leads to higher rates of hypertension, higher rates of stroke, higher rates of all the cardiovascular and cardiometabolic diseases. And we look at mechanisms, specifically the sympathetic nervous system, which is that fight or flight response that we have in our body, and how that intersects with sleep and things like stress and exercise. And so we're operating around a very complicated question. Because I get asked this a lot as a former exercise physiologist, if I could pick between sleep and exercise, which one do I pick? And there's no simple answer to that. They're both important. But what we're looking at right now is really how important sleep is for overall health.

Derek Smith:

Listen, with Dr. Jason Carter, you mentioned sleep and athletic performance. I know we probably can't just apply it to our athletes March Madness right off the bat and see us see major changes, or maybe we can. I don't know. But what are some things that active people in general or student athletes should know about performance and sleep?

Jason Carter:

That it affects everything. It affects our mental acuity. It affects our psychomotor skills. So when I talk to athletes, one of the things I emphasize the most with athletes is, one of the most abused anabolic steroids use in the country, whether collegiate or professional athletes is synthetically produced human growth hormone. And the thing is, I always point this out to athletes who 99% of them don't know this, that the one time that you release growth hormone during your normal circadian rhythm in high, high quantities is when you are in deep slow wave sleep, which happens in the first half of the night. And I try to emphasize to them, there are things happening while you're sleeping that are helping you with your athletic performance. Your body needs to rest and recover. Growth hormone is not just about growing tall growth hormone repairs your muscle, it restores the body. And so there are things that our athletes are prioritizing like nutrition and strength and conditioning and hydration. You remember the old Bear Bryant days where it was like, "Oh, don't drink any water." Well, we now know water's pretty important. I think we're kind of in that same timeframe with sleep. Literally waking up to the idea that sleep does matter and that there's this balance between push and pull. And pushing the limits with your strength training, but then giving your body enough time to repair. And you see this from major professional athletes like LeBron James and Tom Brady and all of these folks saying sleep is one of the most important things that I prioritize. I mean, LeBron James has been on record and saying, when he heads into playoff mode, he's sleeping 10 to 12 hours a night and prioritizing that. So, our student athletes can't sleep 10 to 12 hours a night, I can tell you that. But what we can do is get them to prioritize sleep, maybe take some strategic naps, we've actually done some research around napping and the importance of napping and really prioritize getting more rest, getting more sleep that offsets sort of all that athletic performance that they're involved with.

Derek Smith:

Well, Dr. Carter, we head into the final few minutes of this show. I know I'm a hopscotching a bit around your research, but I want to ask you about one other part too because it is coming up as this show airs at the beginning of March. That means we are about a week away from daylight savings time. You recently had a piece in Heart and Circulatory Study, the journal, examining that. And there's been talk about proposed legislation around daylight savings time. It always pops up this time of year. What are some things that you found, maybe some things that people should know as we contend with it here next week?

Jason Carter:

Yeah, that was a fun little piece that we got commissioned to write up, just kind of highlighting some of the literature around the biannual switch and daylight and standard time. And essentially, if you think about it, it's been a ongoing long experiment basically where we once a year deprive ourselves of sleep and once a year make up that sleep. And there's some really interesting data out there to suggest that there are higher traffic accidents. There are other issues that happen when we lose that sleep, when we have that spring forward, which we're about to do, we're about to lose an hour of sleep. And many of those things trend in the opposite direction when we gain an hour of sleep in the fall. Fewer traffic accidents, all those kind of things. Well, there's been some work done looking at things like cardiovascular risks, people be being admitted to the hospital for sudden cardiac issues. And you see that in the case of where there's that loss of sleep, there's actually a statistical significant difference in that day compared to the other days over a long period of data. Now that's all associational data, you can't say definitively a cause and effect there. But what we do know from definitive studies is that if we deprive sleep of people, even just a couple hours over repeated nights, we can take people's glucose profile and take somebody who looks completely normal and they look pre-diabetic a week later. We show that there's higher incidents of hypertension over long periods of following people. So, we know this has an additive effect. So what we were trying to point out in that is that, why are we continuing to do this? And there's actually legislation out there to try to come to a conclusion of one time time, no switches. But there's a lot to that equation. And I would just say there's economic issues, there's health issues, and we were trying to make the case to the legislature to make sure that they consider some of the cardiovascular health consequences of any decision.

Derek Smith:

That's great. Really interesting. So I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm guessing at the very least, you might tell people to go ahead and make sure you, I don't know, try to get to bed a little earlier that night. Don't just be like, "Oh, it's 11 o'clock, we're going to lose that hour. Nothing we can do about it."

Jason Carter:

Well, speaking of podcast, the journal that we published this and asked us to do a podcast on this article, and we did, and so refer some of your listeners maybe to that one. But we talked about strategies, and one thing that doesn't make a lot of sense as we talk through that podcast is we do this switch on a Saturday night at 2:00 AM right? So you basically can maybe sleep in on Sunday and then you hit Monday. One of the people on the podcast, why don't we do this switch on Friday? And actually that's one of the things that has actually been proposed or we advise people is, "Hey, start doing this earlier. Don't wait till Saturday to change your clock forward. Actually start to change your clock forward that Friday before. Start to ease yourself into it." Because we do know crossing time zones that we do adapt, eventually. We do adapt to that jet lag, that social jet lag. But if you can start to do it on that Friday night and so that it just doesn't hit you that Monday morning as hard, that's probably the best thing we can advise people right now.

Derek Smith:

Well, that sounds good. Well, Dr. Carter, I appreciate that. A lot of topics would be fun to delve further into, but I know we're about out of time. And as we close, I just want to ask you, I think you've touched on this, but as you look ahead at what's in the foreground for Robbins College, what are some things you're really excited about, whether it's this spring semester or beyond?

Jason Carter:

Well, I've really been in listening mode this first semester here, this fall semester, getting to know faculty. And what I'm excited about now is we're shifting into that next gear of talking about what are going to be sort of the four to five signature research areas of Robbins, what are going to be some areas that we put increased emphasis on? I could tell you things like mental health come up, I mean, that's a big topic right now. We also are very passionate and have a lot of people in the college doing work around rural health or disabilities based research. I mean, you think about our Christian mission and what Jesus put forward as an example of helping individuals that are disabled. I think that we have some bright, bright days ahead here if we can stay focused. Try to synergize and determine what do we want to prioritize. And then once we decide on those four to five signature research areas, how do we partner with other people here at Baylor and beyond to help solve some of the most complicated problems that we have?

Derek Smith:

Well, that's very exciting. We'll look forward to talking to you about that again as that comes together and your great faculty as well. Well, really great to meet you on this program and to get to share a little more about your story with the Baylor family. We will appreciate you coming on the program today.

Jason Carter:

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, Derek.

Derek Smith:

Thank you. Dr. Jason Carter, Dean of Baylor's Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences, our guest today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. A reminder, you can hear this in other programs online, baylor.edu/connections, and you can subscribe on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.