Many of our faculty are familiar with the Transformation Research Initiative (TRI) — in fact many of our faculty worked hard to create it. On Monday, Dean Jay Hess announced the plan.
TRI is our new strategic plan for research at the IU School of Medicine, a path to the changes we need to make the School’s research enterprise as competitive as we need it to be in the coming years.
Let me repeat up what I’ve emphasized in many meetings: This plan was created by the faculty at the School of Medicine, with input from our health sciences partners and schools at IU. This is not the “David Wilkes Transforming Research Initiative,” nor is it the “Jay Hess Transforming Research Initiative, it is “our” initiative for the School of Medicine. (You can download the executive summary here.)
The TRI boils down to six fundamental goals in an era of tight research funding, team science, health care reform, an emphasis on translational research and the need to focus our efforts if we are to maintain our standing among research-intensive schools of medicine:
- Development of research themes: Schoolwide input led to the establishment of seven themes, three of which (cancer, cardiovascular disease and neuroscience) are key elements of the Strategic Research Initiative with IU Health. The others are:
- Obesity/Metabolism
- Personalized Medicine
- Health Services Research (with population health a key component)
- Regenerative Medicine
- Increased focus on team science
- Improved research communication
- Evaluating, rationalizing and reorganizing our research cores, centers and institutes
- Focusing on and improving faculty recruitment and retention
- Improving our mentoring systems
Although this plan is now official, steps to implement these goals have already started. The Peer Review and Mentoring Committees (PRMC) I’ve discussed previously are set to start work in March. We’ve hired a recruitment specialist in the Office of Faculty Affairs and we created the position of Assistant Dean for Research Mentoring nearly a year ago.
Those are just first steps, and the goals are something we all have to work toward.