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September-October 2007
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Dr. DeanJeffrey S. Flier, M.D., becomes dean of Harvard Medical School (HMS) on September 1; President Drew Faust announced his appointment on July 11. Flier, the Reisman professor of medicine, is an expert on the molecular mechanisms involved in the production and use of insulin (fundamental to understanding diabetes) and on obesity. He succeeds neuroscientist Joseph B. Martin, who stepped down at the end of the academic year, on June 30, after a decade of service (see “Medicine Man,” January-February, page 64). In the interval, Barbara J. McNeil, M.D. ’66, Ph.D. ’72, Watts professor of health care policy and professor of radiology, served as acting dean at Faust’s request; a faculty member since 1983, McNeil founded and chairs the department of health care policy. 
Photograph by Jon Chase / Harvard News Office Jeffrey S. Flier Faust called Flier, who joined the Harvard Medical community in 1978 (after earning his M.D. from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City in 1972, training in internal medicine at Mount Sinai, and serving as a clinical associate at the National Institutes of Health for four years), “an outstanding academic leader, scientist, and medical educator.” She underscored the intersection of his “collaborative instincts” and his combination of “exceptional intelligence with an admirable ability to bring people together around issues of academic and institutional importance.” And Faust also cited Flier’s atempts to “strengthen cooperative efforts within the broader Harvard medical community [and] to pursue important new opportunities for fruitful connections with other parts of the University.” Even more than the leaders of other Harvard schools, the HMS dean requires that blend of experience and attributes. The school educates future physicians and biomedical researchers; its faculty members do science of fundamental importance; and in pursuit of those missions, it is tightly interwoven with the affiliated hospitals, which of course face not only the financial challenges common throughout the healthcare system, but also the costs to academic medical centers of managing both clinical training and large applied research enterprises. Contemporary research raises the stakes still further, as HMS and hospital-based faculty members apply new tools—genomics, advanced imaging technologies, systems biology (the costs of which exceed what any individual laboratory can support)—and as multiple disciplines are brought to bear, for example, on the range of cancers. The multiyear leveling-off of the budget of the National Institutes of Health (the principal source of research funds) exacerbates competition for support just as the costs of biomedical science have risen significantly. 1 | 2 | continued >  
 
 
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