- Name: James Ford, DO
- Medical school attended: Des Moines University
- Location of your residency/fellowship training:
- Akron Children’s Hospital in Ohio for residency
- Children’s Hospital Colorado in Denver for fellowship
What residency/fellowship program at UNMC are you serving as program director for?
Pediatric Hematology/Oncology
Number of trainees: Three
How long have you been the program director?
Almost four years.
What made you chose to become the program director?
I wanted to see our program succeed and meet the needs of our fellows.
What challenges do you foresee in graduate medical education in the future?
I think in the future, one challenge will be preparing fellows in our specialty to work in different settings.
What are the strengths of your training program?
The strength of our program lies in the incredible faculty and people that do the training for these fellows. They are so invested in helping our fellows to learn and become excellent clinicians as well as scientific investigators. The passion of the many wonderful people in our department who contribute to their education is phenomenal. The physicians, APPs, nurses and the rest of the staff — all are a great help to the fellows and the fellowship. We have an incredible coordinator, Miranda Downing, and a superb associate program director, Melissa Acquazzino. The fellows themselves are also top-notch, which makes my job easy.
List some accomplishments that you are proud of:
I would say that these are program/division accomplishments, not my own. But I think we can be very proud of starting a fellowship (the heavy administrative work of setting it up was done by my predecessor, Don Coulter, MD). Matching our first four fellows — we have filled every year we have been in the match. It sounds strange to say, but I think another thing we can be proud of how our program has changed since our first fellow started. The program has responded to the feedback of our fellows and our faculty and made some significant changes that have made us better. Another accomplishment is that our first fellow (who is graduating in June) has a job.
Tell us three things about you that others may not know:
- I don’t like cantaloupe, but I try it once a year to make sure I still don’t like it.
- When I was young, the incredible Hulk was my favorite super hero, and I felt that I needed to pick a football team, so I picked the Philadelphia Eagles, and I have been fiercely loyal to them ever since.
- On a given (ideal) weekend off I will play Dungeons and Dragons (with my two teenage boys), be a horse with a bad back for my 6- and 8-year-olds and discuss the meaning of Jack Johnson lyrics with my 12-year-old daughter. And if I’m lucky, go on a date with the most beautiful woman in the world (my wife).
Congratulations James!