Building Excellence

We have significant opportunities to create programs of recognized national leadership during the next five years while strengthening existing outstanding programs. Many department- and center-based programs are at or well within reach of prominence, mostly in specific, focused clinical or research areas. Their development should continue to be fostered while we pursue the institutional opportunities for excellence described below.

Education

 Northwestern has always been well regarded for educating medical students and residents. As an early participant in preclinical curriculum reforms during the 1990s, the school brought about major changes by building infrastructure and recruiting key faculty educators. This resulted in the creation of several programs in which the medical school is widely recognized as among the nation’s finest, notably in clinical skills teaching and assessment, health communication, and medical humanities and bioethics. As a leader in medical education reform, the Feinberg School has both an opportunity and a responsibility to expand educational programs in evidence-based medicine and patient safety to help set the direction of medical education for years to come. Our affiliation with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, long regarded as the finest such institution in the nation, affords us a unique opportunity to create educational programs addressing disability.

Read about National Directions in Medical Education

Although the Feinberg School has not historically enjoyed a particularly diverse body of students or faculty members, it has made significant progress, recently achieving a 25 percent minority matriculation rate through the regular admission pathway.  Our location in one of the most diverse population centers creates both an opportunity and an imperative to further develop themes of cultural diversity in medicine in educating the next generation of physicians.
 

Leadership

Read about Diversity: Opportunity and Imperative

Leadership experience always has been a factor in our recruitment of students, residents, and faculty members. As our education, research, and faculty development activities continue to evolve, we will enhance and develop leadership skills and interests by creating formal and informal educational opportunities. The school and some departments already support programs developing innovative approaches to medical and clinical education. By creating an institute, academy, or other unit that spans departmental boundaries, we can nurture collaborations among committed educators and scholars, create opportunities for faculty development, foster new initiatives, and recognize superior teaching.  Similarly, we will support and enhance department initiatives that use information technology creatively to build new educational environments and student tools, especially in the promising area of simulation in medicine and medical education.

Research

Achieving pre-eminence will require the Feinberg School to exceed its impressive growth in research during the last decade by sustaining research growth rates two to three times those forecast for the NIH budget.  A substantial portion of the 100 net new faculty investigators we plan to recruit should be in areas in which the school is or can be nationally recognized for excellence by 2009.  We will gauge our success by a variety of measures, benchmarking our progress against the best institutions and against ourselves. Some measures will be longstanding, such as faculty honors or types and amounts of extramural grant activity; some will be more recent, such as the impact of scholarly publications; and some will be novel, such as whether the faculty members who choose to leave Northwestern do so to pursue leadership positions at top institutions.

The completion of the initial phases of the Lurie Research Center represents a historic opportunity for the Feinberg School. Space in the new facility is being assigned programmatically rather than by department, a significant departure from common practice in academe and one that we believe will allow for significant progress by building outstanding programs through unique collaborations and synergies. During the next five years, we will complete the occupancy of the building and plan for construction of an additional tower. This will require the recruitment of at least 20 net new tenure track faculty members per year. 

The recruitment of more than 100 new faculty members will allow leaders of departments, centers, and institutes to pursue plans for strategic development, build areas that leverage our extensive clinical strengths, and attract additional national program development and center funding. The significant expansion of the research enterprise affords us an opportunity to use recruitment as retention, bringing collaborators here for our most promising faculty members. We will continue to use innovative recruiting models, such as the recently successful supradepartmental search committees, to augment department efforts at attracting outstanding faculty members.

The areas particularly ripe for investment to achieve a recognized position of national excellence during the next five years are 

•  reproductive biology and molecular endocrinology;
•  neurodegenerative disease; and
•  cell motility, cytoskeleton, and molecular motors.
  

Space in the Lurie Research Center and elsewhere on the campus will aid recruitments in these areas.

The University also will be investing in systems and infrastructure supporting the growth of the entire life science enterprise. Working with the leaders of the University and our affiliated hospitals, we will develop a cohesive, comprehensive life sciences research strategy that leverages all our investments to the best advantage. We also will continue to hone our internal processes for evaluating research priorities as our environment evolves.

Recognizing both the promise and challenge of translational research, the NIH has made the focus of its recent Roadmap accelerating the translation of basic discoveries to clinical use. Northwestern may be uniquely positioned, with a breadth of programs from molecular to population studies and a strong culture of interdisciplinary collaboration, to build interesting and innovative linkages and programs that could catapult us toward a leadership position regionally and nationally.

