When Iris Iliana Hartford was born August 19 at the University of Mississippi Medical Center's Wiser Hospital for Women and Infants, she immediately got a roommate: Her mom, Kyera Gilmore Hartford.

Within minutes of Iris' birth, the nurse placed Iris on the bare chest of her mom for skin-to-skin contact, giving Iris comfort and warmth as the two transitioned from labor and delivery to their own room. That skin-to-skin contact allowed Hartford to begin connecting emotionally with her baby.

With the nurse assigned to them just feet away, Iris was weighed and measured. Ointment was placed in her eyes, and she received routine hepatitis B and vitamin K shots, procedures often completed in a hospital newborn nursery.

Healthy moms having healthy babies now have a second option for post-delivery care. Moms can choose to keep their babies in their room, in Wiser's mother-baby unit, during their hospital stay.

Wiser recently began a mother-baby unit in which one nurse is assigned to give total care to a mother and her baby, all in the mother's hospital room. Mothers can also choose for their baby to receive care primarily in the newborn nursery.

Until earlier this year, "we didn't have a comprehensive program to allow babies to stay in their mother's room," said Dr. James Shwayder, professor and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 

As a boy, Dr. Joshua Mann was fascinated by numbers, particularly, 1, 51 and 22 - those worn by, respectively, Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee and Jack Clark.

The young Mann was a St. Louis Cardinals fan riveted also by batting averages, home runs, runs batted in - measures of frequency and probability. Performance converted into digits.

Today, he's engrossed by figures from a different sphere, but which offer a similar service: measuring incidence, prevalence and distribution.

But, instead of hits, he studies human health; instead of dingers, it's human disease - the province of epidemiology, and his province as the newly-arrived chair of the reconstituted Department of Preventive Medicine.

"Preventive medicine deals, in large part, with how realities about health can be translated into numbers,"  said Mann, a UMMC medical school alumnus whose previous position was associate professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.

"It deals with what we can do to improve those realities on both the individual and population levels.

"It asks, 'what do statistics say about reality?' That's what epidemiologists do."

There's another reality facing Mann: reviving a department that has been dormant since 2007, which also means creating a residency program from scratch.

Crystal, Cujo, Charles and Twin.

Of the hundreds of homeless people cared for by Kelli Irby through the Jackson Street Ministry, they are just four whose stories and friendships permanently touch her heart. 

Irby, an administrative assistant in the office of School of Dentistry Dean Gary Reeves, gathers with several dozen members of metro-area churches every Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. in a parking lot at First Baptist Church in downtown Jackson. They grip hands or shoulders, and they single out in prayer the men and women who for the next three hours will accept sack lunches, mosquito spray, clean socks, reading glasses, cold water and other comforts most people don't see as anything special.

Jackson Street Ministry's ultimate goal, Irby said, isn't to collect donations and distribute them to those in need. It's to build relationships with the city's homeless, and to address their spiritual, emotional and physical needs.

The Medical Center is proud to announce the following additions to its faculty and leadership staff: