From Aron’s Desk

Friends, 

This week is the start of reunion season here at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. Last year, I missed the annual migration of alumni back to campus, and this year I am enjoying each visit. It does not take long for the university to look different than it did when an alum was last here. Even if you graduated last Spring, you will see changes this Fall like the new 23,000-square-foot Virtual Health System. The seasons do change. There is always something new here at RFU.

This College of Pharmacy kicked off reunion season with a celebration of its alumni at the end of the week. The college started in 2011, so I have more grey hair than any alumni I met. The college may be young but the alumni are already doing great work. We celebrated two alumni award winners at the reunion last night. The Distinguished Alumni Award went to Alyssa Christensen, PharmD ’15, BCIDP. Christensen is a national leader in antibiotic stewardship, leading programs in Minnesota and Oregon, and publishing on this essential issue in NEJM Catalyst, the JAMA network, and Pharmacotherapy. The Dean’s Alumni Excellence Award went to Carrie Oakland, PharmD ‘16, BCPS, DABAT, who is the clinical supervisor of the Minnesota Regional Poison Center. She has more than  45 publications and serves on national committees of America’s Poison Centers. 

I really enjoyed meeting our alumni at the reunion and talking about the great work done by the people of the RFU College of Pharmacy. I’ve written previously, as recently as last week(!),  about Helix Talk, one of the nation's leading pharmacy podcasts, as an example of our faculty’s innovative and pathfinding work. The college also has a remarkable entrepreneurship program deeply engaged with our biomedical incubator, Helix 51. I have turned to Dean Wiisanen and Associate Dean Jolee Rosenkranz to lead a task force on supporting entrepreneurship for our students, faculty, and staff at RFU. The College of Pharmacy is a leader for RFU, and I have been delighted to learn about the college and its people this year.

We are in the closing phases of the provost search. My thanks to Dean Stephanie Wu for chairing the search committee; Lee Concha, MA, for leading our search process in the absence of a search firm; and Johnna Purcell for heading up search operations, candidate and feedback logistics. We have had a lot of interest in the position and great visits to campus. As we finish the provost search, we are moving on to our search for a vice president for institutional advancement. We just keep going.

Drop me an email if you find the haiku in this update. It follows the usual 5-7-5 syllable pattern, but I will admit that it has a non-traditional feature. Everyone needs a little poetry every now and then.

A highlight of the week for me was the 11th annual Women in Science and Healthcare (WiSH) symposium on gender health disparities with national speaker Elizabeth Comen, MD, of NYU. Her talk, and the excellent panel discussion following it, focused on age-old myths about women’s bodies  and how a long history of misogynistic myth-making still haunts the health of women and underlies health disparities. The event was filled with remarkable history and stories from Dr. Comen’s book and panel members’ own experiences. The series itself is born out of the goal of honoring Rosalind Franklin, and the knowledge that access to care and the benefits of scientific healthcare are not justly distributed among our neighbors. Among the difficult stories and traumatic histories in the session, it was uplifting to hear about the great work of our alumni, faculty, staff, and students at this remarkable university.

Improving the wellness of all people with you, 

Aron