Letter from the Dean

The year 2009 was remarkable in many ways. Nationally, it was a year when the economy sank into a deep recession. We witnessed the inauguration of the first African-American president of the United States, a former senator from Illinois. Healthcare reform was hotly debated and major proposals were considered by Congress. And significant new funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health as part of the ARRA stimulus package. Closer to home at Northwestern, we celebrated the remarkable tenure of President Henry Bienen and inaugurated our 16th University President, Morton Schapiro. In the context of these and many other changes in our environment, it has been a dynamic year at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Speaking of change, this message is part of the first joint annual report with Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, symbolizing our new collaborative relationship as we complete the Great Academic Medical Center planning process and begin the journey to become a top 10 academic medical center by the year 2020 under the Northwestern Medicine banner. This is an ambitious but achievable goal if we execute our bold strategic plan with the same focus, flexibility and collaboration that has characterized the planning process.

The Northwestern Medicine brand will be a significant and tangible aspect of our future academic medical center. Patients will appreciate the more integrated nature of our clinical services. We will ensure high quality across our enterprise and develop processes and measures that foster continuous improvement. We will support an interactive and high-impact research environment, catalyzed by robust core facilities and unique resources such as the enterprise data warehouse, positioning us for the increasing use of informatics in science. We will raise the bar even higher for new faculty recruitment, ensuring that we continue to develop novel areas in research while building on existing strengths. As we embark on a major revision of the MD curriculum, our students will train in a healthcare model of the future – highly integrated, team-oriented and driven by metrics. Northwestern Medicine will also facilitate cost savings as we leverage assets and minimize redundancy across our organizations. We know that the future environment will demand more productivity at lower costs, whether in research or clinical care.

Interdisciplinarity will remain a Northwestern hallmark as we look to the future. It is the underpinning of One Northwestern, our strategic plan for the life sciences. We already see the fruits of this effort with more joint faculty hires between schools, more collaborative grants between the physical and life sciences and more frequent physical (shuttle) and remote interchanges across our campuses. Indeed, One Northwestern has become part of our lexicon as a means to describe the Northwestern culture. Interdisciplinarity will also be a major trend in the clinical arena as we seek to convene multiple specialties around the needs of the patient. As an academic medical center, multispecialty, team-based care is one of our unique attributes. The development of new centers and institutes is a tangible example of these programs. This year, we launched the Center for Global Health, the Comprehensive Transplant Center, the Northwestern Brain Tumor Institute and the new Department of Medical Social Sciences, which focuses on outcomes research. Patrick McCarthy, MD, assumed leadership of the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute with plans to rapidly advance our cardiovascular services and it became a center at both the medical school and the hospital. Our education programs continue to be strengthened by interdisciplinary approaches as exemplified by the success of the NUvention program, designed to train students from multiple schools in medical device development, the Dean’s Grand Challenge Lecture Series with the McCormick School of Engineering and the plans to better align the life sciences graduate programs across our campuses.

This was also a year when many people learned the meaning of sesquicentennial as we celebrated our 150-year anniversary! This important milestone was highlighted throughout the year – with our incoming students on Founder’s Day, on Alumni Weekend and at graduation. These celebrations gave us opportunities to reflect on our remarkable history, most notable for the people we have trained and the impact they have had on the world of medicine and science. Amazingly, our sesquicentennial banner was carried onto the International Space Station twice in 2009 – first in March by alumnus Michael Barratt, MD ’85, GME ’89, and more recently in November by faculty member Bobby Satcher, MD, PhD, the first orthopedic surgeon in space. We can only imagine what the next 150 years will bring.

I thank all of you – faculty, staff, students, alumni and donors – for your many contributions to Northwestern. Our medical center thrives because of your efforts. We have set high goals – not to be brash or arrogant – but because delivering on these goals will have a high impact on society. We went into the fields of medicine and science because of a deep-seated desire to make the world a better place by providing effective healthcare. I am confident that our future plans will accelerate our shared goals.

I hope you enjoy the new online annual report.

J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD
Vice President for Medical Affairs
and Lewis Landsberg Dean
Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine