Are there five doctors in the house?
One of Dr. Sandy Williams' top priorities as the new dean of the School of Medicine is filling a slew of department chair vacancies. Williams hopes to fill five vacant department chairs throughout the school and also hopes to find a director for the Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy, he said.
The five departments--which include the basic science departments of Neurobiology, Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, and Cell Biology, as well as the clinical departments of Surgery and Obstetrics and Gynecology--are in varying stages of their respective search processes. Williams appointed Dr. Mark Newman as permanent chair of the Department of Anesthesiology last month.
Williams said the OB/GYN and cell biology chair searches are closest to completion.
A number of candidates to lead the OB/GYN department, which ranks highly nationally, have been scheduled to return for second visits and there are internal and external candidates, he said.
The cell biology department might well prove to be more of a challenge for its new chair.
The department has 13 faculty right now and should have more than 20, said interim chair Dr. Harold Erickson.
"I think that the major goal of the chair will be to start recruiting top notch faculty, and the goal is to rebuild this department into a first-rate research department," Erickson said.
He hoped the department would have a new chair by next fall.
Among the areas in which the department may grow include developmental biology, the process of how a fertilized egg grows from one cell into a system with organs, and cytoskeletal mobility, the structures inside cells that allow them to move. Erickson said the department would also likely increase its depth in the study of physiology.
Williams said the other vacancies will take longer to fill.
Neurobiology, like OB/GYN, is a department with a strong reputation. Because Trinity College of Arts and Sciences plans to start an undergraduate major in neuroscience in two years, this department will likely have the most relevance to undergraduates.
"The department is really pretty full," Williams said.
"[The chair] will inherit a department not really in need of rebuilding," he said.
The biostatistics and bioinformatics department, which was only recently created, will likely compliment the new Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
Robert Anderson, chair of the department of surgery, has announced he will retire as soon as the medical school finds a suitable replacement.
The department, Duke's second-largest in the Medical Center, has received more grants from the National Institutes of Health in the past eight years than any other university.
"I'm looking for the best person in the country," Williams said. "[The surgery department] really is a jewel in our crown."
"I'm just anxious to be free of some of the administrative work," he said.
Anderson, who began his stint as chair in 1994, will return to research and teaching. He also wants to help build some translational research programs, he said.
Anderson added that the challenge for his successor will be to keep up with the rapidly changing world of medicine.
"It's much more based on applications of molecular biology, much less invasive, much more ambulatory," he said, adding that the growing litigious environment of health care is also changing the field's nature.
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