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LEADERSHIP Martin Bridges Community in Talk on State of the School"Building Bridges" was the theme of HMS dean Joseph Martin's fourth annual State of the School address, which he delivered to the HMS community Sept. 25. Illustrating his talk with images of the many steel and concrete bridges around the Longwood medical area, the dean gave the TMEC amphitheater audience a progress report on the equally abundant institutional bridges connecting the School's components and reaching out to affiliated hospitals, other Harvard schools, and partners in the neighborhood, the city, and around the world. One Word: CollaborationMartin set out "to show that the spirit of cooperation and collaboration that has, I hope, become the signature of my deanship is continuing," he said, "to provide evidence of progress, and to mark honestly areas of concern where further work is needed."He opened with an aerial shot of Boston's new signature span, the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge over the Charles River and lauded Zakim's work on interfaith relations as well as his lesser-known advocacy for terminally ill patients at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The most visible evidence of Martin's collaborative drive is the new research building that will anchor the North Quad across Longwood Avenue from the original 1906 Quad. One of the largest projects ever undertaken at Harvard University, the building "is on schedule and below budget," he said, and due to open in fall 2003. "The remarkable thing from my perspective is how flawless the planning ... has been in determining who will use the new building and what we will do to grow other programs throughout the Quad," he added. The Departments of Genetics and Pathology will move to the new building, which will also house the newly created Harvard Partners Program in Genomics and several basic research programs of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. At the same time, the department chairs have identified five priority research areas to be expanded in the South Quad space freed up by the move: systems biology, computational biology, parasitology, imaging, and structural biology. Expanding ResearchMartin highlighted several items of note on the research front:Five core programs and their leaders have been set for the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair: Centers for Translational Neurology Research, Brain Imaging, Molecular Pathology, Computational Analysis, and a robotics facility. The Harvard Institute of Proteomics is working to establish a gene expression repository for all human and model organism genes and to make these publicly available through the FLEXGene consortium. The Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center has two Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPOREs) funded by the National Cancer Institute, in breast and skin cancers. A new Division of AIDS is being formed with faculty from all major affiliates and in collaboration with HSPH and HSDM. Teaching MedicineTurning to medical education, Martin announced several appointments: George Thibault was named director of the fledgling Academy at Harvard Medical School, heading up a group of 18 founding members. Two new society masters were named: Gordon "Buck" Strewler for the Cannon Society and Augustus White III for the Holmes Society. He displayed the front page of the MyCourses website for students and faculty and credited John Halamka, the new associate dean of educational technology, for his efforts in creating the site. And he pointed to the new Student Affairs office on Gordon Hall's third floor, explaining that "the idea here is to encourage students ... to be more aware of and available to us in that remote site of the Quad--please come and see us."The dean recognized the efforts of Harvard Medical International to build global bridges. An HMI milestone this year was the HealthCare East and West conference in June, which brought 600 physicians from China, "the largest single group of people to leave the mainland in the last 50 years, except [for] the Olympics," he noted, adding that the event represented "a historic first step to open a bridge of dialogue between our country and Chinese physicians." After calling for a moment of silence for the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Martin announced that an open forum for the HMS community would be held Oct. 11, the one-month anniversary of the tragedy. He closed by reminding the audience of the HMS mission: to create and to nurture a community of the best people, committed to leadership in alleviating human suffering caused by disease. --Tom Reynolds |
