Last week, we celebrated the annual UNMC Research Awards. Once again, the UNMC College of Medicine was very well represented in the list of distinguished recipients, capped by Andre Kalil, MD, being named Scientist Laureate.
Research is one of the pillars upon which medical schools and academic medical centers rest. A robust research portfolio is perhaps the most difficult aspect of a medical school’s mission to develop and sustain. Thanks to the investigators recognized this year and the many other outstanding faculty, staff and students involved in research in the college, over the last decade we have seen a substantial growth year after year in our research enterprise. Our ranking among U.S. medical schools has jumped at least 10 spots, as assessed by National Institutes of Health funding.
We have benefited greatly from the partnership with Jennifer Larsen, MD, UNMC vice chancellor for research, and her team in supporting research programs in the college. As she steps down from that role in a few months, I thank her for all her efforts on behalf of the college’s research programs and wish her well in the next stage of her career. I look forward to working with her successor, who is being identified through a national search that is underway.
The future of research is tightly linked to preparing and training the next generation of investigators. Our graduate student training programs are integral to accomplishing that task. I would like to thank the college of medicine faculty who lead and participate in those programs for their time and effort in making them successful. The MD-PhD program is a unique program that continues to flourish under the leadership of Justin Mott, MD, PhD. It is helping train the critically important national cadre of physician scientists that, unfortunately, continues to be an endangered species compared to when I entered that career path more than thirty years ago. I look to these students and their peers to carry on the tradition of those of us whose research careers are winding down.
The support from Ken Cowan, MD, PhD, and the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center has been critical to the continued success of our research programs in cancer. Additional institutional investment in faculty research training, career development and research support have come through many entities, including the Great Plains IDeA-CTR (led by Matthew Rizzo, MD), University of Nebraska National Strategic Research Institute (NSRI), Child Health Research Institute (directed by Ann Anderson Berry, MD, PhD), Cardiovascular Center (led by Merry Lindsey, PhD) and the numerous core facilities overseen by the vice chancellor for research’s office.
This support of our research mission has been critical to UNMC and college of medicine research success and will allow continued growth in the future. The growing importance of being able to amass, store and effectively analyze enormous data sets is upon us and investment in the expertise to do so will be an area of increasing investment of the college going forward. Howard Fox, MD, PhD, senior associate dean for research, will be coordinating this effort from the standpoint of the college.
Ultimately, we seek to have our research translate into new treatments and other modalities that benefit human health. For example, it is exciting that work that has been ongoing for many years in the department of pharmacology and experimental neuroscience by a team under the leadership of Howard Gendelman, PhD, and, more recently, Benson Edagwa, PhD, has resulted in new therapies that are poised to have major impacts on several diseases, including HIV infection and Parkinson’s disease. UNeMed, the technology transfer arm of UNMC, led by Michael Dixon, PhD, continues to be a key partner in advancing college of medicine research to the marketplace.
As you have undoubtedly garnered from the above comments, research is something that I believe is critical to our identity as the UNMC College of Medicine. It has many moving parts and requires continuous and substantial investment to be successful. Most importantly, though, it requires the continued presence of a creative and dedicated group of individuals who devise and carry out the research for which the annual research awards were designed to celebrate. As someone whose own career was substantially involved in research, I understand the commitment required to be successful and how quickly science moves forward. Let me close by again congratulating this year’s, as well as prior years’, UNMC research award recipients and thank all in the college who, in spite of the challenges of the pandemic, have continued to seek out new knowledge that will benefit all mankind.
And as we are about to send out this issue, we’ve received word that the college has been granted LCME accreditation. Read more about this accomplishment in this month’s InterCOM.