Boston Blog

A conversation with Harvard Medical School’s incoming dean, Jeffrey Flier

Under Flier’s leadership, research at Harvard Medical School could become more collaborative, interdisciplinary, and focused on real-world applications.

Corie Lok

Next week, Jeffrey Flier, currently the chief academic officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a leading obesity researcher, will begin his new job as dean of Harvard Medical School. Flier will have a lot on his plate during the first year in his new position, such as deciding what kind of presence medical school researchers will have on Harvard’s new Allston campus. He recently spoke with Nature Network Boston about his goals for the school.

Jeffrey Flier (Credit: Jon Chase/Harvard News Office)

You were on Harvard’s planning committee for science and engineering that recommended that Harvard undertake more interdisciplinary research across the whole university. How does that influence your vision for the medical school?

There is a strong interest within the university to try to increase science activities and planning across the whole university. Harvard is a complicated, multi-faceted university with many different schools and affiliated hospitals. The goal is to better understand how investments and planning can be done across some of these boundaries and stimulate the university to move in directions that many of us want to go in.

What are those directions? One would be to enhance the capacity to take discoveries of modern science and move them towards translation into the sphere of diagnosis, treatment and public health.

Also, many people have recognized that there are still barriers to getting people from difference disciplines together. Some of these barriers could be removed and investments made that would make this easier. That’s a goal across the whole university. One of my goals as dean of the medical school is to try to be a part of that.

What sorts of new programs or initiatives could we expect to see at the medical school that would meet these goals?

There are already a number of things in place that would be examples. Harvard created a new, cross-school department for regenerative biology. This is a department that is totally novel in that it crosses school boundaries. There are high expectations that one of its major goals will be to see that therapies based on such approaches actually get out there sooner rather than later. That’s quite different from what standard academic departments have been doing. So this is a model. Will there be more of these? We’ll see. Good chance that there will, but none of them are ordained to happen.

There are also discussions about, for example, new bioengineering initiatives at Harvard, which would involve the medical school and the school of engineering. These are the kinds of areas I would like to see developed: cross-school initiatives that would go into the domain of practical applications.

How do you hope to encourage medical school researchers to collaborate more with Harvard colleagues across the river? Many may not be accustomed to doing that.

I’m going to try to set the tone that indicates that collaboration and translation into practical applications are some of the goals, even of the most basic science departments. This will be more relevant for some departments than others, but this should be part of the awareness of our whole faculty. I would like to be in discussions about having more of the future investments of the medical school paying attention to these kinds of issues.

So, for example, hiring young faculty doing interdisciplinary work?

Yes.

What about the way graduate students are trained? Will there be more new programs there?

We are already beginning to see some new programs. There is one just starting that is designed to train PhD students interested in human biology. The program trains them, in some of their coursework and mentorship, in subjects related to human physiology and human disease. More programs like that should be developed, in my opinion.

What are some of the things that need to be decided on about the new Allston campus from the medical school’s perspective?

As a theoretical issue: should there be whole departments moved there? Should there be members of individual departments who are associated with a particular theme of research who will end up going there? Those are the kinds of questions, but they haven’t been answered yet.

Comments

Comments are closed.