le 1 janvier 2003 Vol 8, No. 5 2003 Welcome back! This has been one of the longest Holiday breaks I can remember and I sincerely hope that you have had the opportunity to spend time with loved ones, family and friends and that you have succeeded in getting some much deserved rest. The Holiday Break was a very quiet one for me, one in which I spent much needed time with my family reflecting on my good fortune and gently, ever so gently, beginning to come to grips with some of the issues that will face the Faculty over the next year. The big imperative, of course, is the upcoming LCME accreditation site visit in February. This is our opportunity to show our stuff! to present our curriculum, our students, our teachers and our school to the external world! We have done the introspective work in preparing the Institutional Self Study and we have developed strategies to address our shortcomings. Now the time has come to demonstrate our pride and our sense of accomplishment in a job I believe has been extremely well done. A second area of immense importance for the Faculty is a fundamental review of our vision. Over the past several months, I have come to the increasing realization that we, as a Faculty, need to re-visit our vision. I have begun to address this question with members of the Dean’s group and with Department Chairs and I raised it publicly for the first time in my opening remarks at the recent Awards of Excellence ceremony (see Perspectives Vol. 8, No. 3-4). Essentially, given the dramatic changes that our world faces, we need to rethink our place in society and to seriously reexamine how we can make that important and vital difference to our communities and constituencies. Doing the expected will no longer be sufficient; we must strive to do the necessary. I now turn to every member of Faculty and invite you to join me and your colleagues in thinking seriously about what our renewed vision should be. I would like you to begin by considering 4 questions: 1. What do you want our Faculty to be best known for? 2. What is your major contribution to our Faculty? 3. How would you like to be recognized for your contribution? Perspectives 4. If you were the Dean, what is the one (and only) mission or value you would most like to see enshrined in our Faculty? Please e-mail me your response at [email protected] or fax to 562-5457. I look forward to hearing your responses. Your responses will be collated so that I can share them with you. In the New Year I will table a summary document that will serve as the outline for a template that I would like to use for a Faculty-wide discussion over the next 12 months. And over this period, I will meet with Departments, staff, students and residents, both formally and informally, so that, together, we can shape our collective renewed vision. I look forward to your thoughts and comments and I very much look forward to the conversation that will ensue. A third area of importance to the Faculty and faculty members is resolution of a number of financing issues. There are two particular issues here. The first relates to the need for the provincial government to provide appropriate levels of funding for the additional students we began to enroll in 1998-99. In total we added 39 new students. But government has only provided funding to the amount of 45% of the costs of providing the education. For the moment we are coping well and we remain committed to providing increased funding to teachers in the undergraduate curriculum. And we continue to press our case, together with our colleague Ontario faculties of medicine, to the provincial government for appropriate levels of funding – funding that is consistent with the true cost of providing undergraduate medical education; these costs have been measured extensively in our Faculty. The second issue relates to the ongoing discussions with the Ministry of Health & Long Term Care regarding the possibility of an academic alternate funding plan (AFP) for the Ottawa academic health sciences center. The negotiation teams are currently exploring the feasibility of entering into a phased AFP process that would begin with an initial distribution of 14 m$ for academic enhancement. This funding would be used to support academic activities of faculty members, the first time in an extraordinarily long time that the Ministry has explicitly acknowledged the need for funding other than clinical income to support the academic mission of our Faculty and its members. (To put the 14 m$ in some perspective, the Faculty currently allocates just over 7 m$ to the clinical departments in support of teaching and research activities.) Although much remains to be done – and even though the outcome is not yet clear – the discussion about the feasibility of an AFP for us is one of the important issues facing us over the next several months. 