A Farewell from the Dean

Dear Alumni and Friends,

My tenure as dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine is coming quickly to an end. In recent weeks, I’ve had the chance to visit with many of the people who helped make the last 12½ years not only the highlight of my career but also a remarkable period of achievement for the school.

That includes our outstanding faculty members and staff whose work has taken us to new heights. It includes the administrative leaders — past and present — who’ve helped steer us in the right directions. And it includes you: our alumni and donors. We couldn’t have made the progress we have without your belief in and support of the mission.

Academically, those achievements include creating a common curriculum for our nine campuses and establishing Scholarly Concentrations for our students to explore topics in depth. We’ve added advising and mental health resources, created learning communities to support students and, with your investments, greatly increased the number of scholarships available.

In research, we’ve prioritized areas where we could be among the best in the country, addressing public health needs, and where opportunities for grant funding and philanthropy were greatest. That led us to create the Precision Health Initiative, placing special emphasis on multiple myeloma, breast cancer, pediatric sarcoma, gestational diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.

To make these achievements possible, we had to grow.

We’ve constructed new educational buildings in West Lafayette, Evansville and Bloomington. We’ve more than doubled our space devoted to research, including the Neuroscience Research Building. And now we’ve opened the Medical Education and Research Building in Indianapolis, which gives us both new educational and research space and brings them together in a striking facility that is light, modern and open.

More than architecture, the building reflects what I’ve envisioned for IU School of Medicine since my arrival in 2013: creating an environment where our faculty, students and staff can do their best work. This edition of IU MEDICINE highlights how that’s playing out in the new building.

In talking with people who use the building daily, there’s a warmth and pride that comes through the conversations. As we walked through it one day, a colleague even said to me, “It makes you stand a little taller.” As I say farewell, it’s my hope that the IU School of Medicine will keep standing tall for many generations to come.