From the Chair

“Impact” is an often used and loaded word in academia. We seek to make discoveries that have an impact on our field of research, or on new treatments for human disease. The most important score given by reviewers on our research grants is the “Overall Impact.” A faculty’s H-index is the “cumulative impact” of their scholarly work. The journals that we publish in are rated by their “Impact Factor”. Our educational impact is sometimes quantified by degrees awarded, test scores, or future school admission. Despite constantly striving toward high impact work, how to measure impact is one of the most debated and controversial things we try to determine as researchers and educators. The challenge in measuring impact is that 1) the impact often happens in the future, which is relatively unpredictable, and 2) the impact depends on which of the many outcomes that you prioritize and put more weight on.

As you will see in this year’s newsletter, our department continues to strive to impact the world through our tripartite mission of research, education, and service. There are many accomplishments to be proud of. We can count the number of grants, show some of the top journals we published in, highlight the fellowships won, celebrate the degrees awarded and show our national rankings. These are meaningful measures of impact. However, if you ask me, our greatest measure of impact is measured by future lives impacted. Our mission in research is to impact future lives by generating new knowledge and make discoveries about how the body works, so that future lives can be healthier. Our mission in education and training seeks to impact lives of students and scholars drawn from all over the world, who come here for training so that their future lives have greater opportunities in their careers in science and health care. Our mission in service seeks to impact lives by making careers in science more accessible to all through programs like our new BioMedFocus program and HBCU-DAP. Because our collective missions as are so intertwined in impacting lives, that is why the loss of an alumni colleague such as Dr. Andrew Schwartz to cancer is so devastating for MIP and for me personally. His future was bright, his own potential for impacting lives himself was unfolding before him, and the future life impact that we predicted and hoped for many years ago when he was a student, was cut short by something so incredibly unpredictable.

The impact of what we do in MIP is strengthened and expanded by our engaged community of faculty, postdocs, students, staff, and alumni. I want to give a special shout out to our many alumni who have engaged with us over the last year and returned to campus to give a career talk or spoken with our current students and postdocs and continued to impact lives of scientists in our community. Our alumni are also some of our most generous donors, and I want to send a hearty thank you to all our past donors that have enabled the many programs and initiatives that increase the impact of what we do. If you are looking for an opportunity to contribute to the ongoing research and programs in our department, please see the last page for a list of some of our philanthropic funds that our supporting programs in MIP. This year I want to particularly want to highlight two brand new funds, the Andrew J. Schwartz Innovative Translational Research Award Fund and the BioMedFocus Program Fund. The fund in Andrew’s honor will help us continue the impact of Andrew’s life as a translational scientist in perpetuity through a new graduate student award in our department. The BioMedFocus program will impact future lives by providing research opportunities to local underrepresented high school students from the Ypsilanti area and encourage them to impact future lives through pursuing careers in STEM.

With warmest regards,

Daniel Michele, PhD Professor and Interim Department Chair