Dr David Hill (Host): This is Expert Insights with the Carle Foundation Hospital, and I'm Dr. David Hill. Today we are talking with three guests, starting with Brian Aldridge, Bachelor of Veterinary Sciences, Master of Science, PhD, Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and Diplomat of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine. Also, he is serving as Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

Additionally, we have Dana L. Gillon, PhD, Master of Education, and current Director of Departmental Operations and Faculty at Carle. Finally, we have Dr. Robert Healy, Clinical Professor of Internal Medicine at Carle. Welcome all.

Brian Aldridge, PhD: Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Host: So, to be a little personally revealing, here I am mid-career in medicine and when I started, I thought I'm going to go out and practice and be in private practice. And I'm not that interested in academics. I had classmates who were, but honestly now I am finding myself incredibly drawn to academics. I have a couple of adjunct appointments. I teach students. I give lectures and I'm like, how cool would it be to actually become full-time faculty? So can you talk about anybody who's interested in getting a faculty appointment, maybe they're a medical student or a resident, or a fellow right now, or perhaps they're a mid-career physician like me, who's looking to make a change. What would that look like?

Robert Healy, MD: This is Bob Healy, and as a clinician myself, I know that I chose to come to Carle because there was a medical school, a different one back then, but a medical school associated with the hospital and clinics and a chance to teach cause I find that being around learners stimulates me and helps me to keep up to date. So I, I share your ideas about, maybe first kind of focusing on our own careers, but later on, wanting to really help out the next generation.

Dana Gillon, PhD: So we want to make sure that we provide that opportunity for folks to become a part of the faculty in Carle Illinois. And so usually a recommendation for an appointment is initiated by a department head. Dr. Healy is the department head for Clinical Sciences in Carle Illinois.

But it can also be one of the academic medical directors or clerkship director. And when that recommendation comes through, those folks who are being considered, they would provide for us within the Department of Office of Faculty Affairs and Development, we would need a narrative statement from them.

Generally, it's like about a half a page that provides for us their relevant experience that that candidate is going to bring to the college as a faculty member, give us what they think their proposed role would be and whoever is providing for them, this recommendation will probably give them some information to help them write that and then give us a CV that's been updated within the last six months. And then that nominator will give us a brief statement that supports that nomination, and that's how we would get started helping them to make that transition into that role of faculty member.

Host: Thank you, Dr. Gillon. Let me pivot to Dr. Aldridge right here. So you've got this application that Dr. Gillon has described. Are there key points that you're looking for? Are there things that would make you more eager or less eager to accept a candidate?

Brian Aldridge, PhD: I think. The fun thing about Carle Illinois is that there are multiple opportunities. It's a bit of a different medical school in a lot of ways because the association with the university was started, we're in our second class now, just graduating. And one of our key goals, one of our core values is really innovation.

And so, within that, we know that innovation comes from sort of a really wide background. So having clinicians come in. We are trying to generate physician innovators, which is, we want them to be good doctors, but to have this much broader view on the profession as well. So what are the problems within the health system? What are the particular needs within the health system? Anything from gadgets to how do we fix processes as well. So by definition, we'd love a wide range of clinicians, a wide range of scientists, as part of the school. So I would say be yourself when you're applying. There's not a cookie cutter type of clinician that we're looking for.

Be yourself and what can you bring to the school? So what's your particular interest? Obviously there's teaching, but there's also this opportunity of being involved in the innovation space. And I think a lot of clinicians, they're the people who know the problems, so being able to identify the problems as well.

So what's your clinical specialty? What's your passion? What do you bring to the school? But we want it to be a good place to work. So also expressing what can be your benefit. We want people to be here and to stay here for a while. So how can the school benefit you as well? So we're looking for those things in the application as well.

Host: You know, when we think about innovation and the sort of youthful energy that the school has, it also puts me in mind of engineering, and I understand that's sort of a special focus. Maybe Dr. Healy, you can talk about how engineering is part of the curriculum, part of the focus of Carle.

Robert Healy, MD: From the beginning, when this was just an idea in the leaders' minds here in Champaign Urbana, the idea was that we have this wonderful world renowned engineering school here in Urbana, and we have, you know, a lot of healthcare around with the Carle Health System and other groups and other clinicians in town.

We have such a strong amount of faculty from other colleges throughout the university as well. But the idea was to base things on innovation and base things on having engineering concepts really infused throughout the curriculum. So whatever we do in the curriculum, we try to have a triad of a scientist, a clinician, and an engineer.

