Year: 2013

What’s on my mind this month is how fortunate we are to have excellent and wonderfully vibrant graduate, allied health and public health programs embedded within the School of Medicine, which form an invaluable part of our academic enterprise. About half of the approximately 1,300 students enrolled in the School of Medicine are working toward degrees in life sciences, physical therapy, genetic counseling, medical and research technology, public health, and pathologist assistant. As advances in science and research move us closer to understanding health and disease at the molecular level, the medical and allied health professions must be intimately linked to scientific research.

What’s on my mind this month is all we have to look forward to—from our capital projects, to our research program goals, to our new education initiatives—in the calendar year ahead. As I contemplate my personal goals for 2013, I also reflect on the priorities for the School of Medicine. I see us achieving key milestones in a number of areas.

What’s on my mind this month is how heavily Maryland, with its high concentration of bioscience and federal employees, relies on federal research and development funding. As I contemplated what to share in this issue of SOMnews — recognizing that this would go to press before the White House and Congress had, hopefully, reached an agreement on a budget — I was struck by the potentially ominous consequences of the impending fiscal cliff for the State of Maryland. If the “sequestration” clause of the Budget Control Act of 2011 was allowed to kick in, it would trigger an approximately eight percent across-the-board cut in federal discretionary spending. Although all states would be negatively impacted, perhaps no state in the U.S. would be more adversely affected than Maryland.