Read about obesity as An Opportunity in Translational Research

Many areas exist throughout the academic medical center where translational research activities could be built including obesity (linking endocrinology, genetics, nutrition, and clinical practice across the University and in several Feinberg clinical departments and affiliated hospitals); rehabilitation and regenerative medicine (linking RIC to NU expertise in neurology, stem cells, nanoscience, and biomedical engineering); reproductive and developmental biology (linking NU with Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Prentice Women's Hospital and Children’s Memorial Hospital); and other disease-related areas such as cancer, neurodegenerative disease, diabetes, aging, and sleep.

The broader Regional Translational Research Consortium of leading local research medical centers may provide other opportunities as well. The creation in FY2006 of a leadership position in clinical and translational research represents an important step in enabling the school to build upon historical and emerging strengths, such as our longstanding General Clinical Research Center and Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), both supported by NIH, and explore unique possibilities and collaborations avenues across the academic medical center and University.

Recruitment

Read about A Sellers’ Market for Research Talent

Our recruitment pattern has historically been balanced with respect to rank but with a tilt toward junior faculty members. During the next five years, we must move toward a truly balanced approach by recruiting more established investigators. The  Feinberg School has only rarely recruited “superstars” to the faculty. In light of the competitive environment, we are re-examining this approach. While recruiting a corps of outstanding junior faculty members represents the future of the institution in many respects, we are examining the implications of a shift in focus to build, rather than grow, more strength at the senior ranks. 

We will continue our impressive recent expansion of the combined MD-PhD program, an important indicator of the quality of our research and education environment. 

Clinical Services

A major strength of our academic medical center is the quality of care provided by the clinical affiliates. We are committed to fostering clinical innovation and providing the best patient experience, creating and disseminating new knowledge, cultivating future leaders, and applying our combined resources and expertise to accelerate recognition of Northwestern as a leading, contemporary academic medical center.

The medical school can lead the academic medical center institutions in developing collaborations across diverse groups of physicians and surgeons. More than  2,000 active clinicians hold faculty appointments in the Feinberg School and practice throughout our academic medical center. Nearly half are members of three major multispecialty faculty practice plans. The breadth and complementary skills of these faculty members represent an enormous opportunity to create more optimal systems for delivering care and to advance initiatives in patient safety and clinical research.  Significant structural, legal, and cultural barriers exist to creating more unified clinical, research, and technological collaborations across the faculty. But with the tremendous potential for achieving pre-eminence and better serving our patients, faculty members, and students, we will create a dynamic environment that leverages the skills and strengths of clinicians and information systems, links basic science and health services research to clinical practice, and provides exemplary role models at the leading edge of medical practice.

The Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation (NMFF), the school's primary full-time faculty practice plan, is one linchpin of our enterprise. NMFF provides a rich environment of best practices ( of interest to patients), outstanding  clinical experiences for our students and residents, a laboratory for the translation of proven therapies into clinical practice, and a magnet to recruit outstanding faculty physicians. It also provides significant reliable, recurring, and unencumbered financial support for the academic enterprise. We will make every effort to ensure NMFF’s continued viability and growth. 

Many of our residency and fellowship programs are already recognized as among the nation’s best, and the comprehensive, integrated structure of the McGaw Medical Center enables Northwestern to create innovative graduate educational programs.   Exciting opportunities also exist to develop organized comprehensive treatment centers and build linkages for translational research. 

One of Northwestern's greatest strengths lies in its tradition of investing in interdisciplinary collaboration in scholarship and teaching. The breadth and diversity of expertise throughout the University, coupled with a culture of collaboration, provides fertile ground for developing innovative approaches and solutions to the major problems of the day.

Fund Raising

Campaign Northwestern ended in 2003, having raised more than $520 million for the medical school, surpassing its $400 million goal. The current fund-raising environment is quite competitive, with several of our affiliates and other local institutions in capital campaigns. Nonetheless, we believe that our vision, success, and potential create a fertile ground to plan a new capital campaign for the Feinberg School. We will work with school leaders, faculty members, and the donor community to focus our strengths and opportunities within the school’s broad, interdisciplinary framework for growth and excellence.