A year into his tenure as dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School, Dr. Brooks Jackson is working to revitalize a slipping institution.

With the governor expressing concern over the school's performance, Jackson is out to restore its days of research prominence, an era when the school was renowned for such breakthroughs as the first open-heart surgery and the vaccine for Lyme disease.

"We want to be really world-class," Jackson said. Having a world-class research and training program doesn't mean just prestige for the U, but also "new drugs, new vaccines and new medical devices that benefit all Minnesotans."

The new dean also wants to ensure the school can head off a looming shortage of physicians in various specialties and regions of the state. And he wants to nurture a sometimes difficult relationship with Fairview Health Services, which owns the university's hospital.

The slide in the school's reputation began arguably in the mid-1990s, around the time the National Institutes of Health sanctioned it following a series of financial scandals. Fiscal problems prompted the U to sell its teaching hospital to Fairview in 1997.

"Those same financial woes made it difficult to retain faculty," Jackson said. The NIH sanctions "required a lot of resources, and made it much more difficult for faculty to obtain grants, causing a number to leave and again making it more difficult to recruit."

The university slipped from the top 15 in the 1980s to 30th last year out of 144 schools in NIH grant funding, a ranking that many faculty and students consider a sign of excellence.

Meanwhile, the school suffered from a "malaise," according to a 2012 external review. Faculty, the report said, complained the U had "no consensus regarding [its] goals and aspirations."

The decline caught the attention of Gov. Mark Dayton, who last year established a committee, which includes Jackson, to find ways to improve the school.

The new dean says he aims to have the U in the top 20 of the NIH ranking within five years and the top 15 within a decade.

Read this article:

Can new dean heal U medical school?

Photo by: Heather Coit/The News-Gazette

Michael Kuhlenschmidt, a UI medical school student, sits outside the UI Medical Sciences Building in Urbana on Tuesday, March 17, 2015. Kuhlenschmidt will join other future doctors in finding out his residency this Friday.

URBANA First came a bachelor's degree in engineering. Then medical school.

Now Champaign-Urbana native Michael Kuhlenschmidt is waiting, with thousands of other U.S. medical school seniors set to graduate this spring, to find out about their next big career step where they'll go for their residencies.

The news will be delivered via personal letters at the same time Friday for all medical residency program applicants across the country which will be at 11 a.m. for those in the Central Time Zone.

Last year, more than 40,000 applicants competed for 29,000 residency positions in the U.S., and the match this year is expected to be larger, according to the National Resident Matching Program.

For the 29-year-old Kuhlenschmidt and his fellow students set to graduate from the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign, the envelopes will be delivered Friday morning in a ceremony at the Champaign Country Club.

At least a bit of the stress has been lifted for him and many others. Applicants were notified Monday whether they were selected for a match, though they still have to wait until Friday to find out where they'll be going.

"I did match, which is a good feeling," Kuhlenschmidt said.

Through the complicated system used, students rank their residency program choices and the residency programs rank their applicants, and all that information is run through a computerized mathematical algorithm, according to the match program.

Here is the original post:

Med school grads wait to find out where they'll go for residency