Dear Colleagues, As we put the final touches on 2012, I wanted to take just a moment of your time to thank you for making it such a terrific year in so many ways. Through your individual and collective efforts: • We have broken ground on the beautiful J. Harold Harrison, M.D. Education Commons where we will educate the next generation of physicians. • We have experienced our second year in a row of unprecedented numbers of medical school applicants: a 28 percent total increase for the fall of 2012 and 2013. • We have a new academic leader, Dr. Paul Wallach, working with many of you to ensure those exceptional numbers translate into an unprecedentedly strong, diverse class. • Our recently retired academic leader, Dr. Ruth-Marie “Rhee” Fincher, won this year’s Nobel Prize for medical education: the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Abraham Flexner Award for Distinguished Service to Medical Education. Accolades for Rhee and for the education we provide here continue to pour in from around the country. This is a truly remarkable honor for MCG. • We open our fourth regional campus, the Northwest Georgia Clinical Campus based in Rome, in the coming months. (In fact, 40 percent of our clerkship education will be occurring outside of Augusta by next year.) • The Department of Biostatistics is now part of our medical school and we are recruiting for the Chair of the new Department of Radiation Oncology in collaboration with our GHSU Cancer Center colleagues. • We secured $95 million in extramural grants and contracts – up from $90 million last year – despite mega-tight funding budgets punctuated by an eight-year decline in the number of projects funded by the National Institutes of Health. • We have unprecedented student research interest that we are working to build. • We continue to recruit stellar new faculty from across the nation.
And the list goes on. I want you to know that I am privileged to work with each of you and proud of the knowledge, passion, skill and resilience that keeps you and your medical school moving ever forward in this complex, fast-paced world. Be assured that, because of you, even better days are to come. My very best to you and to your families this day and every day.
Peter F. Buckley, M.D. Dean Medical College of Georgia