Sixteen members of the University of Louisville School of Medicine faculty have completed a 10-month training program aimed at developing effective future leaders in academic medicine. Leadership and Innovation in Academic Medicine (LIAM) was designed to develop innovative thinking skills in early to mid-career faculty who are motivated to be leaders in medical education.
“Leadership is more important than ever as the 
university prepares to deal with changes in our health care world. Our leaders need to have the resilience and creativity and the ability to be innovative and problem solve as challenges keep coming,” said Gerard Rabalais, MD, M.H.A., associate dean of faculty development, who created the program along with Staci Saner, MEd, program manager for faculty development.
“We need to deepen our bench here at the university,” said Tracy Eells, PhD, MBA, vice provost for faculty affairs, at the program’s final event on July 17. “We need to have a deep set of leaders that we can turn to because there are a lot of leadership positions at the university.”
The participants attended monthly meetings organized to introduce innovation and design thinking through understanding how to lead oneself, how to lead others and how to lead the organization.
Jeremy Clark, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, most values the connections he made with other participants.
“The single most impactful aspect of LIAM is the relationships I built with each of my peers and with our physician leaders in the School of Medicine. I now have 15 other young leaders that I can go to and ask for advice and counsel when I am struggling with leadership problems,” Clark said.
Hugh Shoff, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine, expected the program to help him acquire tools for becoming a better leader and innovator in medicine. He was surprised by the value of the self-reflection aspect.
“We spent lot of time in the beginning learning to analyze yourself and make sure you as a person are in the right place to become a better leader. I didn’t expect to spend as much time on that, but I am glad we did,” Shoff said.
Eells said self-leadership is a critical aspect of the program’s three-stage approach.
“It has to start with yourself, with emotional intelligence, knowing how to keep your cool when you are in a tense situation since you are serving as a role model to many others around you when you are serving in a leadership capacity,” Eells said.
The self-reflection portion will be expanded for the second LIAM cohort, which will increase from 16 to 24 members.
At the program’s final meeting, teams of four participants presented projects to improve the school or health care in general and presented them to a panel of judges, leaders from the UofL School of Medicine, and members of the 2018-2019 cohort were announced.
2018-19 LIAM cohort
Pascale Alard, PhD Microbiology and Immunology
Thomas Altstadt, MD Neurosurgery
Laura Bishop, MD Medicine
Eric Burton, MD Neurology
Camilo Castillo, MD Neurosurgery
Priya Chandan, MD, MPH Neurosurgery
Brittany Chapman, MD Neurology
Lynzee Cornell, PhD Otolaryngology and Communicative Disorders
Russell Farmer, MD Surgery
Shahab Ghafghazi, MD Medicine
Josephine Gomes, MD Family and Geriatric Medicine
Sushil Gupta, MD Pediatrics
Ahmed Haddad, MD, PhD Urology
Jennifer Hamm, MD Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women’s Health
David Haustein, MD Neurosurgery
Bridget Hittepole, MD Medicine
Deborah Kozik, MD Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery
Rana Latif, MD Anesthesiology
Jennifer Le, MD Pediatrics
Eli Pendleton, MD Family and Geriatric Medicine
Melissa Potts, MD Radiology
Vikas Singh, MD Medicine
Abigail Stocker, MD Medicine
Christina Terrell, MD Psychiatry
2017-2018 LIAM class projects
Increasing the Value of Academic Teaching
Academic teaching is a core mission for UofL School of Medicine faculty that is difficult to quantify in terms of scholarly recognition. The definition and documentation of good teaching is lacking. Our project proposes a structured way of accounting for teaching in an easily accessible system, and ideas for a culture shift towards recognition of teaching excellence as a critical mission for the university. Team members: Alexander Ovechkin, MD, PhD, Christine Brady, PhD, Elizabeth Cash, PhD, Kathrin LaFaver, MD.
A Better PICC Line
The project focuses on the creation of a PICC line that is tamper-evident for use in patients who have a history of IV drug use and require long-term antibiotic therapy for conditions such as bacterial endocarditis. The hope is that use of this PICC line will allow these patients to transition home for IV antibiotics in lieu of prolonged hospital stays to complete the antibiotics course. Team members: Farid Kehdy, MD, Hugh Shoff, MD, Laura Workman, MD, Luz Fernandez, MD.
Mind the Gap: Using Generational Strengths to Create Faculty-Student Teaching Partnerships
Many University of Louisville Health Sciences Center faculty struggle to adapt their teaching to include new educational pedagogies due to lack of time, variable prioritization of teaching and difficulty using new technology. We propose the creation of student-faculty partnerships where the faculty – our content experts – can use the technical savvy and availability of students to modify and improve their teaching. We plan to pilot this initiative as part of the Medical Students as Teachers elective for fourth year medical students and measure change in course evaluations, student satisfaction and faculty well-being. Team members: Leah Siskind, PhD, Sara Multerer, MD, Sara Petruska, MD, Tyler Sharpe, MD.
Financial Empowerment
Leaders in academic medicine are frequently ill prepared to make the financial decisions that are a necessary part of their jobs. There is currently a gap between finance officers at senior levels and leaders at lower levels who lead clinical, research or education teams. Our proposed innovation is to empower leaders across the University of Louisville School of Medicine to make financial decisions by providing local, focused financial training to leaders. Team members: Carolyn Roberson, PhD, Adrienne Jordan, MD, Brian Holland, MD, Jeremy Clark, MD.
