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Dean Lewis Landsberg, MD

It's a pleasure to participate in this annual event. We'll be talking to you about the state of your school. I'll talk about faculty, students, space, and some selected accomplishments.

This image shows the black box of a well-known health care economist at Princeton. It's his observation that medical schools are a big black box, with inputs (tuition, clinical revenue, grants, gifts) and outputs (knowledge, discoveries, good patient care, training of physicians and scientists). All this gets mixed in the middle and hopefully the inputs are justified by the outputs. In the middle are the faculty, students, and staff, and the infrastructure of the school. Over the last decade, under Jeff Miller's tutelage, we have begun to understand the relationship between various inputs, what happens to them in the black box, and how they relate to the outputs. Today I'll talk to you a little bit about what we discovered about our faculty, staff, and infrastructure, and how the school has changed over the last decade.

The tenured faculty has grown from 271 in 2000 to 376 in 2005. To the full-time faculty we have added almost 300 faculty members. The number of contributed service faculty members has shrunk, but that's a little misleading, because it represents changes at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare where some part-time contributed services physicians joined the full-time faculty. The number of research track faculty members has grown proportionately. The number of NIH principal investigators over this time has grown by over 100. We have more than doubled the number of PIs with annual awards in excess of $1 million. In the next five years we expect to see significant growth in the size of tenure-track and full-time faculty.

What's happened to our sponsored research programs? Over the last five years we've gone from $130 million to $207 million. This constitutes over 54 percent of the total NU research budget. About five years ago it was about 50 percent. Despite this impressive growth, our NIH rank—including grants only run through NU, not our full-time faculty at affiliated hospitals—has progressed from 39th to 37th. This shows us the rough sledding we have to move up in this category. We have increased program project awards substantially. We project that by 2010 sponsored research awards will reach $260 million. Research productivity has gone up apace. The metrics that we set for our faculty are about $400 per net square foot of space and about $400,000-plus per faculty member.

Our raison d'etre is the education of medical students. The quality of the school depends in large measure on the students we have and the faculty who teach them. The matriculant Class of 2005 has measurements of 3.7 in GPA and MCATs of 33.8. Half of the class members are women, and 12 percent are underrepresented minorities. This number rises to 20 percent if you include class members who entered through the Honors Program in Medical Education. Our graduates are highly sought after and prized by program directors of the various medical subspecialties across the country. We have done progressively better on USMLE scores. We have consistently ranked above the national average. The separation between the national average and the Northwestern scores have continued to grow every year.

What's not so good is the indebtedness of our students. In 2000 the average debt of our indebted graduates was slightly above the mean for private medical schools. For the intervening years we fell below the mean for private schools. In 2004 [average indebtedness, $151,112] we exceeded the mean. This is not an area where we aspire to rank highest in the country. We have restrained the growth of tuition but unfortunately have had to pass the health insurance bill on to students, which contributes to their debt. This is an area to work on.

The number of graduate professsional students has increased a lot from 2000. We nearly doubled enrollment in the Integrated Graduate Program in the Life Sciences. Yearly slots have increased from 23 to 44. This is an important component of the growth of our research operations as a whole. Graduate students supply the manpower to help faculty be more productive. We work hard to recruit a very good group of graduate students. We have achieved this increase without a fall in quality. We have been successful in growing the MD/PhD program. We have one of the best MSTP programs in the country, which is a credit to the leadership of the program. Dr. Dave Engman has increased the number of students funded with each successful renewal of funding for the program. Since 2000 we've added three degree programs: MD/MPH—master of public health; master of science in clinical investigation; and doctorate in physical therapy.

We've created critical new space, the most critical being parking [jokingly], which is a revenue source for us. We needed the parking. We've erased most of the waiting time for faculty, staff, and students wanting a parking space, and there's a chance for revenue from a retail store on the ground floor.

The space we're in, the Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center of Northwestern University, is our major space acquisition. This 420,000 gross-square-foot building you're sitting in now is a wonderful addition to our medical school campus. It cost a little over $200 million to build. When all built out it will have nine research floors. On the ground floor we have two auditoriums and two smaller meeting rooms. The space is used by medical students and we hope productively. Soon, in January, we will have a food court on the ground floor.

What's happened to our research space over the last 5 years? It has increased 88 percent with the opening of the building we are in now and renovations totaling $50 million to the McGaw Pavilion and Ward-Morton-Searle-Tarry complex. The second floor of McGaw includes lab space for the Department of Medicine, and in the basement we have located our radiology research with MRI machines. We have added education space on the third floor with the Daniel Hale Williams Auditorium, which is home base for second-year students. We hope to construct over the next several years a 15-story research tower that will sit astride the base of this building and will cost in the range of $150 million. It remains for us to raise that money so we can develop the space. That's our challenge in the next five years.

Education space has increased 67 percent in five years. The Hughes Auditorium that we're in houses the first-year class, and the Williams Auditorium in the McGaw Pavilion houses the second-year class. The first floor of the McGaw Pavilion includes the Clinical Education Center as well as new study space. This space was sorely lacking. Ray Curry, the executive associate dean for education, carried the flag for new education space and succeeded in persuading us that this was really important, and he was right.

Where do we stand in rankings? We've gone up a little bit overall in U.S. News & World Report rankings from 22nd place in 2000 to 20th place in 2005. While we recognize the rankings are flawed, people look at them, so we pay some attention to them. Most, but not all of the schools in the Top 20 that are ahead of us are the premier schools in the country. In the next several years we hope to make progress and move up. Research activity is a major determinant of the rankings. We're ranked in the low 20s by U.S. News for research activity. This is different from the ranking on the NIH Web site because it includes research conducted at our affiliated hospitals and the research done by faculty members on the north campus who have joint appointments at the medical school. We hope our ranking will improve as we fill the remaining existing research space and develop new space.

U.S. News also ranks schools on student selectivity, faculty resources, faculty reputation, and reputation of the school among residency program directors. We always do reasonably well in our reputation among program directors, which is based on their experiences with graduates of our schools. We've done as well as 11th or 12th, up to 15th or 16th. Our graduates are good emissaries for the school.

Some individual accomplishments are of note. First, we did succeed in getting an eight-year reaccreditation by the LCME. The team that came had very laudatory comments about the school and was very impressed with the program here. Many of you worked hard on the reaccreditation process. It was a tremendous undertaking.

We have many important faculty announcements. We're very proud that Larry Jameson, our chair of the Department of Medicine, was elected last month to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. It is a well-deserved honor and a real credit to Larry.

We have some other things to be proud of. An RFA was put out for a stem cell center of excellence. Jack Kessler wrote a grant for a stem cell program that got the highest score in the country. It was funded and combines Jack's work in stem cells with nanotechnology under the direction of Sam Stupp. The marriage of these two forefront areas of science gives us a leg up in this important area of regenerative medicine. We are very proud of this.

Sherman Elias, our chair of ob-gyn, received an institutional K award grant for faculty development. We're very proud of that. And Dick Bell, head of the Department of Surgery, continues to get national recognition for the important job he has done in advancing surgical education.

We are proud of all these accomplishments and in fact proud of all our faculty and staff contribute to the school. I thank you very much for your efforts on behalf of the school. We in the Dean's Office will do our best to provide the leadership to continue to grow and advance the medical school to make it great.