By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
A 1993 Union High School graduate, Gina Magyar-Russell, Ph.D., this month completes her two-year fellowship at Johns Hopkins, but is not leaving the Washington-Baltimore area.
Her fellowship was extended until June 30.
July 1 she has been offered a faculty position in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.
Magyar-Russell, who lives in Silver Spring, Md., just north of Washington, is the daughter of John and Annette Magyar of Yaw Street, Dowagiac.
"I will be changing gears a bit and working predominantly within cardiology," she told the Daily News in an e-mail interview.
"I'll be working clinically and conducting research with patients who have cardiovascular disease, including patients with ICDs (implantable cardioverter defibrillators).
"My recent research efforts have been focused on examining the relation between depression, acute emotional distress and cardiac arrhythmias in ICD patients and working on a broad range of projects that hope to clarify the mechanisms currently thought to link depression and anxiety to cardiac functioning."
Cardiology is a departure from the Johns Hopkins Burn Center, where she worked for two years as a postdoctoral fellow.
"I work clinically (psychological assessments and therapy) with burn patients on recovery issues following burn injury, such as changes in appearance, coping with pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, reintegration into the workplace. I also conduct research with burn patients, including examining the impact of depressive symptoms on adherence to rehabilitative therapies, as well as continuing my research examining the use of religious and spiritual coping among burn survivors – which is the first work of its kind among burn patients."
The former Dowagiac cheerleader and volleyball player envisioned herself following in the footsteps of her father, John, and becoming a lawyer, she told the Daily News in 2002.
But when Gina enrolled in an abnormal psychology class during her junior year at the University of Michigan, her plans changed.
"I was hooked. I thought, 'Wow! I can do something for a living and be this excited about it."
She earned her bachelor's degree in history and psychology in 1997 from U-M and a master's degree from Bowling Green in 2001.
Magyar, a Catholic who felt that spirituality is too often ignored by practicing psychologists considering the number of people who rely on religion to cope with trauma, received the psychology department's student paper award for 2001 from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
For her doctorate in clinical psychology, Magyar-Russell's dissertation explored the relation between religious and spiritual coping strategies and mental and physical health during and following acute, inpatient physical rehabilitation for stroke, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, amputations and cancer.
"I took the fellowship at Hopkins with the burn center to expand my training in trauma recovery," she said. "I got a great deal of training in graduate school at BGSU on methods and clinical issues in studying religion and spirituality, so the fellowship was aimed at expanding my training in working with medically ill/trauma patients."
"My ultimate career goals include integrating these two areas of study," Magyar-Russell said. "Psychology of religion/spirituality and what is generally referred to as 'health psychology.' Hence, my work with cardiac and ICD patients will also include the use of religion and spirituality in dealing with heart problems, in particular, coping with the implantation of a device for regulation of cardiac arrythmias and receiving painful 'shocks' from the device when heart rates drop dangerously low. As you might imagine, I am hypothesizing that religious and spiritual individuals may use their faith to cope with what is essentially a 'near death' experience. In other words, people receive shocks from their ICD when they need a 'jump start' to their heart."
On Sept. 4, 2004, she married Dr. Steven Russell from Canton, Ohio. They met in 1999 at Bowling Green. Her husband works in Arlington, Va., while Gina works in Baltimore. His doctoral degree is in industrial-organization psychology.