The following is an abridged and edited transcript of yesterday’s Quarterly Department Update. To view the entire presentation, click here (hawkid login required).
Hi, everyone. I thought we would have an informal chat. I have a couple of slides and then we’ll do what we always do, which is sort of open it up to question and answer. I might embarrass a few people, so be ready for that. I’m going to give this as a quarterly department update and we’ll talk at the end about how I’d like to see things moving forward. And I really appreciate people coming. I know people are busy. I know it’s the holidays, but I do think increasing engagement is one of the things we’re looking for. So what I’m going to talk about today is a little bit about where we’ve been–I’ve been here 80 days–the current opportunities as well as challenges, where we’re going, both short- and long-term goals, and where we’re going to need your help, your engagement, and your input.
So we’ve done a lot of town halls and listening sessions. I always take selfies, so I might take one today as well. I think this was maybe the first or second one. You can see there’s better turnout today. Again, I think it’s offering lunch. We did three town halls on different days, morning, noon, and evening. I had a lot of good questions, a lot of similar questions, which I thought was helpful. And then I also went to all nine divisions and met with people.
I had some divisions where I had so many questions and others where there was sort of less engagement. What I would say is I appreciate divisions that are asking tough questions, good questions, any questions. And I again saw some similar themes, some very unique themes, and I appreciated that we’ve had lots of hallway chats. I always welcome input. As I say, I’m always happy to hear. Listen, if I don’t hear from you, I won’t know what all the challenges and opportunities are.
You guys already know I like to take selfies. This is a selfie with Paul Rothman, this sort of a legend around here. And then a couple other photos we took including with the admin team. We had a couple of social events. We thanked Isabella Grumbach for her almost three years of interim leadership. That is a thankless job, I’ll say, and it’s a labor of love for the organization and the institution. And I’m really grateful to Isabella for her work. We also had a couple of get togethers. I had assistant professors in the tenure track for research to my house with their families for a mid-afternoon time.
It was nice. And you see yourselves up here, raise your hands. Yeah, very good. I do believe, for me at least, and I do think for building community, for rebuilding culture, trust, engagement, we’d like to have more of these. And again, we’ll get out of it what we put in.
There’s been a ton of community efforts. This was the Toys for Tots. Pulmonary, if you’re in Pulmonary, raise your hand. You guys rocked it, man. It’s awesome. You guys won, right? The Toys for Tots, most submissions.
And then I wanted to recognize a lot of recent grant wins by junior faculty and we’ve highlighted Kale’s success in Pulmonary, Sneha in Hem-Onc, Hannah in Immunology and Paari in Cardiology. So congratulations to them. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of other folks having great successes and kudos to all of you, but I just wanted to recognize a couple.
This is the data from our residents over the last five years. Places where they’ve gone for fellowship training, a great 57% are staying at Iowa. In 2025, 8 of the 14 are staying here, which is awesome. This shows you all the great places that people go. I’m going to point out Ohio State University and Stanford are the two places I know about obviously, but it’s great to see that residents trained here are moving on to take what they’ve learned here both intellectually, emotionally, to other organizations. And so kudos to all of you.
I love the Honor Roll that we have in the hallway. I don’t know about you guys. So listen, life can be busy, life can be tough. There’s stresses personally, professionally, emotionally, psychologically, culturally, religiously. There’s just stresses in life. I’m always looking for something that makes me feel full here and that puts a smile on my face. So I love seeing the honor roll when I walk by. I always notice people’s names up there. 133 individual department members have been nominated since December of 2023. I think it’s a great initiative and 27 individuals have been nominated more than once. So kudos to all of you, but especially kudos to those who are getting recognized.
When you see that email come through, take two minutes and nominate somebody who touched your day or week. People are doing the right thing and are working hard to do the right thing. But to hear it is really nice. It really makes a difference. It makes a difference to me. I think it probably makes a difference to you. The other thing I’ve noticed is as I walked through the hospital, there was a leadership board. I’m always stopping and taking photos because I see a lot of your names on these things and I think it’s wonderful. So the Department of Medicine has a great impact across the health system.
A challenge that I’ve noticed is mentoring of junior and mid-level faculty, and actually all faculty. I think everyone needs mentoring. I still need mentoring. I still have people I reach out to on a regular basis for advice, counsel, guidance, but especially junior, mid-level faculty need it more.
And so mentoring and development is a priority and ongoing need. I’m concerned about what I see that despite individuals who are working really hard at this, that we don’t have a system. The junior faculty, the trainees are the next generation. We’re a farm country. You don’t just plant the seed, if you don’t water the seed, it’s not going to grow. So we can bring people in that’s planting the seed, but if we’re not watering it, if we’re not tilling the soil, if we’re not watching it on a regular basis, it’s not going to grow. And I think that’s a real concern for me. So I’m evaluating the departmental mentoring process, including any formal programs and want to identify pathways to support faculty. I think this needs to be in addition to the research mentoring that’s happening in addition to the promotions and process that’s underway.
And so I think we really need an intentional focus on faculty development. We have a Vice Chair for Faculty Development that we’re going to ask for people to apply for.
So in terms of building the team, so there’s books, right, that you read about leadership first 90 days, first hundred days, et cetera, et cetera. I started reading them and then I got a little bored. But number 1, 2, 3, and 4 is building the team, building the team, building the team. So that’s what we’ve been working on really hard.
So we’re going to have two vice chair opportunities. As I mentioned, all of what I’m mentioning today will also be sent out in an email, but feel free to please scan it right now. I see you doing it. The Vice Chair for Quality and Safety will focus on departmental performance in partnership with hospital leadership on initiatives and projects with the goal to result in academic productivity. What I think I’m hoping is that the first two, three years will really be partnering with the health system. In the long run, and what I’ve seen happen at other places, is quality efforts are great fodder for clinical, operational, and translational research. They’re great fodder for implementation science. They’re great fodder for our clinicians and others.
And then the Vice Chair for Faculty Development will partner with the division directors and Vice Chair for Faculty Advancement to mentor and support faculty towards advancement goals. We’re making a request for applications because we are doing this to show people that if you have an interest, raise your hand. If you have an interest, get mentorship. If you don’t have an interest in these two, recognize that other opportunities will arise. We have great people here and it wouldn’t have been hard for me to identify people for these roles, but what I’m really doing is encouraging all of you to engage in this.
Encourage your colleagues to apply or apply yourself. I think that’d be great to apply. Just have to send us a CV and names of two references. We don’t need reference letters. And a letter of interest, up to a page, couple paragraphs, what have you done that makes you suited for this, and then send it to us by the end of January. I will also encourage the junior faculty, and especially the women, we tend to sort of think we have to be ready fully for a job before we apply. And that’s kind of not true. You have to have interest, motivation, you have to have some experience. But if we all waited, at least this is my perspective, and I might be wrong and people can disagree, but if you wait until you’re completely ready, that you can only apply to be that job if you’ve done it a million times. So I want us to think about elevating ourselves, elevating our colleagues, show that you’ve done something in that realm, and then apply when you think you may be interested. And then if you aren’t picked this time, that’s great. That’s okay. It’s okay to put up your hand and say, me. I think that’s really important, and I really would encourage people to do that.
And then we have a couple of leadership announcements. I think everybody knows that we’ve had an interim CDA in Grant Worthington, and we’re really grateful for your service. We have an ongoing search for permanent CDA. The interviews concluded two days ago, so I hope to make an announcement very soon. And I think having the permanent CDA in conjunction with Kristin, who’s our associate CDA, is going to be a big part of building the leadership team. And then we have elevated Dr. Kim Staffey to be Executive Vice Chair for Clinical Programs. I think you all know Kim, she’s been a fantastic leader in the department as well in her division. And having her be the executive vice chair I think is going to help us take a lot of initiatives that we need to do department-wide and health system-wide to the next level. So congratulations, Kim.
And then I have one other announcement. So I think you know that we have currently a couple of interim division directors and I’m really excited and proud to announce that Dr. Ben Davis is going to be the permanent division director for the Division of Immunology. So congratulations. I announced it to his division yesterday and I said, I’m bringing you a Christmas gift. So I said I’d bring a bow and I have this, can I throw it? My arm is really bad, but I want you to put the bow on, but then open this. Congratulations. Yeah, I think the division folks who were there yesterday were super excited by this. I’m super excited for you, Ben, and we look forward to working with you.
I’m committing to all of you that we’ll have a regular cadence of these all-staff faculty meetings. Every two or three months, we’ll bring updates as things happen. I want there to be. And the other thing I heard about in the faculty meetings and the others was there was less transparency than people wanted or just people don’t know what’s happening. I can say for you, for myself, I worked pretty hard the last 80 days. So we are working hard. It’s a big ship and it takes time to move the ship. It takes time to make changes and we’re really committed to it. And I think that’s why having Kim and Ben and the CDA will be really great. What I’d like is some commitment for you from you to attend, to engage and to give feedback as we move forward, especially when we do the review of division directors, associate chairs, the office, et cetera.
We had a nice celebration last Friday, thanks to those of you who are able to come. We celebrated at the Hawkeyes Hall of Fame. So we got to see Caitlin Clark’s records, scores, everything. I dunno if you can see this tall gentleman here. That’s my son. So both my kids actually happened to be here. That’s my dad right there talking to Denise. It was great. This was our core team, Song hung out with us till the end. We danced. He did not dance with us, but he did video us. Thanks to the team that organized it, it was nice to see people. For me, my heart becomes full when I see people talking, conversing, communicating, building a community, what we really need to do. So it was a nice event, thanks to those of you who organized it, thanks to those of you who came. Next year I’d like there to be more dancing. I’ll just say that. I had all my colleagues from Stanford sending me videos from their dance party and we got to beat it, and we didn’t even get close. We’ll try.
Okay, so I’m going to end with that. We have half an hour if people have questions, comments, concerns. Any and all things are allowed to be said. Any comments?
Audience member:
Welcome.
Upi:
Thank you. It’s 80 days in. Thank you. Questions. Remember what I always say at every meeting. If you don’t ask me questions, I’ll ask you. Alright, then I have a question. So is this helpful to see what we’ve been doing or not? Yes. No. Maybe raise your hand if it’s Yes, raise your hand if you think it’s not worth it. Alright, that’s a hundred.
Audience member:
Yes, I appreciate the focus on mentorship, but I think there has to be a distinction for people at our professional level between mentorship and sponsorship. And I think they’re both really important. Different people do each. People are ready for each. But I think in our most junior level that the focus needs to be on both paths.
Upi:
So what I didn’t, and thank you for that question, really important, and mentorship and sponsorship are in fact two different things. And some people are just born mentors or sponsors and some of us learn, what I didn’t clarify was, so these are vice chair positions, they’ll come with some protected time, they’ll come with some administrative differential. But I want that person to tell me what the Department of Medicine needs. And if the answer is that that person feels that there needs to be a mentoring program for clinical faculty versus research-based faculty, we’ll support it. Right? I’m not asking for one person in the department of 450 faculty to go out and fix it. What we’re saying is develop it. So I guess I apologize that I didn’t make that clear. So the idea here is this person is a lead, this person is going to get input, feedback, and then develop the program.
Is there an unlimited resource of people and money? No. But is there enough? Yes. And I’d really encourage that. And I think you can think about mentorship and sponsorship and even that for clinical faculty versus research-based faculty for junior versus mid-level and often mid-level needs sponsorship in a very different way to elevate to a national level. And then for example, I’m hoping I’m giving away my answers for the question, but I’m kind of hoping that people will develop a really robust system in the department to nominate people for awards and sponsor them for different events. We don’t have that right now. I think when I see stuff, I send it to the division directors, but there needs to be a really rigorous way and we have to promote ourselves. We have to promote our colleagues and that’s necessary.
Audience member:
Another equally important part of that is recruitment and retention.
Upi:
Recruitment and retention. Yep. So I think that we do have to have mentoring a little bit better in place before we recruit and retain. And that’s why I use the analogy of planting the seed and watering the seed and tilling the soil. So we haven’t done that right now. Every division director is working hard to recruit, recruit, recruit. But keeping our mid-level faculty, our junior faculty here, I think I’m working with Christie and the team about the promotions process. I do think we need a bunch of things that we need to work on. Yes.
Audience member:
[cross-talk followed by joking question about how long Dr. Kevin Glenn’s will serve as Interim Division Director of General Internal Medicine]
Upi:
Well, he just told me yesterday, 2030, I think we negotiated to 2028. I’m only teasing. Yes. There are plans in the works. As soon as I can share, I will. I share data as soon as I can. Actually, Ben’s is also in the process, but we wanted to share the good news. There’s a lot that happens behind the scenes to make something happen or not. I think that I worry that bringing forth things that are sort of half-baked will cause confusion and all those things. So yes, working hard on everything. Is there anything I’m not working hard on? I’m trying to think. What are we not working hard on? There’s a lot to do. We’re working hard. Yeah. No, I appreciate it. Other questions, comments?
Audience member:
There is a comment in the chat from someone on the subject of future faculty meetings: We should solicit from faculty, discussion topics for more focused conversations.
Upi:
So for these type of faculty meetings, yeah, that’s great. Great idea. Wonderful. And people can always email us, right? Email us today when you think about it. Yeah, I think these things should be discussed.
Audience member:
Next question, Upi. I think there’s a tendency for such meetings to become primarily clinical. And since our department does have research scientists to keep in mind. How do we keep them engaged in these?
Upi:
Yep. Yep. Agreed. So the question is about how to engage the broad group of faculty, not just clinical. I would like these meetings and maybe what we can do next time is just sort of think about the clinical, the education, the research mission and make sure that we have something for each. This time we were trying to just get as many things finalized and formalized so that we could share.
I do think the Vice Chair for mentoring is about mentoring clinical and research faculty. But yeah, agreed. Other questions? Anybody in the back? Oh, great, thanks.
Audience member:
And are there ways, do you think, or solutions that will come up where structurally we can change the way we do things and have it be more formalized?
Upi:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So I will admit in this that I’m learning a lot, and I’ll give an example. So running a division of 44 faculty versus 450 or whatever now. When the scale is bigger and bigger and bigger, ideas have to be formalized and vetted much more carefully. Because our department is only 450, but how many people are in the hospital? 10,000? Because if you think of a process that has to change that’s going to involve respiratory therapy, nurses, pharmacy lab, it has to. So I think it has to be this. I think the leaders, whoever they are, including people in this room come up with issues and things, I think we can give things, but then whatever is going to be implemented has to be able to be scaled and implemented wide.
So I will admit, even going from 44 faculty to this size, I’ve had to learn about how to scale. And then going to the health system… And then the other thing I’ll just say is in a health system you have traveling nurses and you have respiratory therapists that are brand new and you have doctors and you have trainees, and you have somebody, “I’ve done it this way for 35 years, don’t you tell me how to change it.” So that takes time and it has to be really vetted carefully. So I will say I am realizing how complex it is to make change at that scale. Yes.
I think we only have a few minutes. I’m going to end by doing what I do as a mom, which is preach a little. So I would encourage you, not preach, encourage you to get joy over the break, to spend time with family, friends. Thank you to those of you who are on service. I know not everybody gets time off and I, I’m going to tell you something I did, right? So I told you that I, at the last minute bought tickets to go see Taylor Swift flew across the country six flights. I was up for 22 hours to go see her. It was the most joyful three and a half, four hours of my life in a long time because it was just happiness.
I think sometimes in medicine we give and give and give and give and give. And as parents, we give and give and give and give and give. As division directors, we give and give and we forget that we have to fill up our bucket, right? We have to put our oxygen mask on before we can put the oxygen mask on the person next to us.
So put on your oxygen mask, go get joy, give joy, enjoy your holidays, and I’ll see you in the next year. And wait, don’t leave. I have to take a selfie.
