Feature Story
Alumnus Trager Hintze (‘13) Joins Faculty at Alice L. Walton School of Medicine
Southern Virginia University alumnus Trager Hintze (‘13) is joining the ranks of faculty at the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine as an assistant professor of pharmacology, pursuing his dream to train the next generation of medical students to safely and effectively use medication.
Granted preliminary accreditation status with the inaugural Class of 2025, the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine is a four-year MD program based in Bentonville, Arkansas. For optimal student learning, Hintze is building a flip-style classroom where he gives his lectures as pre-class material to allow class time for active learning, such as studying patient cases or participating in interactive learning games.
“I feel so passionate about teaching because I get to do really unique, fun things,” Hintze said. “If I can do escape rooms, some kind of digital or card game, or anything like that in the name of learning, and have those tied to very specific learning objectives, then I prefer that because it cements information in your brain a little bit better and gives it a little more context.”
After studying pharmacy at Idaho State, Hintze completed a residency at the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center and the University of Texas Health Science Center with a specialization in critical care. He then pivoted towards teaching when he took a faculty appointment as a clinical assistant professor at the Texas A&M Irma Lerma Rangel School of Pharmacy, hoping to have a positive impact on the largest number of people.
“I could train up the pharmacy students and teach them some of the things that I had learned, and at the end of the day, they could make recommendations to the physicians–they could have an impact,” Hintze explained. “But I still found that to be not quite the biggest impact, and so that fueled my decision to jump over to the medicine side and take this position here at Alice Walton because I could train future physicians and help them make good choices to really use medication safely and effectively.”
Hintze began considering a career in pharmacy when he was a student at Southern Virginia University. As a biology major and chemistry minor, he remembers Dr. Van Kuiken recommending that he look into pharmaceuticals during one of his chemistry classes. His decision was reinforced when a cousin in pharmacy school encouraged him to look into it more.
“Honestly, pharmacy was a really good opportunity to hone in on one particular area. Medicine obviously can be very broad, and pharmacy is really broad too, but it gave me a way to narrow down my learning and focus in on one area,” said Hintze. “And I feel that I had a really good foundation at SVU, especially in all the chemistry courses I took with Dr. Van Kuiken.”
As a student at Southern Virginia, Hintze played on the university’s baseball team and worked in the call center, where he met his wife, Jena (‘13). They currently live in Bentonville, Arkansas, with their three daughters.