Thomas J. Lawley

f you want to know where you're going, it helps to know where you've been and where you are now. This applies not only to people but also to medical schools. During the past two years, Emory's School of Medicine has been engaged in just such a scrutiny of where it has been and where it is in order to get to where it wants to go. We've already completed and begun to implement strategic plans in clinical care and research, and we're putting the finishing touches on the plan for teaching. Each of these plans must dovetail with one another to create a seamless whole, and each plan requires an aggressive implementation schedule. The recently announced agreement between Emory Healthcare and Columbia/HCA (see page 4), for example, is a direct result of Emory's strategic plan for clinical care. It's still too early to say what effect this agreement will have on medical education or research at Emory, but we believe it will enable us to give community physicians (many of whom are alumni) easier access to Emory's services. And certainly the medical school stands to benefit in numerous ways from increased access to patients. As far as the research plan is concerned, we're taking bold steps in this arena as well. We've gotten approval from the Emory Board of Trustees to erect two new buildings, one devoted to basic biomedical research, which will provide the medical school with an additional 325,000 square feet of research space, and another which will be home to the Winship Cancer Center. The cancer center building will have 200,000 square feet, 40% of which will be devoted to research and 60% to clinical areas. In addition to buildings, we're putting resources into recruiting world-class research faculty. During the next seven years, our goal is to recruit between 70 and 90 scientists to Emory. Among the outstanding appointments we've already made is Robert Rich, an internationally known immunologist, formerly at Baylor, who joined Emory last September as executive associate dean for research (see page 10). He is a major player at the national science policy level, serving as an adviser to the NIH and Association of American Medical Colleges, with his own research focusing on the biology and genetics of T cell formation. We've also recruited several other senior scientists, including Michael Davis as Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, a world-renowned researcher on the startle reflex, formerly of Yale. David Martin joined us from Purdue as director of our transgenic mouse facility. The purchase of equipment is also on our list of priorities for improving our research capabilities. We recently bought an API "triple quad" mass spectrometer, a leading-edge instrument that greatly enhances the sensitivity and resolution with which research can detect and characterize peptides. One of only a few in the world, this spectrometer allows our researchers to detect and view proteins and gene products at the femtomole level. Of all our plans, the one most likely to be closest to your heart as an alumnus of this institution is that for teaching. Implementation of the teaching strategic plan will arguably be the school's most important accomplishment over the next decade. Stay tuned for some exciting steps that lay ahead, as we lay out this plan in the next issue of Emory Medicine. Thomas J. Lawley, MD

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