Dean's Update
July 25, 2025 - Aron Sousa, MD
Above: Aron, Alexis, baby Bishop, Mona, and Jermaine enjoy the Flint Rx Kids Baby Parade.
Friends,
This week, we are announcing the Dean’s Scholars Program, which provides in-state tuition support as a recruitment scholarship. I repurposed an endowed discretionary fund to provide a four-year, full in-state tuition scholarship for twelve students, so each year we can offer three scholarships. We have a long history of students who have been academically strong, improve the college and our communities through programming and advocacy, and go on to do great things in their careers. The scholarship is designed to help bring even more of those people to the college and to provide some programming and a cohort experience while they are at the college.
Because the Dean’s Scholars Program is starting this year, we will have three matriculating students, and we have completed the application process to complete the cohort with three students each from the second-, third-, and fourth-year classes. This fall, we will start with twelve students and a full cohort.
The director of the Dean’s Scholars Program is Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine & Center for Bioethics and Social Justice Karen Kelly-Blake, PhD, who has designed the programming along with Assistant Dean for Admissions Amber Heard-Booth, PhD and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Andrea Wendling, MD. The goal is to have a broadly successful group of students who help advance scholarship, advocacy, and community engagement at the college. I am really looking forward to the start of this program!
The college has begun to implement its budget cuts as part of the university’s 6% budget cut this year. Among those cuts, I have volunteered my administrative increment for the executive dean role in the provost’s office to be reduced to one dollar. Thanks to other leaders across the college for volunteering to reduce their administrative increments. This show of commitment to the college and our mission decreases the impact of cuts on critical programs and our staff.
Next month, we celebrate the opening of the new MSU space in our expanded campus in Flint. I note that when President Guskiewicz and the university’s board of trustees held their retreat in Flint a year ago spring, there was no sign of a new building – what a difference a year makes. I appreciate all of the love and support from the trustees and the president as MSU builds the most remarkable public health program in the country through its collaboration with the people in Flint and across the state. The work in Flint is remarkable and could only have been done by Michigan State. I think our engagement with the people of Flint as colleagues and collaborators comes from, and is dependent on, the college’s legacy as a pioneer community-based medical school at a pioneer land grant university.
The college’s faculty across many departments have created a truly distinctive, only-at-Michigan-State network of programs all across the state, including programs focused on improving maternal morbidity across multiple departments and health system partners, the ECHO grant in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Rx Kids, and numerous public health research programs across in every region of the state. Universities across the country are organized pretty much the same, with tired old structures penning programs in and creating uniformity in a misled belief that being structured like fancy schools makes you the same as a fancy school. Reputation and opportunity come from being different, in taking a new approach, in working where others fear to go or simply do not care enough to bother.
I’ve written about the Rx Kids program many times. Mostly, I write about how the cash allowances have made a difference in the lives of kids and moms. Rx Kids reduces evictions, reduces postpartum depression, and improves trust and hope. Dr. Mona will tell you that the fundamental, underlying, most basic, and most important tenant of the program is love. Specifically, the program demonstrates that we love babies and moms, and that we care enough about them to do something to make their lives better. And celebrating moms and babies is an integral part of the program, which is why I went to the Flint Baby Parade today. There were babies and moms and dads and grandparents and supporting adults and love all through the parade. And, that is a remarkable, distinctive, extraordinary accomplishment for any university.
Serving the people with you,
Aron
Aron Sousa, MD, FACP
Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine