Dean's Update
June 20, 2025 - Aron Sousa, MD
Left: Aron in Detroit in front of rising steel of the new Henry Ford + MSU research building.
Right: Aron’s picture of the Flint Campus expansion, but he forgot to do the picture as a selfie.
Friends,
It’s been a week of travel. I was in Traverse City for the Street Medicine presentation to the university board of trustees by Community Assistant Dean David Klee, MD and a group of our students from the Traverse City campus, family medicine residents, and College of Osteopathic Medicine students. Dave gave a great presentation about the work of the Traverse City Street Medicine team, and the students and residents demonstrated their point of care ultrasound skills and toured the trustees and university leaders through the street medicine Mobile Medical Unit. The trustees clearly enjoyed the experience and President Guskiewicz is pretty solid with the transducer.
After Traverse City, I visited Flint to meet a team visiting the MIRACLE Center, which is a large NIH center grant addressing maternal health mortality. The study includes our partners at Corewell Health, Henry Ford Health, and communities across the state, with projects in 22 Michigan counties including rural communities of the state. The programs look at the effectiveness of a series of interventions ranging from technology-based programming to community health workers. Our Washington, D.C. based visitors had a whirlwind tour of sites including Detroit, Flint, East Lansing, and Grand Rapids.
And, while I was in Flint, I had a chance to visit with our great partners at the Greater Flint Health Coalition. I serve on the board of the coalition, and they have been key partners in many of our projects including the Flint Registry. The lead registry is one of those projects in a limbo-like state. The CDC has the money appropriated by Congress for the program, but the CDC staff for this program had been on administrative leave until last week. The money for the registry has to move through the CDC to our team, and without CDC, the funding has been stupefied by inefficiency.
The day after I was in Flint, I went to Detroit to help celebrate Rick Leach’s new Henry Ford endowed chair position, the C. Paul Hodgkinson Endowed Chair. In addition to chairing the college’s Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology, Rick is the chair of the Henry Ford Department of Women’s Health Services, which Dr. Hodgkinson chaired from 1952-1973 back when it was called the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. It was so nice to celebrate Rick’s work and to be with the assembled Henry Ford chairs I have been working with for so long.
And then, back to Grand Rapids for lunch at the Grand Rapids Rotary Club where President Guskiewicz gave a great talk about the work at the university and the successes of our people on the Medical Mile and the region. The attendees were decked out in green for the lunch with only a smattering of GVSU “Laker Blue” in the room. The Grand Rapids Rotary and its members have been great supporters of the college and our students, and a long line of presidents and deans have been welcomed at Rotary over the years.
Travelling the state to see the great work of the college’s people is one of the perks of this job. There are other people who travel farther and more often, but I do love going to the places where our students, staff, and faculty live and work. We should take great pride in being the first medical school in the country accredited as a community-based medical school. Our story and our work are uniquely MSU. Our premier rural health educational program just turned 50 years old, and I don’t think another medical school in the country has managed to have NIH work in six campuses. Take a trip to our campuses and see how we have made good on our founding vision.
Serving the people with you,
Aron
Aron Sousa, MD, FACP
Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine