New women deans make history at SMD

he Board of Trustees has approved the appointments of two women to senior leadership positions in the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Deborah Cory-Slechta has been appointed to the newly established post of dean for research and Lindsey Henson has been appointed senior associate dean for medical education. Cory-Slechta and Henson, who were promoted from positions within the medical school, are the first women to be appointed to the rank of dean or senior associate dean in the school's 75-year history.

"The appointments of these two remarkably talented individuals herald an exciting and promising future for the medical school's vital missions of research and education," said Jay Stein, senior vice president and vice provost for health affairs and Medical Center and Strong Health CEO. "Our ability to fill these positions internally is a testament to the depth of talent that is present within our own ranks."

Cory-Slechta

As dean for research, Cory-Slechta will oversee SMD's research programs. Growth of these programs has been the focus of a 10-year $550 million initiative that includes the creation last year of the Aab Institute of Biomedical Sciences, which Cory-Slechta will direct. She will work closely with Edward Hundert, dean of the medical school.

Critical to the development of the research mission, she says, is creating a culture that encourages researchers to think and work interdepartmentally. For example, she plans to foster collaborative research projects that bring together faculty from various departments and research centers to study the molecular underpinnings of diseases and to develop new therapeutic strategies. Cory-Slechta has been with the University for over 20 years. She also is the director of the University's Environmental Health Sciences Center.

Henson

A member of the SMD faculty since 1992, Henson will have responsibility for the school's undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education programs. She had served previously as associate dean for graduate medical education, where she led SMD's residency programs through a rigorous national accreditation process administered by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, achieving the highest possible level of accreditation.

Henson also has been closely involved in the sweeping reform of SMD's curriculum that has been led by Hundert over the past three years. To date, the first two years of the medical school curriculum have been converted to the "Double-Helix" curriculum. Henson will continue its implementation over the next two years to include the third and fourth years of the curriculum. In addition, she will begin work on a plan to apply the "Double-Helix" principles to SMD's graduate medical education programs. Just as the new curriculum integrates basic science and clinical medicine in the training of medical students, Henson hopes to better integrate the two in the training of residents.

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