Anne Weisman

Three degrees in two different disciplines. 

Two academic appointments (including a current role as associate professor of medical education at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV).

Member of more than five dozen — yes, dozen — university and community committees (including active participation with nearly four dozen of those committees).

Mentor to more than three dozen UNLV students and student groups (including numerous Honors College, graduate, doctoral, and medical school candidates).

Licensed massage therapist whose healing hands have brought physical and emotional relief to hundreds of clients.

Wellness workshop presenter. Keynote speaker. Planner and facilitator of countless university- and community-related events.

The list of reasons why Anne Weisman is worthy of being recognized as the 2025 Graduate College Alumna of the Year goes on ad infinitum. 

Indeed, Weisman has dedicated her entire adult life to academic, professional, and personal pursuits tied to a single-minded mission: helping others live better lives.

No, not because she’s on some dogged quest for self-serving nobility. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Weisman’s intense passion (and compassion) for the well-being of others is born of a deep sense of gratitude for her own life — a life she nearly lost a quarter-century ago.

It was on July 4, 1999, when Weisman — then a 20-year-old student at UNR — was driving back to Reno with friends after celebrating the 4th of July holiday in Lake Tahoe.

After missing the turn to her friend’s home, Weisman attempted to make a U-turn at the next intersection. As she pulled out and began to crank the steering wheel, a truck going full speed in the opposite direction smashed into her vehicle.

Fortunately, Weisman was the only one in the accident who sustained injuries. Unfortunately, those injuries were grave: multiple facial fractures, broken jaw, broken ribs that punctured her left lung, and most frightening of all, a traumatic brain injury.

After being extricated from her vehicle, Weisman was transferred to a medical helicopter. The plan was to head to the state’s only Level One trauma center in Weisman’s hometown of Las Vegas. But when Weisman’s vitals plummeted midflight, the decision was made to double back and land at Reno’s Renown Regional Medical Center.

“They brought me in and placed me on life support,” Weisman says. “The doctors called my family and prepared them for the worst. I spent six days on life support and in a coma.”

Thankfully, Weisman emerged from the coma and began to breathe on her own. As her condition improved, a surgeon at Renown repaired Weisman’s facial fractures, and soon after she was transferred to Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas to continue her recovery.

Finally, on August 4, 1999 — exactly one month after the accident — Weisman was back in her parent’s home.

“I do not have any memory of the day of the crash or any of my time in the hospital,” Weisman says. “My first memory is waking up in Las Vegas in my old childhood bedroom and wondering, ‘What am I doing here?’”

While Weisman was out of life-threatening danger at this point, the odds of her regaining the life she previously had were not encouraging. 

“My early prognosis was poor,” she says. “Doctors thought that if I did survive, my brain function would be quite limited. Thankfully, that never resonated with me.”

Determined to prove that prognosis wrong and author her own second act, Weisman began taking classes at UNLV in the spring 2000 semester. 

“I remember feeling so excited to have the opportunity to begin again — and to learn how to learn again,” she says. 

The rest, as they say, is history.

A gentle nudge from two of her business school professors led Weisman to change majors from business to communications. Then after working in public relations for a couple of years post-graduation, Weisman made a decision that altered the course of her life: She enrolled in massage therapy school.

“After all my body had endured, I felt that I understood pain and suffering in a way I had not before,” she says. “I thought it would be a good use of my life to try to help others who experience bodily pain or discomfort.”

After earning her massage therapy license and working on people from vulnerable populations — most notably, hospice patients and individuals dealing with HIV and AIDS — Weisman found herself wanting to explore the world of public health.

So she reached out to UNLV professor emerita Mary Guinan (the founding dean of what is now the School of Public Health). Guinan connected Weisman with Melva Thompson-Robinson (then a Public Health professor), and both educators offered the same advice: Apply to the Graduate College.

After some initial trepidation, Weisman did just that.

“I was so excited to be a student again,” she says. “During that first semester, I took a biostatistics class and sat next to two women whom I felt would be smart, and we ended up becoming lifelong friends.

“My graduate school experience was amazing. I was surrounded by incredible faculty and interesting peers.”

As Weisman neared completion of her master’s in social and behavioral sciences, Thompson-Robinson encouraged her to join the ranks of triple-degree Rebel graduates by pursuing her doctorate in public health.

“I was reluctant,” Weisman says. “But she told me in order to do the work I wanted to do that I would need a Ph.D. And she was right.”

Today, that work includes teaching integrative, culinary, and evidence-based medicine to students in the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine.

This, of course, is just Weisman’s full-time job. As her extensive résumé reveals, she devotes countless hours to individuals, businesses, nonprofit causes, and her alma mater. And she does it all buoyed by that overarching goal of helping those in her community live their best, healthiest, and most comfortable lives.

“I believe that we each have something unique to offer, and sharing it is the real gift of this lifetime,” Weisman says. “I am alive today because of the love and support of others. And having the perspective of almost dying at 20 years old taught me that the most important thing I can do with my beautiful life is help others.” 

Looking back to that fateful day of your car accident on July 4, 1999, what do you believe was the one critical occurrence or decision that had the biggest impact in saving your life?

Miraculously, one of the people in the car that was behind mine — Carol Baltierra; I call her my guardian angel — had just completed her paramedic certification. So when my friends in my car were pulling me out, she ran over to try to get them to stop so she could assess me.

She knew how critical my injuries were and made a decision that I believe saved my life: She called for a medical helicopter to come get me. As I was being transported to University Medical Center in Las Vegas — which has Nevada’s only Level One Trauma unit — I coded.

They thought that I would be dead on arrival by the time we got to UMC, so they made the decision to bring me back to a hospital in Reno.

What do you recall about waking up in your bedroom at your parent’s house a month later?

When I got out of my bed, my body felt different and I was very confused. I walked into my parents’ bedroom to ask them why I was there, but I could not open my mouth because my jaw had been wired shut.

I remember crying and my parents telling me that I had been in a serious car accident and that I now lived with them in Las Vegas. It felt surreal.

I was so mad and confused. I asked them for details about the accident and they told me that I had caused it. I remember asking if anyone had been injured, and thankfully they said no.

In disbelief, I walked out of their room and into the kitchen. There, I saw a newspaper on the table. The date on the front page was August 4, 1999.

I remember sitting there wondering where I had been for the past month of my life.

As the days and weeks passed and your condition improved, what was everyday life like? How did you pass the time?

Well, a healing brain needs sleep, so I slept a lot. But after getting through the initial shock, I became fascinated with the human brain and brain injuries. I read everything I could on the topic.

Then one day while scanning the newspaper, I saw an article about a program called Child Life at Sunrise Hospital. Since I couldn’t work or go to school during the semester after my accident, I began volunteering at Sunrise Hospital and playing with children who had cancer.

The thing about almost dying was that it instilled a very deep sense of wonder and being of service. I realized that I got a second chance to still be on this earth, so I could try to put the pieces back together and make something beautiful out of my life. 

My road to recovery was long, but I am incredibly fortunate. I still have a brain that works differently, and at times that feels like both a blessing and a curse. I wanted so desperately to be the “old Annie,” and it took me until I was about 25 to let that part of me go. 

This past July 4 marked 26 years since that fateful day. I am the luckiest person to still be here.

You started your college journey at UNR before transferring to UNLV following your accident. Any trepidation about going from a Wolf Pack to a Rebel?

When I started UNLV as a non-admitted student in fall 2000, my biggest trepidation was if my brain was going to work and how college would be for the new me. My Wolf Pack-to-Rebel transition was so sudden that I often laugh that I wear purple.

I have so much love for UNR and the lifelong relationships I made in my short two years there. And my time as a Rebel has been nothing short of miraculous. UNLV provided me with the opportunity to reinvent myself and pursue my passions. It has been an incredible home, and I love being a part of this university and community.

You initially enrolled as a business major. What spurred that choice, and what led you to switch to communications?

My dad always thought I would do well in business, so I tried it. My business management professor — the late Daniel McCallister — and my accounting professor knew each other, and over a chance conversation, my name came up. I imagine they talked about how terribly I was doing in accounting.

They both agreed that I was a good fit for communications, which I didn’t even know was a field! So I went and changed my major that day.

But I still have fond memories of professor McCallister, who was a wonderful human being. I remember one of our first assignments required us to write down how much we thought we would be worth when we graduated from UNLV. He collected our responses, read them back to us, then told us that we were each invaluable — no amount of money could ever determine our worth.

As you pursued your communications degree, did you formulate a career plan? 

Not really. I had an incredible internship with Preferred Public Relations, and I loved doing PR when I was doing it for AFAN (Aid for AIDS of Nevada). But I knew deep down there was something else for me; I just wasn’t sure what at the time.

After a couple of years working in PR, I decided to quit and pursue massage therapy. 

Was there a moment in massage therapy school when you knew you had hit on a passion? 

One of my first courses was pathology. We were asked to select a pathogen and study it in relation to massage therapy. I picked HIV and began volunteering with AFAN — the same place for whom I used to do PR. The very first day, a client who was receiving massage therapy began to cry and told me that no one had touched him like that since his diagnosis. 

That was the pivotal moment. Gone were my dreams of traveling the world on cruise ships as a massage therapist. What emerged was a budding researcher. 

Since 2015, you’ve served as the director of well-being & integrative medicine at UNLV’s Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine. What attracted you to this position?

When the medical school was forming, I was a doctoral research assistant for the School of Public Health’s Center for Health Disparities Research. We hosted a community luncheon to promote our grant about teenage pregnancy prevention.

That’s where I met Dr. Barbara Atkinson, the medical school’s founding dean. I was very impressed that Dr. Atkinson came to our luncheon and wanted to learn more about our community. We had an incredible conversation, and I shared with her my thoughts from my years of working as a massage therapist at Nathan Adelson Hospice and in the beautiful spas in Las Vegas. 

I mentioned that many of the hospice patients that I had cared for often asked why it wasn’t until the end of their life that they were receiving such great healthcare. I dreamt of how we may be able to change that.

I thought we had a chance to create a different model of healthcare here, which is taking the hospice model of whole-person care and carrying that through the entire human lifespan.

Dr. Atkinson agreed and offered me the opportunity to create something different within the medical school construct.

Today, I get to teach this to our future physicians and work with our community to share the many ways we can improve our health and well-being together.