The legacy of leaders at Iowa

Transitions are all around us right now. Commencement exercises this evening for our medical school graduates is obviously the most immediate marker of coming change. We are as proud as ever of Dr. Manish Suneja, our Vice Chair for Education and Residency Program Director, who will deliver their commencement address, the overwhelming favorite of these soon-to-be-official physicians to speak. Congratulations, doctors! We are excited that so many of you will be joining us at the end of June to begin your intern year as internal medicine residents. One of them is Dr. Greta Becker, an incoming member of our Physician-Scientist Training Pathway. She also just won one of our William R. Wilson awards, an august recognition of future promise. We are excited to have all our graduates from across the country join us soon.

The other big news this week are the back-to-back announcements of Iowa Women’s Basketball Head Coach Lisa Bluder retiring and her handing over the reins to Associate Coach Jan Jensen. I would encourage you to pay attention to Coach Bluder’s comments about how seamless this transition will be. The story she tells is not just limited to sports, but one about how we all strive to mentor at Iowa, with one eye on helping someone build skills to solve short-term problems, and with the other eye toward the future. We want what we build to last, flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances, but rooted in tradition and dedication to the same standards of excellence we learned ourselves. This is how we define leadership at Iowa.

Coach Bluder has clearly been a leader whose legacy will be visible for many years to come. But there are examples throughout our department of similarly outstanding leaders as well. I mentioned Dr. Jack Stapleton’s win of this year’s Regents Award for Faculty Excellence in my last post, but I think it is worth revisiting in this context of legacy and leadership. Many may recall the mid-1980s when HIV and AIDS was not only a new and mysterious virus but primarily affecting a minoritized population, so an added burden of stigma from some layered on top of fear. In the face of this, Dr. Stapleton could have done the bare minimum and waited for someone else to step in. Instead, he established the first HIV/AIDS clinic in the state here, treating a vulnerable population with compassion and training others to do the same, both directly and indirectly by example.

We are not always called to step up as dramatically in the face of inequities, but opportunities to lead in clinical care are around us all the time. Two recent examples of innovations can be found in how we address cancer. The lung cancer screening program started as an idea almost seven years ago and today boasts follow-up rates more than double the national average. It continues to be an impressive model for engaging multiple disciplines, including our digital infrastructure, to build on success. Congratulations to Drs. Kim Baker El-Abiad and Sara Kraus for their vision and dogged pursuit of what evidence shows will save more lives. I also appreciate the leadership that Dr. Soorih Shaikh has shown in the Acute and Diagnostic Care clinics in the Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center. These clinics have successfully found ways to ensure that people either with cancer or a suspicion of it get the responses they need when speed and efficiency mean a mountain of difference in the path their disease may take.

In all of the above cases, an individual or a couple people may have had an idea, but it took a team and a culture to clear the path to implementation. Sometimes these processes happen on the fly or informally. Honestly, that can be a frustrating path initially when one encounters inertia in others. But programs like the Executive Leadership Academy in UI Health Care are meant to help individuals identify the roadblocks and how best to accommodate them, how to overcome inertia. This is why I was so pleased to see five of our department’s members, the most ever, graduate from the last year-long class. Their projects took aim at a diverse set of problems and I am excited to see what each of them do next. Congratulations to these graduates, too!