2024 Alumni Award Recipients
Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences is excited to announce this year’s recipients of its prestigious Alumni of the Year and Rising Star awards. Among these remarkable individuals are educators who have passed on their knowledge to thousands of DMU students. They are practitioners who have significantly advanced health care.
“These individuals are exceptional in their fields and embody the spirit of service and excellence that DMU stands for. They truly deserve this recognition,” says Andrew English, associate director of alumni relations. “DMU is dedicated to preparing tomorrow’s health leaders through outstanding education, significant research and exemplary patient care. Our alumni are making a difference globally by applying their expertise and compassion to improve health care for all.”
The DMU Alumni Board of Directors and university leadership selected this year’s honorees based on their outstanding contributions to their respective fields and dedication to service. To be considered for the awards, recipients must:
- Be in good standing as members of their respective professional state or national organization and the DMU Alumni Association.
- Demonstrate excellent service to DMU, its students and their profession.
- Exhibit a record of service to their community on a local, state and/or national level.
Kelsey Millonig, D.P.M.’17, M.P.H.’17, FACFAS, DABPM
Kelsey Millonig, D.P.M.’17, M.P.H.’17, FACFAS, DABPM, a fellowship-trained foot and ankle surgeon with the East Village Foot and Ankle Surgeons in Des Moines, Iowa, has been awarded the Rising Star Award. As a student, she led the Global Health Student Club and participated in service trips to rural Honduras, Dominican Republic and Uganda. Millonig also was president of DMU’s American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons chapter. She founded and served as president of Podiatric Medicine Advocacy, now part of the American Podiatric Medical Association. She was also the first-ever podiatric student selected as a research intern at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, where she focused on age-friendly cities and communities. Today she is active in organizations including the Iowa Board of Podiatric Medicine, American College of Foot and Ankle Surgery, the American Podiatric Medical Association and the American Association for Women Podiatrists. She lectures nationally educating surgeons on her specialities in minimally invasive surgery and deformity correction. She also focuses on mentorship for women in medicine who have similar interests.
Millonig, an Iowa native, received her undergraduate degree at Luther College, where she took her first steps into medicine. The college offered an alumni shadowing program to help students learn more about the fields they would one day enter. Millonig was first paired with Jeff Anderson, an anesthesiologist in Des Moines, with whom she remains friends. “When I shadowed Dr. Anderson, I was able to experience the operating room and fell in love with surgery instantly,” Millonig says.
A softball player throughout her college career, Millonig suffered a few foot injuries that ultimately led her to choose podiatric medicine for her next job shadow. Right off the bat, she loved the idea of specializing and the opportunities it allows to be an expert in foot and ankle surgery. She realized by entering the podiatric profession, she could help people get back on their feet and continue living their lives. “You can’t be active if you are unable to walk or be on your feet,” Millonig says. “I loved the idea of fixing things for patients so that they can go back to doing the things they love.”
When it came to graduate programs, Millonig did her research. She looked at many different schools and eventually landed at DMU because of the opportunities for dual degrees, student involvement and global health. It didn’t take long for her to take advantage of these things. Adding a master’s in public health was just one of them.
As a DMU student passionate about health access and global health, she was among an interdisciplinary group of students and clinicians who participated in a five-day health services trip in rural Honduran villages over the 2014 spring break and Dominican Republic in 2015. Her fourth-year rotation occurred in a Ugandan medical school where she worked on the Uganda Clubfoot Project. She was a member and trip leader of the Global Health Student Club and president of the Student Chapter of the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons. Millonig founded and served as president of Podiatric Medicine Advocacy, an organization to promote the profession and work toward parity, that now is an integral part of the American Podiatric Medical Association.
She also became the first-ever podiatric professional to be selected as a research intern at the World Health Organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. “I'm so grateful to have had the chance to be at the World Health Organization, stand in the United Nations and learn about policy creation among the world’s leaders,” Millonig says.
Her international experiences are most impactful when it comes to leaving her legacy.
“I wanted to see how I could make a difference internationally and with policy,” Millonig says. “I didn’t want to only be a surgeon who could operate. I wanted to develop programs that would help train doctors in communities to provide care after I left. I wanted to help create real change within the communities I visited.”
When she graduated from DMU, Millonig completed a three-year residency at Franciscan Foot and Ankle Institute in Seattle. After, she did a one-year fellowship at the Rubin Institute, the international center for limb lengthening in Baltimore. “This extra year isn’t required in podiatry, but I wanted to be the best trained in my profession, so I chose to do it,” Millonig says. “I wanted to be sure if someone brought a concern to me, I knew how to fix it.” This training specifically offered Millonig the opportunity to offer expertise in minimally invasive surgery, limb deformity correction and lengthening, orthoplastic reconstruction and total ankle replacement.
