Holiday wishes

I will keep this one brief. I hope this end-of-year message finds you wrapped in warm blankets and the warmth of loved ones around you. At every holiday, I think about our patients, the people who had no choice in spending this time away from comfort or from certainty. Facing a health crisis at any […]

Quarterly Department Update – December 2025

The following is an abridged and edited transcript of the December 11, 2025, Quarterly Department Update. To view the entire presentation, click here (hawkid login required). I want to start by saying thanks for attending. Looking forward to a good conversation and happy holidays for those who celebrate. I hope that whether you do or […]

Our fellow fellows

Earlier this week a host of physicians across the country learned where the next phase of their career would take them. The fellowship match day might be slightly less headline-grabbing than the matching of MD graduates with residency programs, but for our department and our residency program, it is just as important. We are proud […]

Gifts that give back

Although the turkey, rolls, stuffing, and potatoes form the core of most people’s Thanksgiving meals, many families make changes to those staples or skip them altogether. I am always interested in how families adapt and make holidays their own. Maybe it is some secret ingredient your grandma added to the yams or a card game […]

Iowa women leading in medicine

For nearly 150 years, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has helped organize and standardize medical education in this country. That longevity gives them a unique vantage point to track and report on trends. One trend they have been watching is the growing number of women becoming physicians. Just 6 years ago the number […]

Quarterly Department Update – October 2025

The following is an abridged and edited transcript of the October 16, 2025, Quarterly Department Update. To view the entire presentation, click here (hawkid login required). We’ve done a number of these over the last year and so we’re going to talk a little bit about where we’ve been for the last year because my […]

Community connections

This week was the department’s 59th annual Internal Medicine Research Day. This tradition gives us a chance to celebrate the incredibly broad spectrum of activity conducted by members of this department. Like all our missions, research is inextricably linked with education and clinical care, as it should be, but the immediacy we find in working […]

Anniversaries and perspective

The days may be long, but a year can go quickly. Next week will mark exactly one year since I had the honor to become chair & DEO of Internal Medicine at Iowa. In my first weeks I was often asked whether my expectations matched my experience. It wasn’t just curiosity, but a genuine expression […]

Rivals and friends

Stop the presses! It is not often that dramatic events require a last-minute addition to a Friday post, but here we are. Yesterday’s news that Dr. Michael Welsh will receive the 2025 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award certainly qualifies. For 80 years the Lasker Foundation has recognized discoveries in basic and clinical science that fundamentally change […]

Recruits grow tall

Although our new trainees are almost two months into their time with us, it is the first week of classes for most of the rest of the state. For our K-12 students, for our undergraduate and graduate students across the state, this week is an exciting time. Sidewalks around campus are filled back up and […]