Dean of Harvard Medical School to leave post next year

The dean of Harvard Medical School will step down next June, ending a 10-year tenure during which he eased tensions among Harvard's fiercely competitive teaching hospitals and oversaw dramatic changes to the school's curriculum.

Dr. Joseph B. Martin , a 67-year-old neurologist, said he will take a sabbatical for one year and then increase his work with the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration & Repair, a group that is trying to develop new drugs for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders.

``It's been a wonderful time, and 10 years is a good go at a job," Martin said in an interview yesterday.

Interim Harvard University president Derek Bok will convene a faculty committee to recommend potential replacements. 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 university's largest division -- with 10,000 faculty members and $1.2 billion in National Institutes of Health research grants awarded to the medical school and its affiliated hospitals.

Martin said one of the accomplishments he's proudest 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 of doctors and researchers to competing Harvard hospitals. ``Just having to come before us [the advisory group] essentially shut down the activity that was so painful to watch," he said.

Paul Levy, chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a research partnership involving five hospitals, the medical school and the Harvard School of Public Health, would not have come together without Martin's leadership.

``He created a forum for the CEOs of the hospitals to get together on a regular basis to collaborate," said Levy, who from 1998 to 2002 was the medical school's executive dean for administration. ``The cancer center is the first time in the history of the Harvard hospitals that we've sent a single proposal to the NIH [National Institutes of Health ] for a joint program in cancer research."

Martin also initiated the most dramatic changes to the school's curriculum in 20 years. The process had a bumpy beginning in 2003 when some faculty members thought the physician Martin hired to direct the process was imposing radical reforms . But that physician departed, and ultimately many on the faculty embraced the endeavor, which began this year.

The biggest shift will occur in the third year of medical school; currently students travel from hospital to hospital for one- to three-month stints, a practice that gives them few opportunities to get to know patients or senior doctors well . Under the new curriculum, students will stay in one hospital and follow some patients the entire year. The medical school has 1,587 students.

There have been tensions during Martin's tenure, particularly over his dissatisfaction that physicians aren't willing to spend more time teaching medical students. Primary-care doctors are especially under pressure to see more patients to maintain their incomes, while teaching pays relatively little. But Martin has been working with the hospitals to create a fund to make teaching more lucrative.

Martin said that one problem he regrets being unable to solve during his tenure is the dearth of high-level African-American and Hispanic faculty members. The number of faculty members from underrepresented minority groups, which also includes American Indians, climbed to 467 this year from 264 in 1995. The number of full professors, however, grew to 15 from 8, according to Dr. Joan Reede, dean for diversity and community. The total number of full professors is about 830.

``It's a complicated problem and we've worked hard on it," Martin said. ``But we haven't done as well as we would have hoped."