Today, Millonig practices at East Village Foot and Ankle Surgeons in Des Moines, Iowa, where individualized care is at the forefront of everything they do. The small private practice has two other locations in Pella, Iowa, and Mason City, Iowa. “Some patients come in with really complex issues or have been told by other providers there is nothing that can be done to help them. It’s the most profound experience to be able to tell these patients I can help them, and here’s how we are going to do it.”
With her extensive athletic background, Millonig also enjoys treating athletes with sports injuries, allowing them to resume competitive activity.
“I’m really just a small-town farm kid from Iowa who went to school for a long time,” Millonig says. “I sought out a lot of opportunities to collect experiences from around the world with the support of some amazing people. It brings me so much joy to be able to come back and help share all of that with the people of Iowa that I love so much in a place that I’ve always called home.”
Thomas Benzoni, D.O.’83, AOBEM, FACEP, ABFM, and Noreen O’Shea, D.O.’84, FAAFP
Thomas Benzoni, D.O.’83, AOBEM, FACEP, ABFM, and Noreen O’Shea, D.O.’84, FAAFP, have taught and inspired thousands of aspiring health care professionals. Experts in emergency and family medicine, respectively, they both recently retired as DMU faculty members. The couple has been named the College of Osteopathic Medicine 2024 Alumni of the Year.
Benzoni, a board-certified emergency medicine physician practicing at UnityPoint Health in Central Iowa, and O’Shea, a board-certified family physician and the medical director for the Clive Community Services Free Clinic in Clive, Iowa, have a long history of helping establish medical services in areas that did not previously have them.
Their combined list of credentials is impressive. She was president of the Iowa Academy of Family Physicians and a member of the Iowa Osteopathic Medical Association Board of Trustees and is currently serving on the Iowa Medical Society Board of Directors. He is a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians, a founding member of the Iowa Disaster Medical Assistance Team, a holder of multiple certifications with the Iowa Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue, and an active physician in the American Heart Association’s Mission: Lifeline, among many other entities. He also served on the Iowa Medical Society Board of Directors and is currently secretary-treasurer of the Polk County, Iowa, Medical Society. Benzoni and O’Shea continue to amplify their impact on patients and their families by expanding access to care in communities and teaching and increasing educational opportunities for aspiring health professionals.
Every physician’s care creates a ripple effect, impacting patients, families and entire communities. Benzoni and O’Shea, who are married, have amplified their impact by expanding access to care in rural communities and enhancing educational opportunities for aspiring health care professionals. They also have a beautiful story of how they fell in love with each other and with medicine and found that their values of integrity and compassion were in perfect alignment.
As recent DMU faculty retirees, they first met as undergraduates at Creighton University. Benzoni, a medical technology major, and O’Shea, a pre-medicine and theology major, were both encouraged to pursue medical careers by mentors and professors. After marrying and Benzoni enrolling at DMU, O’Shea worked as a phlebotomist at Iowa Methodist Medical Center. She often attended his classes to build her confidence for medical school.
“On my days off, I’d sit in on classes with Tom, and when he was studying, I’d listen in,” O’Shea says. “That made me more confident about my ability to do the academic work.” She applied to DMU and was accepted the following year after her husband began his studies.
Their dedication to osteopathic principles was influenced by DMU giants like Bernard TePoorten, D.O., FAAO, and Gordon Zink, D.O., FAAO, D.Sc.Hon., who demonstrated the integration of osteopathic manipulative medicine into holistic patient care. “In osteopathic medicine, you can do things with your brain and your hands and not be totally reliant on an x-ray machine or a lab test,” O’Shea says.
O’Shea’s initiative to host prospective DMU students during their interviews created lasting connections and a welcoming environment. “I worked with DMU’s dean of admissions to recruit current students that would offer to open their apartments up to prospective students who were being interviewed at DMU,” O’Shea says. “That way, if they were admitted, they already were connected to a student here.” This program’s success reflected the couple’s commitment to mentorship and their dedication to nurturing the next generation of medical professionals.
Completing their residencies at Creighton, O’Shea specialized in family medicine, and continues to practice at Clive Community Services Free Clinic, where she also serves as the medical director. Benzoni found his passion in emergency medicine. He continues to practice at UnityPoint Health in Central Iowa.
“Emergency medicine is where you bring a living body and have it cared for with reasonable graciousness and reasonable dignity until another living body comes to claim it or it can take care of itself,” he says. “Race, color, creed, financial — none of those matter.”
Their commitment to underserved communities led them to Breathitt County, Kentucky, one of the nation’s poorest counties. They transformed health care access by establishing a hospital and recruiting doctors, working with community health nurses and hosting DMU students for rotations.
