DEAN'S CORNER
The NIH funding crisis continues with no apparent end in sight. I have been directly involved in efforts coordinated by AAMC to lobby federal policymakers, but these efforts have thus far borne little fruit. At the same time, we succeeded in recruiting a net addition of 46 faculty members to the Division in the last fiscal year. This impressive outcome and the continued instability at NIH makes it imperative that we redouble our efforts to ensure that our existing and newly recruited faculty members remain stable and well supported. You should therefore expect in your renewal releases this year a sharp reduction in the total number of new starts authorized for FY08 so that the bulk of the Division’s renewal resources be dedicated to ongoing support for recent recruits as well as for potential bridging and retaining of existing faculty.
The reorganization of the Medical Center is proceeding quite well. The former Hospitals Board has been reorganized as the Medical Center Board whose Executive Committee is chaired by Valerie Jarrett and is well integrated with University leadership. We are facing some significant financial challenges in the clinical enterprise that our new structure is optimally organized to tackle, and we are developing new programs such as the Urban Health Initiative that will allow us to fully integrate academic goals with delivery of clinical care.
As previously announced, a new Department of Neurobiology has been created. Following the recommendation of the Neurosciences Taskforce, Drs. Murray Sherman and Dan Margoliash led this initiative through both the divisional and University approval process. With the goal of creating a functional, strong and cohesive department, Dr. Vinay Kumar, Vice Dean of the BSD, led an ad hoc committee that recommended founding members for the new department. Further applications for appointments are being considered by the faculty of the new department.
In addition, efforts to create PhD programs in Cell Physiology, Biophysical Sciences and Health Studies have been considered and approved by our faculty and are proceeding to the Provost for formal consideration by the University.
I am also very pleased to report some recent transformative recruitment results. As I am sure you all know, David Hefner was recently hired as President of the Medical Center. Additionally, Dr. Jeff Matthews was recruited from the University of Cincinnati as our new Chair of the Department of Surgery. The Department of Health Studies and the Cancer Research Center partnered to recruit Dr. Habib Ahsan, a genetic epidemiologist at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, as Professor in Health Studies and Director of Population Research at the Cancer Center. The Department of Medicine, the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology, the Computation Institute and Argonne National Laboratory collaborated to recruit Dr. Andrey Rzhetsky, a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics, from the Columbia Genome Center. Additionally, Dr. Bruce Minsky has recently joined us as Chief Quality Officer of the Medical Center, Associate Dean for Clinical Quality and Professor in the Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology in the BSD. Dr. Minsky joins us from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Though many factors continue to limit our short term financial growth, by retaining our talented faculty and making limited but important recruitments, we can continue to grow our programs in prominence and productivity as we institute new management initiatives to improve our financial future.
The University of Chicago 5841 S. Maryland Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
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