Dean's Update

September 12, 2024 - Aron Sousa, MD

Friends,

The College of Human Medicine was founded in 1964 making this our 60th anniversary year. To celebrate and remember our people and their achievements, the college is hosting both virtual and live town halls about key events and programs in each of our communities. It has been great to catch up with people and hear stories. In total we are doing sixteen 60th Anniversary Town Halls. We still have a series of community visits planned. If you are around, I invite you to check out these upcoming live Town Halls and receptions celebrating our communities and alumni:

• Friday, September 27 – Traverse City Campus
• Friday, October 11 – Southeast Michigan Campus
• Friday, October 18 – Grand Rapids Campus Homecoming/Alumni Weekend
• Friday, November 1 – Upper Peninsula Region Campus
• Friday, November 15 – Flint Campus
• Tuesday, December 10 – Midland Regional Campus

As September wanes, I have done 172 recorded town halls since we started doing them in March 2020 as a chance for people to ask questions about COVID. Each Town Hall begins with me giving a brief update on college news, and then I turn to a panel learning and celebrating with our wonderful people.

You don’t need to watch all the Town Halls to keep up, nor do you need to read all the weekly Dean’s Updates. You are busy folks, and no matter how much time, talent, or treasure you contribute—whether you’re a student, faculty or staff member, graduate, community partner or friend of the college—you are important to our mission, and I’m glad to offer up these highlights of the past three months.

Over the last few months, we held virtual Town Halls focusing on college innovations, like our founding as a community-based medical school in 1964  and the creation of one of the first Departments of Family Medicine. You can also check a Town Hall on the ABLE program and another on the creation of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department.

In our short time working with Henry Ford, we have already created a campus, had the first Match Day with Henry Ford Health as a home institution, created the Department of Anesthesia, brought together our Department of OB-GYN and Reproductive Biology and Henry Ford Medical Group’s Department of Women’s Health, and we have created six new departments: dermatology, radiation oncology, otolaryngology, neurosurgery, pathology, and urology. This fall we are doing the logistical work to stand up our six new, statewide departments at Henry Ford.

The research collaborations have been even more fruitful, because the partnership has encouraged faculty from both institutions to work on grants. Our impact is built on developing a vibrant health workforce, discovering science, establishing innovation, helping people meet their health goals, and making communities more sanative.

In June, I signed on to a six-month gig as executive dean working with Office of Health Sciences leadership on the next steps for our health sciences effort. You can find the introduction from Norm Hubbard and me here. Meanwhile, I am still the dean of the college and as excited and honored as ever to have that role.

Even later in June, the university and Henry Ford Health celebrated the groundbreaking for the new $335 million research center. This building will be home to the current wet bench researchers at Henry Ford and the new hires envisioned by the partnership. This is a huge deal for us!

Yes, June was busy. At the end of the month, we welcomed the MSU Board of Trustees to our Flint campus for their annual retreat. Our staff, faculty, and community partners in Flint worked with the board and administration on a remarkable series of events for the trustees and senior administrators. I’ve had the pleasure to work on many extraordinary projects in my nineteen years in the dean’s hallway, and they are all my favorites, however, our work in Flint holds a special place in my heart.

During the board retreat, I had the chance to introduce our team and their work to the president and board. I started with this framework: our successes in Flint are due to the intelligence, expertise, talent and hard work of the people of Flint, who are our colleagues, collaborators, and compatriots. And this is not hyperbole. Our community partners are co-PIs on center grants and R01’s; they co-chaired the search for our founding chair and serve on our search committees. The people of Flint are our superpower and our unfair competitive advantage.

And that was what the board saw. Our public health department actively integrates a community participatory approach in everything they do. This is what we imagined from the beginning, and it’s more successful than we ever dared hope.

That same week (as I said, a lot happened in June), the state budget passed to support four college-specific programs:

• The Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program, led by Dr. Amy Saxe-Custack and her team, received $500K to continue providing $15 prescriptions for fresh produce to pediatric and prenatal patients in Flint through the Pediatric Public Health Initiative (PPHI).
  