“We had a little house with a dryer in the basement. When people found out who we were, they’d bring over their kids when they had lacerations. We’d sew them up on the lid of that dryer,” Benzoni says. “There were no veterinary services, so occasionally I’d have to be the veterinarian too.”
The ripple effect of Benzoni and O’Shea moving to Breathitt County extended beyond helping people with their medical needs. Their work had a transformative impact on the community’s youth, with more young people prioritizing their education.
“When we arrived, many of the young people would not go beyond high school, and some would quit halfway through to get whatever jobs they could,” O’Shea says. “When the hospital was started, people started to move back to get jobs as nurses and so on. When we went back in 2017, that was the first year every kid graduated and went on to something beyond high school.”
When the couple relocated to Sioux City, Iowa, they hosted Ugandan medical students for rural health rotations. When they joined the DMU faculty in 2014, they revived spring break rural health experiences in Breathitt County for DMU students.
While in Sioux City, Benzoni became involved in setting up the State Trauma system, drawing on models from across the country, basing it on the American College of Surgeons’ Committee On Trauma model. He directed air medical operations and rural emergency medical services squads and remains one of the longest-serving Advanced Trauma Life Support instructors in Iowa.
They still have ongoing efforts to send medical supplies to Honduras and Ukraine. They helped DMU decide to refurbish depreciated ultrasound machines and send them to high-need areas, such as Honduras and war-torn Ukraine, where they continue to be used effectively. Benzoni took the machines to his home and refurbished them himself.
Benzoni also spearheaded DMU’s ultrasound training program. O’Shea’s contributions as a faculty member included directing the family medicine clerkship, re-organizing the Ethics and Preventive Medicine courses and revamping the dermatology curriculum.
Their love for medicine and DMU remains strong. “Medicine is a passion. If you want to choose something that will invigorate you for the rest of your life, that will let you make a living but also make a difference, choose medicine,” O’Shea says.
Stephen DeVries, M.S.P.A.S.’12, PA-C
Stephen DeVries, M.S.P.A.S.’12, PA-C, is the College of Health Sciences 2024 Alumnus of the Year. He is a cardiothoracic surgery physician assistant and clinical organ recovery lead at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also an instructor of thoracic organ recovery for Vanderbilt's cardiothoracic surgery fellowship program. He began saving lives as a firefighter/paramedic before earning his physician assistant studies degree at DMU. He is the second PA in the United States to become nationally credentialed to independently procure donated hearts and lungs for transplantation. In December 2019, DeVries was part of a team at the University of Wisconsin that was the third in the United States to recover a heart after donation after cardiac death using normothermic machine reperfusion. In May 2024, he was part of a team with Vanderbilt that was the first in North America to recover a DCD heart directly to a novel cold organ perfusion device. His dedication and determination are helping drive innovation in the field to save more lives.
DeVries began saving lives as a firefighter/paramedic before he earned his physician assistant studies degree. Since then, he’s taken that endeavor to far greater heights and is helping drive innovation in the field.
Before joining Vanderbilt in 2022, he was in a similar role at the University of Wisconsin Health in Madison. Here, he helped build a DCD heart transplant program to use hearts with the then-new normothermic machine reperfusion device. In DCD donation, donors have sustained severe brain injury with no chance of survival without artificial support, but they do not meet the criteria for brain death. Previously, only hearts from brain dead donors were able to be recovered for transplant.
In December 2019, DeVries was part of the UW Health team, just third in the U.S., after Duke University Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, to successfully transplant an adult heart from a DCD patient.
“Since then, the field has exploded as far as the science and development of other devices,” he says. “It broke a glass ceiling in a field that had been stagnant for four decades, where we had been recovering hearts and lungs and putting them in ice coolers for transport. That restricted us as far as the distance we could travel, the time we had and the organs our recipients had access to.”
DeVries has traveled to 44 states, Puerto Rico and Canada to recover donated hearts, including a trip to Alaska that took seven and a half hours each way. That heart had a total ischemic time of 10 hours, 22 minutes.
“Prior to all this new science and technology, you really had to stay under four hours for a heart stored in a cooler. Anything beyond four hours we would rarely consider for transplant,” he says. “Now we’ve repeatedly gone seven, eight and more than 10 hours with good outcomes.”
DeVries is an instructor for Vanderbilt’s cardiothoracic surgery fellowship. He regularly talks with visitors from around the world who want to begin, expand or improve their heart transplantation program. In a field that’s advancing so quickly, PAs can provide essential personnel and expertise.
