September 12, 2023

Dear School of Medicine Community,

It was so great to see so many of you at the State of the School Address last week – more than 600 faculty and students attended in person, filling Leadership Hall. We also appreciate the engagement of our leaders, including UMB President Dr. Bruce Jarrell, Provost Dr. Roger Ward, and UMMS President and CEO Dr. Mohan Suntha, as well as Board members, hospital and faculty practice leaders. Thank you. 

In this adddress we tried to share our passion for the Schools of Health Sciences and for the Univesity of Maryland in Baltimore and to celebrate all of your successes. This presentation presents an opportunity to view the entire proverbial elephant and break down our respective silos in clinical medicine, science and education. 

In brief, we walked through a subset of our “Shock and Awe” programs of the School of Medicine that I discovered during my fall listening tour; the state of our school by the numbers in each of our mission areas; the six generational challenges in health we are facing as a country and the three new institutes and other efforts we have launched to address these challenges; our focused new initiatives in research, clinical care, education and philanthropy; and our three different system-level strategic planning efforts, as well as our vision moving forward for academic medicine.

We also tried to recognize many of our faculty leaders and all of your success – while we cannot cover everything in a 60-minute presentation, we hope to recognize all of your accomplishments in future years and our many celebratory events! If you missed it, I encourage you to watch the video here. 

We had a great celebration afterward in the atrium of HSRFIII and I want to thank everyone who attended, from SOM leadership and many faculty, staff, students and trainees to both campus and UMMC leadership and several Board of Visitors members. So many faculty, students and administrative staff came up to me to share how proud they are to work at UMB. I also want to thank everyone for all your support during my first year here. You made it an incredibly enjoyable transition and I had a lot of fun recounting all of your successes over the past year and predating my arrival. 

Speaking of transitions, as I announced in my State of the School Address, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Shawn Kwatra from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as our new Chair of the Department of Dermatology. Dr. Kwatra is the Founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Itch Center, an internationally renowned dermatologist and clinical leader in chronic inflammatory skin diseases. As an NIH-funded clincal investigator, he has 100+ peer reviewed publications, including an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, and leads multiple clinical trials. We look forward to having him join us in early 2024! For more information, please click here.

With enthusiasm and commitment,