Don Motaka passed away suddenly on Dec. 21, 2020, in Oxford, Michigan, at the age of 68 due to complications unrelated to COVID.
A native of Gettysburg, Don led a dynamic and purposeful life that included serving as an ordained Lutheran pastor, a Congressional aide, and a professed monk at the only Lutheran monastery in North America.
Don was truly one of a kind and he made an impression on everyone that he met. His keen intelligence, quick wit, huge heart, irreverent sense of humor, and booming laugh will be missed. His positive energy and love of life could overwhelm a room. He was a loving son to his mother, and he was adored by many close friends and their families who referred to him affectionately as âUncle Don.â
Earlier this month, UMass officials led by UMass Medical School Chancellor Dr. Michael Collins and system President Marty Meehan proposed the state should partner with schools to build a program recruiting nursing and medical students to administer the COVID-19 vaccine. This group, led by UMass students, could then go around the state training others and speed up the distribution and delivery of the roughly 10 million vaccine doses the state will need for its adult population.
UMass is now testing this effort in Worcester, and if it is successful, the state should consider implementing the plan widely as soon as possible. To date, America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been mismanaged and uneven, at best. Now with the solution of a vaccine at our doorstep, we continue to trip up in the execution phase, with a slow vaccine rollout. With hospitals in many states strained beyond capacity, more than 400,000 Americans dead, and a new variant of the virus spreading the disea
To start, it may all depend on how things go in Worcester.
UMass Medical School students – both nursing students and the School of Medicine students they’ve trained to give shots – began administering the first vaccines on Jan. 11 to the first few hundred police officers, firefighters and other first responders in Worcester and six adjacent towns.
Before too long, leaders of the effort will review what worked best and what didn’t in order to gauge how such an effort could be replicated elsewhere in the state.
The program may be tapping into a broad eagerness in the medical community to play a role in helping to bring an eventual end to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 400,000 Americans.
Former Isenberg School dean picked to lead UMass-Dartmouth
Mark Fuller, currently a vice chancellor at UMass Amherst, takes over Jan. 19 as interim chancellor of the university’s Dartmouth campus. PHOTO COURTESY OF UMASS
Published: 1/12/2021 4:41:09 PM
A nine-year dean of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s business school who now holds the flagship campus’ top development role will take over next week as the interim chancellor of UMass Dartmouth.
UMass President Marty Meehan announced Tuesday that Mark Fuller, the vice chancellor for advancement at UMass Amherst and former dean of UMass Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management, will step into the Dartmouth job on Jan. 19.