“With the way this field continues to rapidly evolve, you need someone who’s very focused and dedicated to the work. Also, cardiac surgeons have so much going on with the demands of their practices that it’s hard for the faculty to dedicate a lot of time to this very subspecialized part of transplantation,” DeVries says. “Our goal is to show a PA organ recovery model is successful, reproducible and a major benefit to transplant programs in a very unique way. My hope is this will open doors for PAs all over the country to have a similar opportunity.”
It’s one he prizes. “It’s kind of surreal when I step back and think about the impact this work has on so many people, not just the patients but also their families and the donors’ families,” DeVries says. “Because of this technology, we’re recovering more organs and maximizing the gifts of the donors in ways we couldn’t before. In addition, patients waiting for a life-saving transplant are now gaining access to additional donor organs they never previously had access to, which, is decreasing average wait times and waitlist mortality. I’m very grateful to have a small part in that.”
DeVries, who began his medical practice in emergency medicine, is also grateful for his DMU education. “One of the things that makes PAs unique is the ability to transition between specialties, and DMU has a very well-rounded curriculum. That laid the foundation for where I am today,” he says.
College of Podiatric Medicine and Surgery Alumni of the Year
Joshua M. Vest, D.P.M.’08, FACFAS
Joshua M. Vest, D.P.M.’08, FACFAS, is a podiatric physician. Known for his dedication to educating others about podiatric medicine, Vest mentors medical students and residents and leads the podiatric surgery department at Bryan Medical Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. He is this year’s College of Podiatric Medicine and Surgery 2024 Alumnus of the Year. As a DMU student, he served as the president of the Iowa Podiatric Medical Student Association. In 2011, he moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, to join two other podiatric physicians at a practice that provides foot and ankle trauma care services at Bryan Health System. Vest also is president of Capital Foot and Ankle in Lincoln and a governor-appointed member of the Nebraska State Board of Health. He emphasizes the importance of keeping abreast of new treatment protocols and procedures.
Any time Vest encounters others, whether they be fellow medical professionals or not, he’s happy to educate and share his knowledge. He’s similarly generous in mentoring medical students and residents. Growing up, he looked up to his uncle, who was a physician, as a mentor who introduced him to the idea of going into medicine. He just wasn’t sure what type of medicine to go into. That is until he shadowed a podiatrist while pre-med as an undergraduate.
“You hear people say podiatry is the best-kept secret in medicine, and there’s some truth to that,” Vest says. “Fortunately, I was introduced to a podiatrist who truly loved what he did and inspired me to follow in the same path.”
Vest has helped share this best-kept secret as a podiatric physician and president of Capital Foot and Ankle in Lincoln, Nebraska; chair of the podiatric surgery department at Bryan Medical Center; and a governor-appointed member of the Nebraska State Board of Health. He moved to Lincoln in 2011 to join two other podiatric physicians at a practice that agreed to provide foot and ankle trauma care services at the medical center. The practice, which became part of Bryan Health System four years ago, now includes six podiatrists, two pedorthists, a physician assistant and two nurse practitioners.
“Having our practice be part of the hospital is great. I can focus on my patients and not worry about many of the aspects of running a private practice,” he says. “And because there are six podiatrists in our group, each of us gets to focus on the areas we’re passionate about.”
Joining the hospital did require some podiatric diplomacy. When he first came to Lincoln, podiatric physicians were considered allied health professionals. Some providers in the area didn’t know the level and types of training, standards or criteria for podiatric practice.
“Some were surprised to find out we could prescribe medicines and that we had a similar education to an M.D. or D.O.,” he says. “Working with the hospital, we’ve been able to change that.”
He also shares those insights with students who shadow him or do rotations at his practice and residents in the Lincoln Family Medicine Residency Program, where he serves as a clinical instructor. It’s a way to “pay it forward” for the mentors he’s had, including during his own reconstructive foot and ankle surgery residency at Detroit Medical Center and Wayne State University. He was chief resident there.
“It was a high surgical volume program at a Level 1 trauma center, where I developed the interest in and love for what I do now,” Vest says. “We had more than 100 podiatry attendings, so I got to see the ways different people practice.”
That inspired how he practices. He emphasizes the importance of keeping abreast of new treatment protocols and procedures, including with his advanced training in ankle joint replacement. His practice features a 3D printer that can transform a CT scan of a patient’s ankle into an exact replica with a surgical template. That facilitates preparation for the actual surgical procedure, reducing “guesswork and problem-solving” in the operating room.
“Some physicians choose a treatment option because that’s the way they’ve always done it,” Vest says. “I never felt it was right to make decisions for your patients. To me, it’s always been important to base decisions on the most up-to-date evidence shows. We owe it to our patients to constantly immerse ourselves in the latest literature and data.”