Dean's Message - March 2008

Dear Colleagues:

What's on my mind this month is the School of Medicine's research roadmap. In my research vision letter and in my September State of the School address, I outlined my goals and objectives for our outstanding research enterprise. I emphasized that we are not only compelled but indeed obligated to increase the impact of research and discovery on human health. It is not enough to simply increase the amount of research we do, but rather we must increase the impact that research has on human health. We propose to do this in a number of ways: by increasing new magnet areas, expanding current magnet areas, recruiting and retaining productive faculty, emphasizing translational research, working in a more collaborative environment to enhance interdisciplinary research, and, ultimately, achieving a top-15 ranking within five years.

Our research roadmap will help us achieve these goals and objectives. The roadmap is unique because it harnesses the individual excellence of the School of Medicine's departments, programs, institutes and centers in achieving institutional goals using tools for measuring organizational success and accountability. It also provides incentives for encouraging and rewarding interdisciplinary collaborations and entrepreneurship. For example, it combines traditional business metrics, such as return on investment, with institutional development objectives, workforce planning and cultural change.

Let us focus on just one of our goals-achieving top-15 status for national biomedical research funding over the next five years (FY2008-FY2012). As you know very well, the competition is fierce for funding from federal, state and private sources for grants and contracts for biomedical research. Thus, achieving this status will require a sustained commitment of time and energy from all sectors of the School of Medicine. Our roadmap is criti-cally important to this process because it provides a structured, interdependent framework for clarifying and achieving the specific goals that will lead to achieving this vision. More importantly, it mobilizes resources to focus on maximizing opportunities for success across departments, pro-grams, institutes and centers toward a common goal. We must remember that funding level is a surrogate for and an effective measure of excellence in research programs since funds are secured by rigorous competition of program content, progress and success.

The roadmap includes several key elements with distinct strategies:

• Foster a more collaborative research community by fully accounting for collaborative efforts and establishing measures of research productiv-ity for clinical faculty.
• Support existing and emerging centers of clinical-translational research excellence and ensure their continued growth by building and main-taining translational research excellence. For example, over the next five years, at least half of our clinical departments will have an area of excellence that meets the criteria for an established "center of clinical-translational research excellence."
• Prioritize the recruitment of established (funded) principal investigators and development of a steady pipeline of exceptional new investiga-tors by such measures as enhancing the recruitment process to identify and review the best candidates, increasing the number of endowed chairs, and staying ahead of the curve in investing in new core technologies.
• Encourage and support existing research faculty by protecting them from the growing burdens of the administrative component of research, strengthening the research infrastructure to enhance their research capabilities, and assisting them in identifying sources of funding and in de-veloping grant proposals.
• Increase state, federal, philanthropic, school and medical center investment in research by aggressively and relentlessly pursuing existing, new and novel sources of funding.
• Identify and strengthen core facilities/infrastructure by focusing on space management, building new research space, and keeping pace with the latest research laboratory designs.

I am very optimistic and energized by our research roadmap. The plan is practical. It is highly dynamic and most adaptable, in that it can change as research evolves. Furthermore, it touches on the entire organizational infrastructure including policies, processes, structure and research direction, and is designed to improve the entire research enterprise from the bottom up.

There are so many opportunities that already exist for the School of Medicine to continue to enrich and expand its research enterprise. The research roadmap is the thread that ties together all those who are committed to soaring to new heights. I encourage you to talk with your chair and/or director and your colleagues about this roadmap and about how you can become involved in achieving our goals, so that together, we will indeed soar to greater heights.

You can access the research roadmap at http://medschool.umaryland.edu/researchroadmap.asp

In the relentless pursuit of excellence, I am

Sincerely yours,

 E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA
Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland
John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and
Dean, School of Medicine

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