Category: What’s the Buzz?

What’s on my mind this month are our graduates and how exciting it is to enter into the medical, allied health and scientific research enterprise today. We celebrate commencement this month, the ceremonial passage of student to scholar—for our medical, graduate and allied health students.

On March 15, we celebrated Match Day, the day when all fourth-year medical students across the United States discover where they will be doing their residencies. It is an auspicious occasion and marks a turning point in their training. This year, our students matched to some of the most competitive areas, including orthopedic surgery and radiology, and entered residency programs in emergency, internal and family medicine, as well as pediatrics, psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology.

What’s on my mind this month is how fortunate we are to have excellent and wonderfully vibrant graduate, allied health and public health programs embedded within the School of Medicine, which form an invaluable part of our academic enterprise. About half of the approximately 1,300 students enrolled in the School of Medicine are working toward degrees in life sciences, physical therapy, genetic counseling, medical and research technology, public health, and pathologist assistant. As advances in science and research move us closer to understanding health and disease at the molecular level, the medical and allied health professions must be intimately linked to scientific research.

What’s on my mind this month is all we have to look forward to—from our capital projects, to our research program goals, to our new education initiatives—in the calendar year ahead. As I contemplate my personal goals for 2013, I also reflect on the priorities for the School of Medicine. I see us achieving key milestones in a number of areas.

What’s on my mind this month is how heavily Maryland, with its high concentration of bioscience and federal employees, relies on federal research and development funding. As I contemplated what to share in this issue of SOMnews — recognizing that this would go to press before the White House and Congress had, hopefully, reached an agreement on a budget — I was struck by the potentially ominous consequences of the impending fiscal cliff for the State of Maryland. If the “sequestration” clause of the Budget Control Act of 2011 was allowed to kick in, it would trigger an approximately eight percent across-the-board cut in federal discretionary spending. Although all states would be negatively impacted, perhaps no state in the U.S. would be more adversely affected than Maryland.

What’s on my mind this month is the need for enhanced federally-funded clinical research. We are currently witnessing an evolution in medical and scientific research at the national level. There are vast increases in biological data from the human genome project. Advanced technologies are being used for molecular discovery. There are developments in more personalized approaches to care. As part of this transformation, we are seeing a growing emphasis and embrace of both clinical and translational research by federal and state funding agencies. One needs to look no further than www.clinicaltrials.gov and the new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at NIH as evidence of the scope and magnitude of federally-funded clinical trial research.

What’s on my mind this month is the health status of citizens in our state and how we are taking a lead role in introducing initiatives to help improve the health and well-being of the people of Maryland.

As Marylanders, we have an interesting paradox. On one hand, our state is among the nation’s leaders in several important measures. Maryland has the fourth-highest per capita income in the U.S. We rank third in the nation in median household income. Maryland is home to the world’s premiere biomedical research institute, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, as well as some of the nation’s top hospitals and two top-tier medical schools.

What’s on my mind this month is our partnerships with the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) and the Veterans Affairs (VA) Maryland Health Care System—and how these partnerships reflect the full alignment of our academic health center (AHC). From the School of Medicine (SOM), to Faculty Physicians Inc. (FPI), to the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) and the Baltimore VA Medical Center, we are working together better than ever.

What’s on my mind this month is the School of Medicine’s Class of 2012 and their extraordinary achievements, which we celebrated last month in a wonderful convocation ceremony at the Baltimore Hilton. One-hundred fifty-two students took the solemn Oath of Hippocrates, signifying their commitment to the ancient tradition of healing, and pledging to serve humanity. This oath has stood the test of time, and represents the gold standard of moral and ethical behavior to which all physicians are bound.