O.T. Wendel

Dr. Wendel is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives & Planning at the Arizona campus of A. T. Still University of Health Sciences (ATSU). His prior position was Vice President for Arizona Operations and Special Assistant to the Executive Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and for over a decade, he served as the Associate Provost for the Arizona campus of ATSU. He received his undergraduate degree from St. Andrews College in Laurinburg, North Carolina in 1969. He has both a masters (1973) and doctorate (1974) in pharmacology from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina where he served on the medical school faculty for six years before accepting a position as an associate professor of pharmacology at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine. Dr. Wendel published several papers in the area of neuropharmacology and the neural mechanisms of hypertension. In 1986 he moved to the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific in Pomona, California where he was the founding dean of the school of allied health and the chancellor of the Chico campus of the Western University of Health Sciences. In 1998 Dr. Wendel returned to the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine (now ATSU) to serve as the associate provost of the ATSU-Mesa campus where he currently also holds an academic appointment as professor in the School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona (SOMA). For the past 15 years, Dr. Wendel has explored innovative approaches to educating health professionals. Among these projects was the first successful online masters degree in nursing. As an academic leader on the ATSU’s Mesa campus, Dr. Wendel has created an environment that facilitates the incorporation of state-of-the-art technology into the education and training of health care professionals.