Addressing faculty senate, dean shares vision for leading 'biomedical revolution'

BY KATHLEEN SULLIVAN
NOV. 18, 2013

In his first presentation to Stanford's Faculty Senate, Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of the School of Medicine, said the goal of the Campaign for Stanford Medicine is to "lead the biomedical revolution" by promoting fundamental, clinical and translational discovery, by transforming patient care and by training future leaders.

"We are the epicenter of innovation," Minor said during his Nov. 8 presentation.

"We are drawn to the difficult problems, not the problems that can be solved with incremental solutions or approaches, but the problems that no one else tackles," he said. "The problems that, at first, we don't even know how to conceptualize and approach to solve them. And we develop the platforms and the paradigms that change the future."

As an example, Minor cited the work of Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, a professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, who led the multidisciplinary team that combined neuroscience and chemical engineering to develop a process that renders a mouse brain transparent.

Citing many facts and figures during his 15-minute presentation, Minor provided an overview of the School of Medicine. Currently, the medical school has 411 students studying to become doctors, 937 residents and clinical fellows, 713 PhD students and 1,277 postdoctoral research scholars.

Emphasizing the excellence of the school's faculty, Minor noted that its ranks include six living Nobel laureates.

Turning to undergraduate education, he said that 19 percent of medical school courses are open to undergraduate students. Some of most popular are "Sleep and Dreams," "Genetic Analysis," "Cell and Developmental Biology" and "Economics of Health and Medical Care."

Regarding patient care initiatives with Stanford Hospital & Clinics, Minor noted that the hospital developed the new Stanford HealthCare Alliance, a low-cost, high-quality health-care plan that will be available to Stanford employees and postdoctoral scholars in 2014.

Minor compared Stanford to 20 of its peer medical schools by looking at the number of faculty, medical students, residents and fellows, and hospital beds.

"Across the board, we're small, and that is one of our greatest strengths," he said. "Because we're small, we're nimble. We can respond. We can react. We can plan. We can organize in ways that much larger institutions have a great deal of difficulty doing."

Following the presentation, faculty members asked questions about the quality of patient care in teaching hospitals, the challenges facing the medical school and the quest to derive meaningful information about individuals and populations from massive databases.

The minutes of the Nov. 7 meeting will be available on the Faculty Senate website. The minutes will include the question-and-answer session that followed Minor's presentation.

Kathleen Sullivan is the university governance writer at the Stanford News Service.