Skip to main content

SC AHEC Excellence Awards: Gateway Award

Acting HCP Director Paula Jones and SC AHEC Executive Director Ann Lefebvre present Dr. Christie with the Gateway Award
The South Carolina AHEC Gateway Award recognizes individuals who are committed to furthering the development of future health professionals and are distinguished in their service to students in the health careers pipeline. This year’s Gateway Award recipient is Angelica Ellman Christie, Ed.D. 

Dr. Christie is currently the vice president of academic affairs at Denmark Technical College. Previously, she served in the South Carolina AHEC system for numerous years: She started her career in 1998 as the Health Careers Program (HCP) coordinator for Greenville AHEC and advanced as the HCP director in the South Carolina AHEC program office in 2000. In the fall of 2018, Dr. Christie left South Carolina AHEC for her position at Denmark Tech.

Throughout her career, Dr. Christie exhibited her passionate dedication to advancing the mission of South Carolina AHEC. She enthusiastically went above and beyond to research, develop, and successfully undertake new projects and programming to strengthen and enhance the HCP core services, including Bench to Bedside (B2B), Building Coalitions to Increase the Diversity of the S.C. Health Care Workforce, Teach-the-Teacher Academy, and the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) Health Careers Exploration & Literacy Project. 

One of Dr. Christie’s AHEC colleagues described her dedication to the Health Careers Program: 

Angelica understood the needs of communities, suburban and rural, and worked fiercely to advocate for students to get involved in health careers so that the community at large would become a healthier, more vital, and impactful place to live. Angelica supported all types of programs that local high schools were working to implement and develop by having coordinators befriend health science instructors and create partnerships to educate young people in health careers. There was no program that Angelica did not see value in, and then add more depth to.  

Dr. Christie’s dedication to excellence was seen throughout her tenure with the South Carolina AHEC System and she indelibly left her mark on the Health Careers Program.  Thank you, Dr. Christie! 

Popular posts from this blog

Marchek Siblings Stay Connected With Upstate AHEC Through Academic Journey

 A pair of siblings from Greer are giving back to current Upstate AHEC Health Careers students after completing the program themselves. Alex Marchek, MD is in his first year as a family medicine resident at Prisma Health Seneca. His younger sister by two years, Anna Marchek, is a second-year medical student at Edward Via College of Medicine (VCOM) Carolinas. “My mom likes to say she did good,” Anna joked. “Both of her kids are going to be doctors. She went two-for-two.” Anna (left) and Alex (right) Marchek are pictured with Nita Donald, Executive Director of Upstate AHEC. While Alex and Anna have both chosen to pursue medicine as a career, their interest in healthcare developed differently. Alex describes his discovery of health sciences as a slow realization. “It was definitely something that was on my radar really young,” said Alex. “My parents will say when I was six years old, I was talking about doing something in medicine. I had some really great science teachers in elementar...

Pee Dee AHEC Clinical Placements Help Students See Challenges – and Opportunities – of Rural Primary Care

  Third-year medical student Omar Guerrero didn’t find his passion for a career in healthcare until he began shadowing health professionals as an undergraduate student. “I just knew that I really loved science and working with my hands,” said Guerrero, who double-majored in Public Health and Cellular & Molecular Biology while at the University of South Florida. It all clicked for him once he was able to observe physicians in their encounters with patients. “I saw there was a real need for Spanish-speaking physicians,” said Guerrero. “There’s a lot of disconnect between providers and Spanish-speaking patients and I thought that was definitely an area that I could make a difference in.” Now in his third year at A.T. Still University’s School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona, Guerrero is doing a clinical placement at Beaufort-Jasper-Hampton Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. in Richland. Guerrero was connected with Pee Dee AHEC and their Health Professions Student (HPS) program...

Simulation Training Prepares Students for Rural Primary Care

Since its inception in 2021, South Carolina AHEC’s Simulation Education Training (SET) has remained a favorite experience amongst health professions students statewide. Pee Dee AHEC Scholars and other health professions students pose for the camera during a simulation Since its inception in 2021, South Carolina AHEC’s Simulation Education Training (SET) has remained a favorite experience amongst health professions students statewide. SET uses simulation-based technology to expose students to clinical environments and scenarios that mirror what providers experience in rural, medically-underserved communities. “A lot of simulations are emergent or hospital-based and students are usually being graded as a formal assessment when they participate,” said SC AHEC Curriculum Coordinator Dawn Leberknight, who was heavily involved in the development of the initiative. “We tried to make [SET] more informal to expose students to simulations before it’s high stakes, and then to really focus on rura...