Expanding Our Presence

A medical school must have myriad programs  to properly serve its constituents and remain at the forefront of medicine. Five of our focused areas have been targeted for significant growth: stem cell biology, genetics, regenerative medicine, imaging, and cardiovascular disease and treatment. Recruitments to these areas are tightly linked to our plan to productively occupy the Lurie Research Center, with additional space in the McGaw Pavilion and Tarry Building available to further build our presence in these areas. Progress has been made in recruiting researchers as well as redirecting current researchers to stem cell and genetic research, but recruiting leaders for a stem cell institute and the Feinberg Cardiovascular Research Institute are critical to our further success.

Expansion will not only provide a research presence and a breadth of support for potential collaborators throughout our academic medical center but also  maintain a capability to incorporate advances into clinical practice and medical education. Key recruitments and investments in these areas may enable us to seek national distinction during future planning cycles.

The influx of more than 100 faculty members creates an opportunity to evaluate our structure both programmatically and administratively. Research is increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative, and historical department distinctions are blurring.  Data from the top research medical schools show that no uniform structure and organization exist nor even a uniform set of departments. This suggests that we can tailor our organizational structure to further develop a culture specific to Northwestern.

Departments should be kept a manageable size so that chairs (who are often active investigators themselves) can engage in mentoring and faculty development in addition to their administrative duties. This manageable size will also create the best infrastructure to seed collaborations between colleagues. New academic departments, department substructures, and centers and institutes will be necessary. Potential departments in the basic sciences include genetics, biochemistry, immunology, and neurosciences; cross-campus departments also will be explored. Evolving models of patient care delivery will likely result in reorganization of the clinical enterprise as well as the structure of clinical departments.

The Feinberg School has implemented a new recruitment model to facilitate its significant expansion. Supradepartmental search committees augment—not replace—traditional department-based efforts. They are charged with recruiting at least five outstanding faculty members, at any academic rank and regardless of their home department, in research areas linked specifically to the school’s strategic research priority themes. Our recent success indicates that these committees will continue to be an important tool for recruiting faculty members by discipline and strategic need.

Our defining mission remains education.  We will incorporate more skills-based assessments, track student progress more comprehensively, continue our review and improvement of each curricular component, and improve the measurement of educational outcomes. In addition, we will strengthen our education programs in ethics and professionalism, cultural diversity and social context, and the use of information systems and other technologies to enhance patient care and safety. Since understanding the principles of scientific research is critical, medical students will be encouraged to undertake a research experience. Goals include offering a research thesis experience to medical students and increasing the percentage of students who wish to pursue this option.

The strong trends toward internationalization should drive the school and its academic medical center partners to evaluate what it means—and what it takes—to have a global presence. We will build on our existing partnerships to further expand international educational opportunities.

Providing care to indigent and underserved populations is essential to educating medical students and residents and serving the broader community. A cornerstone of Northwestern's responsibility in this area is its longstanding affiliation with the VA medical system. Since the Department of Veterans Affairs closed the Lakeside inpatient facility in 2003, the school has been exploring relationships with other local VA hospitals and clinics. We are seeking affiliations that have a strong commitment to underserved populations so that students and residents may maintain and develop their commitment to community service. We have the opportunity to develop a broad-based initiative on the needs of ethnic and cultural minorities throughout all of the hospitals and educational sites of the McGaw Medical Center.

The rapid pace of change of information technology requires significant investment to keep up. An expanded presence in several areas could lead to strategic information technology advantage.  By developing special capabilities for bioinformatics—such as clustered computing, massive storage, and perhaps even a separate network—we can position ourselves competitively for the era of post-genomic multifactorial analyses. We can also greatly enhance the information environment for faculty members, with expanded user support and smart search tools.