From Aron’s Desk

Friends, 

It’s been a busy week in our university, out here on the edge of the prairie. The first, crisp notes of fall are in the air, and you can buy MacIntosh apples from Katy the Butcher down on Elm Place just off First Street. She had a friend bring some down from a Wisconsin orchard, and there are about a bushel left. They are maybe just a week short of being fully ripe, which is about right for us northern folk. You do not want to be too comfortable heading into winter. Besides, Macs just short of being ripe are perfect for pies, because you can taste the tartness under the sweetness of the sugar and the exotic warmth of the cinnamon. I think we’ve ruined cinnamon with Hot Rocks candy, which only impressionable children eat. That candy makes a horror show of cinnamon - for the rest of their lives these children will not appreciate the love and warmth that cinnamon gives to an apple nestled in a pie. 

In Katy’s shop people held the usual small talk about the meat she had in. How was the lamb leg or the brisket? There were also deep, thoughtful conversations about whether you should spatchcock a chicken. Some felt a spatchcocked chicken was the cheater's way out. A few even wondered if you can really discuss spatchcocking in polite company. They were not sure so spoke in hushed tones. With this week’s appearance of the Macs, talk moved to apple varieties and whether Katy the Butcher would be getting in any Pippens. There is a lot of support for Macs among the older folk who remember them from decades ago. The MacIntosh apple variety is a valuable import from Canada from long ago, don’t you know. 

Fall can teach us many things about life: harvest from real work rather than duplicity; strong communities need healthy neighbors. There are a lot of fancy new apples in the markets, but our family likes this old apple, the MacIntosh. The gleam may be off that particular variety for the computer which stole its name, but still it eats and bakes well and even looks nice in a bowl. “Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are unhappy in their own way,” and all families have their preferred family apple. The conversation is almost unifying. People come out of different religious and ethnic traditions but can talk about favorite varieties and even have the same apple heritage. Solace can be found when you seek it.

It was the middle of the week when the Board of Trustees came to town for their quarterly meetings. All the administrators look a bit more professional when the board appears, and the facilities staff put out cones protecting parking spots for the trustees. The board approved a new member to join them this winter, Rachel Nichols, PhD, JD. There has been a lot of support and enthusiasm for adding her to the board after her service on the research committee. She comes to RFU from Argonne National Laboratory and the Air Force Reserves with expertise in immunology and legal compliance, which makes for some interesting conversations at the board dinners. She has talent and does tell a good story. 

The board meets every quarter, but not all meetings are the same. Nothing is the same in different seasons. September is the time of apples, and in March we just hold on until the June strawberries come in — like fruit, the meetings could never be the same. The September meeting is filled with bushels of updates and pecks of strategic discussions rather than formal decisions like approval of the budget (the June meeting) or promotions (March). 

Since I arrived, the board committee meetings have moved from a nearby inn to campus, and we have added lunches for board members with students and more interaction with faculty. For this week’s meeting the students led board members through a simulation in the new Virtual Health System (VHS). With the support of the students, the board members had the chance to put in an IV, intubate a patient, manage a code, learn some ultrasound, and all the sim patients got better! 

After the board left on Thursday, we celebrated the formal opening of the VHS with our community friends, partners, and funders. Two days earlier, our faculty, students, and staff had the chance to go through the facility and try out some of the simulators. As I wrote last week, the VHS is an amazing facility putting RFU in the forefront of health universities. (See our media clip here and here)

We have some important greetings and announcements from RFU as well:

• The second edition of Vaccinophobia and Vaccine Controversies of the 21st Century, edited by our own Chicago Medical School Dean Archana Chatterjee, MD, PhD, has now been released. The first edition emerged prior to the pandemic. Obviously, this is an excellent time for an update!
• We share our congratulations to RFU College of Pharmacy Associate Professor Dr. Khyati Patel, who has been named the Illinois Pharmacists Association Educator of the Year. She is an excellent teacher and is co-host of Helix Talk, the main pharmacy education podcast in the country. You can watch Dr. Patel and her co-host, Dr. Sean Kane, on the Town Hall last spring. 

As the week began, I was not actually here at RFU. Instead, I was in Buffalo for a conference about gun violence. That is a long way from a conversation about apples. The conference emerged out of a collaboration I have had for a few years with the leadership of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo (UB). It is not of Buffalo; instead, it is the University at Buffalo. 

Jacobs School Dean and UB Vice President Allison Brashear, MD, MBA, and I became friends when we both attended dean charm school years ago. Then, in February 2023, there was a tragic shooting at Michigan State University resulting in the murder of three students and wounding of five more. I spent that night in the university emergency operations center as the lead physician. When I had a conversation with Dr. Brashear a couple of months later, Buffalo was approaching the one year remembrance of the 2022 Buffalo shooting during which a white supremacist shot and killed ten African Americans from the eastside of Buffalo. 

Allison and I decided to engage our communities and started with a faculty and students exchange at the one year remembrance of each other’s tragedy. That exchange turned into the Remembrance Conference in East Lansing and Buffalo and then last weekend’s Rise, Respond, Rebuild Conference in Buffalo. Each event has been focused on public health approaches to gun violence in communities and families. We talk about how to prevent gun deaths through suicide prevention, addressing community violence, and engaging students as the future of this work. In a turn of good news, community gun violence is down across the country. I’ve included students from many disciplines in this work over my career. We as health care professionals face complicated issues, and the engagement and leadership of students with community members is so important to the health of our neighbors and communities in all seasons. I’m proud to be at RFU, a place that has long understood why community matters. 

That’s the news from Rosalind Franklin University, where all the faculty are smart, all the staff are talented, and all the students are above average, because that is who we admit, so don’t try to give me any flack — they actually are all above average.

Improving the wellness of all people with you, 

Aron