2003 will be an important year for recruitment and leadership renewal. At present, two major departmental chair search committees are active – surgery and anesthesiology. And recruitment continues at the divisional head level as well as in the basic science departments. In addition, we are actively recruiting to a significant number of Canada Research Chairs and to at least 2 endowed chairs. And finally, as can be seen elsewhere in this issue of Perspectives, recruitment of leaders to the Dean’s Office will continue with the identification of a new Director of Continuing Medical Education to succeed Craig Campbell who has gone on to a leadership position at the Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons of Canada. 2003 also will be a time for aggressive planning for growth and expansion of our research infrastructure. Active planning is presently underway for the determination of our space needs for the next decade and a working group will be struck in the early new year to develop a consolidated plan for research development in the Faculty. On the education side, I will be taking a proposal for a new and major initiative to Faculty Advisory Board in January. Adoption of this proposal will allow us to develop a platform for sustained innovation in curriculum design and management, in e-curriculum, in evaluation and psychometrics and in education leadership development. All in all, an exciting year is ahead of us. I am struck by a comment made by one of my colleagues just before the holiday break when we were talking about the upcoming year and its challenges. His response was ‘the issues next year will be the same, only bigger, much bigger’. I suspect he may well be right. Perspectives Vol. 8, No. 5, Page 2 In the previous issue of Perspectives, I reported on the recipients of the 2002 Faculty of 2002 Awards Medicine Awards of Excellence. Presiding over the ceremony were the Chancellor, Mme of Excellence Huguette Labelle,a nd the Rector and Vice-Chancellor, M. Gilles Patry. The recipients were Barbara Vanderhyden, Rose Goldstein, Ruth Slack, Gillian Lord, Sandy Fyfe and Sylvie Forgues-Martel. This month I present the recipients of the Young Professor Award (David Park), Mentoring Award (Jeffrey Turnbull) and Architect Award (Wilbert Keon) in addition to those individuals who participated in the Let’s Talk Science Program. David Park, Young Investigator Award Le Prix du jeune chercheur reconnaît les contributions exceptionnelles d’une personne durant les sept premières années de sa nomination à l’Université d’Ottawa. Cette année, nous célébrons les succès de docteur David Park, professeur adjoint au Département Sylvie Forgues-Martel (centre) is de médecine et scientifique dans le programme des flanked by the Rector, Gilles Patry, neurosciences à l’Institut en recherche de la santé and the Chancellor, Mme Huguette Labelle. Sylvie was one of 6 recipients d’Ottawa. of the 2002 Faculty Awards of Excellence. The other 5 recipients of 2002 Awards of Excellence are (from r to l) Barbara Vanderhyden, Sandy Fyfe, Rose Goldstein, Gillian Lord and Ruth Slack. David est originaire d’Ann Arbor d’où il reçoit son BSc en biologie cellulaire et moléculaire en 1989. Il passe ensuite à l’Université Rutgers pour faire son doctorat. Il poursuit ses études postdoctorales au laboratoire de Lloyd Greene à Columbia University où il approfondit ses intérêts dans la mort cellulaire, sujet qui le préoccupe à ce jour. En 1998, il se joint à l’Université d’Ottawa. David is an immensely talented and prolific investigator. Throughout his young career he has distinguished himself by winning a number of prestigious personal awards. For example, while at Columbia he received an Aaron Diamond post-doctoral fellowship David Park, recipient of the 2002 Young Investiga- and on assuming his position at the tor Award, gets a few pointers from the Rector. University of Ottawa he received a Glaxo-Wellcome Award, a MRC Scholarship, a MRC/PMAC Chair and the Michael Smith Promising Scientist Award. His record of achievement is outstanding; a mere 4 years after securing his first independent faculty position, he is on the editorial board of the prestigious Journal of Biological Chemistry. I cite from one of the letters of nomination. ‘Dr. Park is a thinking and careful scientist. His contributions to the understanding of the apoptosis process, the role of cell cycle genes in Perspectives Vol. 8, No. 5, Page 3 cell death and his ability to translate these concepts into investigations at the animal model level have been nothing short of brilliant. He has enormous mentorship qualities to his graduate students and fellows, is a cooperative colleague to his fellow scientists and he is entirely committed to his professional development.