Kathy Carver, RN, MN a nursing professor at JCCC, is the first person to hold the Zamierowski Family Endowed Professorship for Nursing and Medical Simulation, the first endowed chair in JCCC's history.

In the early ‘80s, Carver was working as a staff nurse in the Shawnee Mission Medical Center emergency room and assisted Dr. David Zamierowski, a plastic surgeon, with a car accident victim with multiple lacerations.

Twenty-five years later, their paths crossed again.

In 2004, Zamierowski, now retired, began volunteering to teach JCCC nursing students and assist Carver, now a professor, in the college's health resource lab. Zamierowki was impressed.

Three years later, in honor of Carver's teaching and leadership in a human simulation project at JCCC, Drs. Mary and David Zamierowski designated Carver to be the first person to hold the Zamierowski Family Endowed Professorship for Nursing and Medical Simulation, the first endowed chair in JCCC's history. The couple's gift allows Carver to concentrate full time on simulation teaching, research and evaluation and allowed the nursing program to hire another full-time faculty member.

"I was honored to be recognized with this new title and humbled to have the Zamierowski family name associated with my teaching and nursing practice," Carver said. "I am really excited that JCCC students are afforded more simulation experience."

JCCC introduced its first simulator - named Mel - in November 2001. With the support of Zamierowski, JCCC now has an extensive Healthcare Simulation Center on the first floor of the Classroom Laboratory Building on campus, complete with patient simulators and multifunctional bed bays that can be configured as rooms in the ICU, emergency room, post-operative unit or medical-surgery unit. Students can triage and care for multiple "patients" at one time and work in teams, replicating real-world nursing practice.

"The simulators make our students good practitioners by building their skills and confidence," Carver said. "Students feel more prepared to deal with critical kinds of care and less frequently seen medical conditions after practice in the center."

Carver earned a bachelor's degree in nursing from Washburn University and a master's degree in nursing from the University of Kansas. She started teaching at JCCC in 1983 and has taught all nursing courses. In 2001, she was trained to program and maintain the complex computerized human simulators by their manufacturer, Medical Education Technologies Inc. Since then, she has been a presenter at many state and national conferences on the use of simulation and the development of critical thinking in nurse education.