Hanover
The department is being created as part of a restructuring plan to address persistent deficits at the medical school. Led by Rand Swenson, it will be housed in existing space at Geisel.
The department will include a core group of faculty members whose primary focus is teaching and supporting Geisel’s undergraduate medical students, Swenson said in a news release from the medical school.
The exact size and composition of the faculty is still being determined, college spokesman Justin Anderson said in an email.
The release said the new centralized formation will be beneficial for students and faculty.
Having a dedicated group of faculty members who will be communicating regularly “will give us an unparalleled level of consistency and continuity,” Swenson said. “That will mean medical students should see a lot more of their faculty and be able to develop strong relationships with them. This should help us to create a better support system for them, especially during the difficult period of transition to medical school.”
While courses are currently run by individual departments, the new department “will allow us to deliver a consistent, integrated medical education and develop the faculty who will lead the continuous improvement of our curriculum,” said Greg Ogrinc, Geisel’s senior associate dean of medical education.
The faculty, selected from throughout the school, have “shown excellence in medical education,” according to the release.
They will have the same opportunities for professional advancement as members of other departments, and be expected to meet “comparable criteria, in terms of excellence in teaching, recognition by peers on a regional to national/international level, and scholarship,” said Leslie Henderson, Geisel’s senior associate dean for faculty affairs.
“However, they will also have the opportunity for that research and scholarship to be not only in specific areas of biomedical endeavor, but also in biomedical pedagogy or even at the intersections of the two,” she said.
— Staff report