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Harvard Medical School dean will step down
(Photo by Graham Ramsay)
Dr. Joseph B. Martin, Dean of the Harvard University Faculty of Medicine, will step down in June.
By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff
Harvard Medical School Dean Dr. Joseph Martin will step down next June, ending a ten-year tenure during which he eased tensions among Harvard's fiercely competitive teaching hospitals and oversaw dramatic changes to the school's curriculum.
Martin, a 67-year-old neurologist, said he will take a sabbatical for one year, and increase his efforts working with the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration & Repair, a group that is trying to jump-start the development of new drugs for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders.
"It's been a wonderful time, and ten years is a good go at a job," Martin said in an interview.
Martin said that interim Harvard University president Derek Bok will convene a faculty committee to recommend a replacement for Martin. But, Martin said, Bok has agreed to leave the final decision for the next permanent president of Harvard, partly because the medical school is the largest of Harvard's schools in terms of the number of faculty and grant money.
Martin said one of the accomplishments he's most proud of is "knitting together the Harvard community, the hospitals and the faculty who work there. When I first came there was a lot of unpleasant competition among the hospitals. This led to even poaching of faculty," he said. Martin established an advisory group to review all lateral moves and developed guidelines for when doctors and researchers should take jobs at competing Harvard hospitals. "Just having to come before us (the advisory group) essentially shut down the activity that was so painful to watch."
One problem he hasn't been able to solve during his tenure, he said, is a dearth of high-level African-American and Hispanic faculty members.
"I am still very troubled by the diversity gap we have in the medical school," he said "There is an underrepresentation of minority faculty at the higher levels of appointments. It's a complicated problem and we've worked hard on it. But we haven't done as well as we would have hoped."
