TMC PULSE

t m c » p u l s e | m a y 2 0 1 5 18 According to McKeon, the next few decades will allow for tremendous strides in cultivating a proactive, personalized approach to patient care. "When we think of proactive measures and prevention today, we think of eating less fats and getting more exercise," he said. "We are already identifying genomic nuances that allow us to better select the most effective tar- geted therapy. Twenty years from now, we will understand more sooner, and, where appropri- ate, intervene." Wearable and implantable sensor technol- ogy will become fundamental in the future, woven throughout the fabric of our lives from both a health and fitness standpoint. These sensors will be capable of communicating and routing information, providing physicians and researchers with crucial, objective data. McKeon is confident that this evolution will be used to validate potential conditions, chron- icling them as they develop. "Twenty years ago, cars had fewer than 10 sensors," he added. "Today, each car has over 1,000 and they mon- itor and provide us with essential information. Sensors are continuously becoming smaller, more accurate and less invasive. Imagine a future when your sensors and home dashboard provide you and your doctor with a diagnosis before you leave home." This evolutionary trajectory has similar counterpoints in education, especially as education and technology become more intertwined. "Since we're talking about 20 years from now, let's look at 20 years in the past," said George L. McLendon, Ph.D., Howard R. Hughes Provost and professor of chemistry at Rice University. "Back then, one of the measures of a great university was the size of your library. Today, basically everyone has the same library because it's all digitized and freely available, everywhere. In the future—and this is happen- ing right now—the things you learn will be processes instead of information." McLendon affirmed that experiential learning and process might supplant our cur- rent classroom-based model, coupled with an increasingly personalized focus on individual preferences and learning styles. "Today, there are some precursors to that," he observed. "If you do a key word search on your device, whether it's a phone or a computer, you will not get the same hits as someone else. It's learned what we're most interested in and is delivering customized content. All learning is going to start to work more and more like that." At the same time, McLendon concedes anything that disrupts the status quo will undoubtedly be met with some resistance. "Familiarity breeds content," he laughed. "People are usually happy with the way things are. Anything that portends significant change in things that they've taken a long time to get used to is going to be hard. It's going to be hard on teachers, students and families alike, but it's inevitable. Part of our job as educators is to say, 'This can be really exciting; let's make this really exciting and move forward.' "One thing we can do today is to let go of our defensiveness and think about what good things are made possible," he added. "To think about the benefits that might emerge, go all the way back to the time of the monks—they owned all the information. They were the only ones who could read or write, so they had dispro- portionate authority, and associated with that, disproportionate power. It's really important that we make sure that the kids coming into school now are empowered to be these future, independent workers. That's going to require a lot of social support and a lot of resource commitment." Within the constantly shifting landscape of infrastructure, design and architecture, David J. Calkins, regional managing principal at Gensler, envisions self-perpetuating construc- tion materials with the capability to grow, heal and clean themselves, enhanced three dimen- sional visualization tools that enable the user to experience environments before a hammer is raised, and large-scale 3-D printing capabili- ties that render the hammer itself irrelevant. "We'll be able to highly customize spaces based on people's real perceptions walking through them, in simulation," said Calkins. "In the case of manufacturers, they might be able to try out manufacturing processes before they're ever put together in reality—you can almost live in it before it's even built." In addition to construction processes that make our current methodology seem prac- tically primitive, Calkins thinks a trajectory towards self-reliance will sketch the model for future cities. "There's a whole trend towards resilience," considered Calkins. "How do you make a city resilient and sustainable? How does it keep It's essential to edu- cate the many students, trainees and faculty members across all of our institutions that the fundamental discoveries they're making every day can be translated into new, commercializable drugs, devices and digital solutions to improve the health of humanity. — ROBERT C. ROBBINS, M.D. President and Chief Executive Officer of the Texas Medical Center

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