A former New York State Trooper with more than two decades of emergency services experience, Douglas Wildermuth has been named the first-ever Director of Clarkson University’s Emergency Medical Services program.
“We are very excited to have Doug join us. He brings incredible experience, leadership, and a high level of professionalism,” said Lennart Johns, Founding Dean of Clarkson University’s Lewis School of Health Sciences. “Because of his high level of involvement within the region and nationally, he brings immediate recognition to the Lewis School’s new EMS program.”
Wildermuth, originally from Long Island, is a SUNY Cortland graduate who began his career with the New York State Police in 2001. With experience in several positions with the State Police, along with various other medical services positions, Wildermuth looks forward to a new challenge in developing Clarkson’s Emergency Medical Services program.
“I am excited to be here because there has never been a Director of EMS before,” Wildermuth said. “I am very excited to be the first and I am excited to try and move the entire project into an advanced life support/paramedic program in the future.”
During his time with the State Police, Wildermuth made several major advances in the emergency services field. In 2006, he created the EMS for law enforcement program that Troopers continue to use to this day. Wildermuth also helped expand a state initiative from having an automated external defibrillator (AED) in every state building to include every marked State Police vehicle.
“We argued that the patrol cars are actually our office, so they gave us some more money and we actually created the largest active public access defibrillation program in the nation at that time,” Wildermuth said. “We instituted having an AED in every troop car across the state.”
Eventually, Wildermuth was moved to Division Headquarters, where he was promoted to Technical Sergeant and Contaminated Crime Scene Emergency Response Team Coordinator. He returned to the field in 2017, taking a position closer to his home to finish off his career before accepting the EMS Director position at Clarkson.
In being the first to serve as EMS Director at Clarkson, Wildermuth is excited at the prospect of a blank canvas from which to build the program. He’s also eager to begin forming a relationship with the community and its local EMS providers.
“Within the program, we are expected to help the community,” he said. “We are going to have a class off-campus and a class on-campus simultaneously.”
Wildermuth recognizes offering quality, disciplined education is paramount to creating a positive relationship with the community. Part of accomplishing this, he believes, includes offering a hands-on form of education.
“In EMS, we have found that adult learning is learning more by doing than by lecture. There are so many different skill sets of adult education that I have learned over the years,” Wildermuth said. “Any participant that comes into this program is not only going to understand the principal, but they will actually apply the practice to their emergency medical technician training. I think that is going to excite a lot of students in that they are not just going to sit there and listen about what they have to do, they are actually going to apply it.”