And all three of those mindsets really helps us to develop the problems that we teach early on in the med school in problem-based learning cases that we talk about. We don't just talk about heart disease and the pathophysiology of the heart, et cetera, but the engineering mindset looks at it for what it is, which is a pump, and how does the pump function of the heart from an engineering point of view, what could we do to incorporate that in our learning?

So it's really exciting. We've seen a lot of great things come from that kind of three-pronged approach, and are excited to see what happens over the years.

Brian Aldridge, PhD: Yeah, what's happened as well, Dr. Hill, which is interesting, and Dr. Healy is right, the original goal, was this engineering and people do think of devices and gadgets, but actually as we look at the applicants that have come to the school have been really interesting.

When was involved initially when we were designing the curriculum and I've even being a veterinarian, right? Cardiology, you mentioned, internal medicine crosses different species and so, I thought I understood cardiology. Then when I saw how they're teaching cardiology from this sort of quantitative aspect, what's a differential equation to describe blood flow into the heart and blood flow out to the heart?

I was like, what? I've never understood cardiology in this way, but I was amazed to see as the applicants also, they've changed a little bit. They certainly have this quantitative set of skills with them, which a lot of us as older clinicians, in health sciences weren't always familiar with.

But we've also seen them wanting to solve other problems, health disparities for instance, and access to healthcare, which need problem solvers as well. So the innovation started off as, hey, what does engineering look like? But it's really become how do we use a design process in solving problems in some way, and that can cross all kinds of problems as well, not just, technological ones, if that makes sense.

Host: You know, I'm so glad that you bring up that problem solving approach, Dr. Aldridge, because the most successful academic clinicians that I've known and researchers have been really interested in a particular problem and just sort of dived into it. And sometimes if you find the right problem, it's fairly easy to become the world expert on it, just through persistence. Maybe Dr. Gillon, you can talk to us about how somebody once they're on the faculty, demonstrates what they want to study, how they're interested in it, and where they want to go with it.

Dana Gillon, PhD: Actually, I am glad that you brought up the research perspective, because oftentimes once folks become clinicians, they feel a little bit displaced from their research, but there is room for researchers within this space. And we have been talking a bit about what happens to folks when they become a clinician and they want to still do research.

And within the Carle Illinois College of Medicine community, there is a need for continued research within the clinical space. And so we want to make sure that we're having that conversation that while we have this engineering background, while we have this engineering focus, we still need to have clinicians who are doing the research and bringing that to the table because we want to marry those concepts as well.

And so, when we talk about faculty members and we have these researchers who are doing all of this innovation, and it's marvelous; but we also want to make sure that when we are looking at progressing in the clinical space, that we have room for those clinicians whose passion is research and what does that research develop, what's coming from the research that they're doing, and that we have an eye for that.

And so we don't want to lose sight of that. And so when folks are putting together their statements about wanting an appointment for faculty; we want them to be able to say, Hey, this is my passion that I'm a researcher. Do we have space for that? We absolutely do, and we want to see those people. We know that oftentimes they're a smaller group of folks, but we have room for them too.

Brian Aldridge, PhD: I think that's a really important point as well, because there's an annual review process as well. It's an academic, medical center as well. So we have the university's sort of promotion requirements to fulfill as well, Dr. Hill. But each person, each year they would get a review. Could be a high touch review or a low touch review, depending how closely they are associated with the medical school, how active they are in the medical school. But those persons would sit down with a department head, for instance, with Dr. Healy, and then they would set out each year, hey, here's my plan for the year, and I can define the criteria really by which I'll be evaluated.

So if I'm going to do a lot of research, that will be taken into consideration in my promotion package. If I'm doing a lot of clinics, mainly clinics, then the clinical elements of my work will be part of my promotion package. So we are really, the schools design this process by which the individuals get evaluated on their strengths, if that makes sense. And, as Dr. Gillon said on their passions and on their interests.

Host: You know, I'm so glad that you mentioned promotion there, Dr. Aldridge, because I think especially for young researchers or academic physicians who are looking to join a faculty, it's a natural question, where am I going to go from here? How am I going to advance? Can one of you or all of you, talk a little bit about specifically how Carle views the promotion process in the academic setting?

Robert Healy, MD: I think that one thing to think about is what Dr. Aldridge just finished talking about, which is this concept that there's a lot of different needs for faculty. We've talked about people who have an engineering background. We've talked about people who have that innovative mindset, that already do that.

And, interestingly, some of our applicants to the medical school for our students, they've already gotten patents. They've been in companies and startups. What I want to focus on though is that person out there who might be early in their career or mid-career as a clinician, wondering, you know, is there room for me?

And there is, and what I mean by that is, we need people to take a student with them. Our students learn clinical medicine right from the beginning. So every student from the time they start as M1s, they're assigned to a clinician in an office setting, in primary care, and they spend an afternoon per week with that clinician. And it's a tremendous opportunity for them to learn the clinical world and what it's like to be a, quote unquote real doctor. Clinicians can do that, and that might be their passion. They might want to be a mentor, be an advisor for that one student for that year. We need people like that.

So, if you don't understand differential equations for flow through the heart, it's okay. We need people to do kind of the basic blocking and tackling, right? About showing people how an office works, showing people that critical communication skills that are needed when you're talking to a patient or a family.

So I think, tying that back to promotions. As Dr. Aldridge said, when you start and after you're here for a few years and go through a few annual reviews, then we know that your interest lies in that area of just teaching one student, one-on-one for a while, or being more involved in coming up with courses and clerkships or being really innovative and coming up with new ways to evaluate people or doing research or working with the translational research with a lot of our people at the college. So I think you really define what your pathway will be and then you're judged on your promotability based on that pathway.

Dana Gillon, PhD: It's also mportant to note that promotion is based on research, teaching and service. It's not one aspect of what you do. So when Dr. Healy is talking about learning what it is that your passion is, being in the position for a few years, some folks come in and immediately talk about, I've got my appointments now, can we talk about promotion?

You really need to put some time in the position. It's not promotion immediately upon appointment. And so you want to make sure that you're in the position for a little bit, do the research, do the teaching, figure out where you want to put in your service, but also understand, DEI efforts, are strengths in the evaluation and promotion process.

DEI is going to become mandatory as part of your promotion package in the future. And they're a part currently of your evaluation process, and so all of these pieces are elements that you want to pay attention to as a part of your initial appointment because they will play a part in your promotion package.

Host: That's really helpful. I would love if each of you could think of one last takeaway for clinicians who are interested in gaining faculty appointments at Carle. Let's see, do you want to start Dr. Aldridge?

Brian Aldridge, PhD: I would say, we want to have a flourishing faculty environment and based on relationships, professional relationships. And so I really think actually contacting us, speaking to one of us, or to other clinicians that are involved already. But I think, meeting us will be the best thing.

So we can sort of answer your particular questions. There is a sort of formal process of application, but I think we just touched on the intricacies and the unique aspects really of Carle Illinois. It's a bit different from other academic medical centers because of the diversity of, we call it the faculty phenotype.

There are so many different kinds of faculty in our college, and so I really think contacting us and for us to have a one-on-one meeting, would be brilliant.

Host: Fantastic. Dr. Healy last thoughts?

Robert Healy, MD: Yeah, I would say, don't be worried that you might not fit in. And it's possible you might not. And after talking to us, you'll find out that, well, that's not really what I was looking for, but more likely is going to be that you'll find a space on our faculty that you'll be interested in and you'll flourish there.

I would especially direct my thoughts to that person out there who's a great clinician, but they really haven't been involved yet. Reach out to us, talk to us. We could talk to you about what it would take to be on faculty, and it might just be that that fits with what you want and your career will be that much better for it.

Host: That's great. And final word from Dr. Gillon.

Dana Gillon, PhD: Thank you. Nothing happens as quickly as you would think it would. So, leave time for the process to unfold. A lot of people think that if I put my package in today, in two weeks, I should have an answer. Generally, it takes longer than that. There is a process, there are committees that all of these, whether it's an appointment or a promotion, that it has to go through.

Sometimes the committee will meet this month and have to meet next month, so please allow for time. So I want to set an expectation around that and also be willing to, for people who don't look like you, we need diversity amongst providers, and so we want to make sure we're diversifying our faculty as well. So please, let's expand the pool and let's expand the conversations.

Host: Critical mission and thank you for sharing that. Well, Dr. Brian Aldridge, Dr. Robert Healy and Dr. Dana Gillon, thank you so much for speaking with us today and I'm excited to see how the faculty and the mission continue to expand at this exciting institution.

Brian Aldridge, PhD: Thank you very much.

Dana Gillon, PhD: Thank you for having us.

Robert Healy, MD: Thank you.

Host: For more information and to get connected with one of our providers, please visit carle.org. For listing of Carle providers and to view Carle sponsored educational activities, head on over to our website at carleconnect.com.