  
• The MICARES program, which helps train students, nurses, and physicians in the treatment of substance use disorder, received its first line-item support in the budget. Dr. Cara Poland and her team will use the $1.5M to expand services and education in Michigan.
  
  
• The MIDOCS program is a collaboration of several medical schools to support residency training in underserved communities. We use the residency slots to train psychiatrists in and for rural communities using the MSU and Pine Rest partnerships at rural training sites in Marquette and Traverse City. We also have rural family medicine residents based in Midland who finish their training in Alpena. The state has increased MIDOCS from 24 residency slots to 32, which is more than expected. The program has already increased the number of psychiatrists in the UP by 30%.
  
  
• Rx Kids, the PPHI anti-poverty program addressing the first year of a child’s life, was awarded $20M in matching funding for the next expansion of Rx Kids to new communities in the state. As you all likely know, Mona Hanna, MD, MPH (’02) is the director and founder of Rx Kids. This program supports all Flint babies with a prenatal cash prescription to the mother and $500 per month in the first year of the baby’s life. So far, the program has been, in the words of Dr. Mona “AMAZING!” You can find a wealth of data at the Rx Kids website.

In July, I was thrilled to announce two new 1964 Project faculty positions the college will fund: one in the Department of Medicine for a health services researcher working to address health equity and health disparities. For the other position, the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology will begin their search for a scientist addressing cancer disparities in Native American populations. The department and their chair, Dr. Olorunseun “Seun” Ogunwobi, are leading the development of a new MSU Center for Cancer Health Equity Research (CCHER). This faculty line will be a part of that center. Clearly, July was not as busy as June, although my garden flooded. 

In August, we welcomed our newest class of medical students with our White Coat Ceremony, which is the second happiest day of the academic calendar. Our matriculating students gathered to be coated by members of the profession, usually faculty and sometimes family members from medicine, sometimes the coating family members are also faculty! There were more than 60 guest coaters in Grand Rapids, and the stage at DeVos Place was full.

There was no white coat ceremony when I started medical school elsewhere.* In fact, White Coat ceremonies are pretty recent and are designed to be a rite of passage, including an oath and donning the short white coat of a medical student. They are suiting up to be a medical student. Or, perhaps we are coating over their previous persona? It is supposed to engender professionalism with a focus on caring for patients, and that would be an interesting dose-response curve if there was one. More realistically, the ceremony provides a welcome and time for everyone to reflect on what we want to see in our profession.

In East Lansing, the surest harbinger of fall is the return of students to campus. There is no way to know fall is coming via the weather – we had just escaped a heat dome with temps in the mid-nineties and high humidity. This particular fall season also brings the final runup to the election – a heat dome of a more metaphorical kind. By all means, be sure you are registered to vote. Every election cycle is emotional and consequential, and this election season also coincides with a series of controversies about free speech and dissent on campuses across the country. We are proud of the advocacy of our faculty and students—and we want to be sure our folks treat each other well and follow the rules.

Over the summer, the senior leaders in the university put together resources to positively address free speech and dissent on campus. You might have caught President Guskiewicz’s excellent video on free speech and civil discourse and you can also find it with his community letter on civil discourse. Regardless of how the election turns out, the college will retain its focus on engaging communities as partners and collaborators in the training of the next generation of scientists, physicians, and public health workers.

If you’re still with me, I do hope this update helped shine a light on the great work of our people. I will keep serving alongside our dedicated faculty, staff, and students who are making the world a better place for all communities. Together, we are an unstoppable force for good.

Serving the people with you, 


Aron Sousa, MD, FACP
Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine

* Note: We witnessed an odd “welcome to medicine” lecture by a seriously primeval physician who referred to all doctors as “he” and counseled us to drive something like a Buick. He specified doctors should have a car that signaled more success than a Chevy and less opulence than a Cadillac. For those of you keeping score at home, I’m mourning my 2012 Chevy Volt, which has suffered from an angry transmission for some time. While there was no white coat ceremony then, we did get our picture taken in our white coats, and I remember the conversation in my little community group about whether we were going to button our coats or leave the coats unbuttoned. We decided it looked more friendly to have our coats unbuttoned.