Dean's Update
August 2, 2024 - Aron Sousa, MD
Friends,
I’ve written about the 1964 Project multiple times over the last few years. The Project is a college funded effort to hire high level faculty into the college’s grand challenge to address health equity, if’n you don’t know by now. The Project is run by the college’s Dean’s Advisory Committee on Diversity (DACD) and uses an NIH-like rating system to rank departmental proposals for new tenure stream positions that advance our scholarship in health equity. This week, the provost’s office agreed to include the faculty hired through the 1964 Project in its 1855 Professorships program. With this agreement, our 1964 Project hires will join the cohort of 1855 Professors and participate in programing as well as use the 1855 Professor title. I appreciate the partnership of the provost office and the exceptional work by our departments and the DACD.
Here are some items of interest for your perusal and celebration:
- Catch up with Nakia Allen, MD (CHM ’07), who is our new community assistant dean for our Detroit campus.
- I recommend the TEDx talk by our own Cara Poland, MD, on her very personal path to being an addiction specialist. (This talk includes the sensitive topic of suicide and may be upsetting or disturbing.)
- Our website has a new and better way of capturing faculty publications and grants, so enjoy our most complete list of both. My thanks to Amy Nienhouse on Geri Kelley’s team for finding ways to capture this data without the pain and suffering underlying our previous attempts asking faculty to self-report this information.
- While I’m writing about the website, congratulations to Steven Kaatz and our MarComm team for winning an MSU award at the Summer Showcase. They’ve been working to improve the site’s user interface, and their work has been recognized by their peers!
- Our assistant dean and chief external relations officer, Jerry Kooiman, MPA, is part of the non-partisan, cross-party Keep Our Republic working to educate voters on how our voting system works. Be sure to vote in the primary election Tuesday!
- Still with me? After you have enjoyed the last-second win by the USA women’s rugby sevens at the Paris Olympics, settle in to watch something contemplative, clever, and only available thanks to the delightful oddness of the internet. This is not a common double feature, but each touch the human experience in their own way.
We lost Howard Brody, MD, PhD (CHM ’76) last week. He was an intellectual mentor for many of us and clear and compelling thinker about the place of medicine in society. For decades Howard was a remarkable leader in the field of bioethics and at MSU. From 1985 to 2000 he was director of our Center for Bioethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences (now the Center for Bioethics and Social Justice) as well as a member of the Department of Family Medicine (nee’ Practice.) He wrote important, widely reviewed books on the placebo effect, stories of sickness and health, power and medicine, how pharma gifts change physician behavior, the future of bioethics, and general reviews of ethics in medicine dating back to the early 1970s. The Center was one of the first units of its kind in the country, and Howard was a driving force behind its national prominence and success.
Dr. Brody had so much to write and say because none of us are perfect and advancing fairness in health is one of the great struggles of any age. He was an important voice in patient autonomy, especially around end-of-life care, and people all over the world have benefited from his work and leadership. Here in the college, he was a mentor and collaborator to so many. Dr. Brody leaves a remarkable legacy, and we will miss Howard.
Serving the people with you, Howard,
Aron
Aron Sousa, MD, FACP
Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine