Dear Colleague: 

What a great Match Day!

We gathered last Friday morning to celebrate as our Class of 2025 medical students discovered the next destination on their professional journeys.

Congratulations to our medical students and thank you to all our faculty and staff who contributed to their education and provided support during their time in our school. We enjoyed a morning of this momentous occasion with their mentors, family, and friends, who gathered in the Anschutz Health Sciences Building for the festivities.

Match Day is a time to reflect on accomplishments and to channel energy toward new goals and challenges. For some, the next assignment is exactly what they wanted, and for others, the direction is a curve. We are confident that wherever the Class of 2025 goes, they are going to make a positive difference and will make so many lives better.

I had the great privilege of addressing the class before they opened their envelopes. We are excited to see what these talented students do next, and we take great pride that they are forever part of our community. They always have a home here at CU. Our school communications teams has posted coverage of the events in our newsroom and profiles of members of the class on the Class of 2025 Match Day Celebration webpage.

In addition to celebrating Match Day with our Class of 2025, I am pleased to share good news for the interns coming to CU from all over the country. The Office of Graduate Medical Education, through the work and with the support of Shanta Zimmer, MD, Senior Associate Dean for Education and Geoff Connors, MD, Associate Dean for Graduate Medical Education, has announced new stipends that represent an increase of more than 20% over the last two years. We will also provide a new one-time, off-cycle paycheck for new interns starting this summer to alleviate financial hardship related to moving and relocation expenses. We are eager to welcome them to our programs this summer, and I look forward to working with you in our hospitals and clinics.

Senator Hickenlooper Visit
Our campus hosted U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper last week for a roundtable discussion about the importance of scientific research and the threats caused by the disruptions at federal health agencies. Our colleagues presented a tour-de-force of the importance of scientific breakthroughs and outlined concerns about the negative impacts caused by spending cuts at NIH.

Judy Regensteiner, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Director of the Ludeman Family Center for Women’s Health Research told Sen. Hickenlooper that she is worried the grant that funds her work could disappear. “It’s the uncertainty that’s so hard right now,” she said. “It’s painful to me, and especially to the early-career scientists” funded by the grant.

Sheera Rosenbaum, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology, told a Colorado Public Radio reporter covering the event that possible cuts to NIH funding are forcing her to think about the impact to her career choices.

Chancellor Don Elliman pointed out that research funding supports roughly $1.6 billion in economic activity in Colorado annually and 40,000 jobs. 

We are grateful for the opportunity to showcase our campus and our vital scientific research for Sen. Hickenlooper. We appreciate his support and advocacy.

Sen. Hickenlooper’s visit coincided with news last week that NIH Advisory Council meetings are expected to resume soon. Announcements posted to the Federal Register on March 18 included recently rescheduled review council meetings for several NIH Advisory Councils including: NCI, NHLBI, NCATS, NIMH, NIDA , NIAAA, NCCIH, NEI, and NIDCR. The meetings are to review new grant applications. All meetings will be virtual and begin on April 1. For more information on which applications will be reviewed, you can view each announcement posted to the NIH section of the Federal Register.

For additional updates on federal activities, check the Federal Transitions Updates webpage posted by the CU Office of Government Relations. The Anschutz Medical Campus also has an updates webpage.

Effective Scientific Communications
Even as we work to help elected officials to be champions for our work, there are other ways we can be better advocates, which was the focus of a forum, “Combating Misinformation through Effective Scientific Communications,” presented last week by the Department of Medicine.

Aimee Pugh Bernard, PhD, Assistant Professor of Immunology and Microbiology and a leader of the “Communicating Your Science to the Public” workshop series at the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, recommended a respectful approach. She called it “connection, not correction.”

An article in the Department of Medicine newsroom offers a summary of the event, including the important takeaway that it’s important to back up the data we love to use with individual stories that allow listeners to make that connection.

Mark Earnest, MD, PhD, Head of the Division of General Internal Medicine, gave a vivid example: Shep Glazer, the then-president of the American Association of Kidney Patients, testifying before a U.S. House committee while attached to a dialysis machine that had been brought into the hearing. His compelling testimony helped convince Congress in 1972 to allow Medicare to cover kidney dialysis for millions of American.

“An individual story breaks through the noise,” said Mark Earnest, MD, PhD, Head of the Division of General Internal Medicine. “If we’re good at telling stories and putting our data into those stories, those things will be ‘meme-able’ – they’ll find their places in social media.”

Recent Publications
Joshua T.B. Williams, MD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, and Florence Wu, MD, Clinical Instructor of Pediatrics, who are both members Ambulatory Care Services, Department of Pediatrics at Denver Health, are co-authors of a Viewpoint article, “Race-Based Guidance and Nirsevimab,” published March 17 by JAMA Pediatrics.

Mark Earnest, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine and Head of the Division of General Internal Medicine, is corresponding author of an Ideas and Opinions article, “Racing to Nowhere – Primary Care Productivity Benchmarks and the Red Queen’s Race,” published March 18 by Annals of Internal Medicine. Dr. Earnest describes how the standard measure of physician productivity – the Relative Value Unit – should be updated for primary care to a new model that is risk-adjusted and accounts for variables like panel size, patient contact time, total work hours, team-based goals, and various measures of quality and population health outcomes.

Fan Zhang, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, is corresponding author of a research article, “Deep immunophenotyping reveals circulating activated lymphocytes in individuals at risk for rheumatoid arthritis,” published March 17 by The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Several co-authors are from our campus. An article in the Department of Medicine newsroom describes this study.

Theresa R. Grover, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, is a co-author of an article published March 15 by the Journal of Perinatology that reports on patent ductus arteriosus therapy trends across the Children’s Hospital Neonatal Consortium.

Podcast News
Stuff You Should Know, a podcast consistently in the Top 10 rankings on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, recently featured a paper written by five members of our Department of Psychiatry, including corresponding author Scott M. Thompson, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry, and C. Neill Epperson, MD, Chair of Psychiatry. The  paper, “Beyond the serotonin deficit hypothesis: communicating a neuroplasticity framework of major depressive disorder,” was published in Molecular Psychiatry in May 2024. The reference is around the 12-minute mark of the podcast.

I was the guest on Surgeons at The Table, a podcast by Shahyan Bakhtiyar, MD, MBE, General Surgery Resident. The episode, which posted on March 16, was an enjoyable conversation about curiosity and problem-solving, philosophy of leadership, and enjoying the journey.

Faculty Updates
David Schwartz, MD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Immunology, and Lior Atia, PhD, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, have been awarded support from the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Israel Young Academy to strengthen international academic ties and enrich Israel’s research community.  Dr. Schwartz plans to use the award for an extended visit to Israel between March 2025 and April 2026 with a couple of members of his lab. During that time, they will pursue and explore collaborative scientific programs with investigators at Ben Gurion University, the Weitzmann Institute, Tel Aviv University, the Technion, and several biotech programs.

Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine and Director of the CU Center for Bioethics and Humanities, has been named to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s  ad hoc committee to recommend guidance on clinical actions related to monitoring the health of those potentially exposed to jet fuel (JP-5) when it leaked from the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility into the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam water distribution system in November 2021. An estimated 93,000 individuals, including military and civilian workers and their families, were potentially exposed to contaminated drinking water through their residence or work due to the fuel release.

Child Health Clinicians Needed for AI Pilot
We are excited to announce the extension of our pilot program with Abridge to pediatric faculty at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Abridge provides technology that transforms patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes in real time and integrates into electronic medical records. We believe this technology could significantly reduce clerical workload while enhancing your clinic experience. We are seeking volunteers to participate. To be eligible, you must be a physician, APP, or licensed mental health professional seeing patients in an outpatient clinic at least three half-days per week and own/use an iPhone device. Residents and fellows are not eligible for the pilot phase of the project. This is an important step in our efforts to serve patients while making our work more efficient. For more information and to share your interest in participating, please submit this form by April 1.

Help Wanted
The Office of Medical Education in the School of Medicine is seeking candidates for the Assistant Dean for Medical Education, Post-Clerkship Curriculum position. This role involves working with the Associate Dean for Medical Education, Post-Clerkship, and other faculty and curriculum leaders to administer, improve, assess, and innovate the year 3 and 4 post-clerkship curriculum. The curriculum includes Advanced Science Courses, Trails leadership training, Acting Internships, Electives, and the Transition to Residency Basecamp. Candidates for this 0.3-0.4 FTE position must have a professional-level degree (MD, DO, PhD, etc.) and be eligible for an appointment in the CU School of Medicine. Details and application instructions are posted here: Assistant Dean of Medical Education, Post-Clerkship Curriculum. Application review begins on April 11. For questions, please contact Jessica.ackels@cuanschutz.edu.

History Lesson
The Strauss Health Sciences Library has created a digital exhibit about Charles Meader, MD, who served as Dean of the School of Medicine from 1916-1925. The exhibit is a fascinating stroll through a key moment in the history of our school: The construction of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Campus at 9^th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard.

Dr. Meader wrote legislation that paved the way for the construction of the campus. The documents included in the exhibit were donated to the School of Medicine in 2016 and have been scanned and are available in the CU Anschutz Digital Collections. The exhibit offers links to view Dr. Meader’s handwritten versions of the bills that established the original University Hospital and the Colorado Psychopathic Hospital. The exhibit also includes studies, reports from other states, and a pamphlet, “A Few Problems of Hospital Organization,” copyright 1912, that Dr. Meader may have used to write the bills.

According to the exhibit, the University of Colorado Health Sciences Campus was dedicated on Jan. 23, 1925. Dr. Meader resigned as Dean in 1925, satisfied that his duty to the University of Colorado had been fulfilled. He died at the age of 80 in 1965.

Have a good week,

John H. Sampson, MD, PhD, MBA
Richard D. Krugman Endowed Chair
Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and
Dean, University of Colorado School of Medicine