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t m c » p u l s e | m a y 2 0 1 6 11 BARBARA J. STOLL, M.D., DEAN OF THE McGOVERN MEDICAL SCHOOL AT UTHEALTH AND THE H. WAYNE HIGHTOWER DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR IN THE MEDICAL SCIENCES, SAT DOWN WITH WILLIAM F. McKEON, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF STRATEGY AND OPERATING OFFICER OF THE TEXAS MEDICAL CENTER, TO TALK ABOUT HER ILLUSTRIOUS CAREER AND THE DECISIONS THAT ULTIMATELY BROUGHT HER TO THE TEXAS MEDICAL CENTER. SPOTLIGHT My life and career have been a winding road of opportunities. When those opportunities arise, it's important for all of us—but especially for women— to seize them and have fun with new challenges and new adventures. Q | Where were you born? Where did you spend your formative years? A | I grew up in New York City and still consider myself a New Yorker— although I've adopted other home cities over the years—Atlanta and now Houston. I went to high school and col- lege in New York, and that's also where I completed my residency in pediatrics. Q | Where did you spend your high school years? A | I am a proud graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. Bronx Science is well known as the secondary school whose graduates comprise the highest number of Nobel laureates. Q | That's fascinating. And why did you select Barnard college? A | I was probably afraid of going away from home. It was close enough, but far away enough. It turned out to be a wonderful school and experience, and I'm very loyal to Barnard. I mentioned that Bronx Science is known for its Nobel laureates; Barnard has one of the highest proportions of women physi- cians, Ph.D.s and CEOs. Barnard intro- duced me to wonderful professors who reflected the best qualities of educators and scholars and had a real affection for students. Located across the street from Columbia University, we had full access to Columbia courses but still lived in the intimacy of a small, all-girls school. As much as I am a great proponent of co-education, looking back there was something protective about learning and growing in an all-women school. Q | You then went on to Yale for medical school. Tell us about that experience. A | It was a terrific experience. Yale was a vibrant academic community with wonderful professors and wonderful students. At the time I went to Yale, the medical school had no exams and no grades. My husband for many years joked, 'Would you go to a doctor who went to a school like Yale with no exams and no grades?' But it gave you the freedom to think broadly— and beyond medicine. I was a dorm mother for Morse College freshmen, living on the old campus in Vanderbilt Hall, frequently attending Yale University lectures. Yale was a remarkable place. Yale Medical School required students to do a scholarly thesis long before other medical schools considered such a requirement. The independent thesis was an important and formative part of our education. Although there were no exams or grades, students still spent many hours in the library studying and I suspect were equally competitive as students elsewhere. There was an expectation at Yale that you would do big things in your career. Q | You also spent a good deal of time overseas? A | I got married in medical school to someone I met when I was 19. My husband, Roger Glass, is incredibly smart and creative, always curious, always interested in others and always full of adventure and wanderlust. He was a Fulbrighter in Argentina; lived in Argentina, Brazil, Oxford and the former Soviet Union before we got married. So the fact that we then went on to live overseas should have been no surprise to me. For quite some time, I was the poster child of a trailing spouse. After medical school, I went back to NYC because my husband was there, and we moved to Atlanta because Roger went to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to enter the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program. My life and career have been a winding road of opportunities. When those opportunities arise, it's important for all of us—but especially for women— to seize them and have fun with new challenges and new adventures. I completed my fellowship in neona- tology in Atlanta, and Roger completed the two-year EIS training program. We were ready for an adventure. We considered a number of different options and ended up deciding to go to the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research in Bangladesh (ICDDR,B). We signed on for two years and ended up staying for four. I went from being a neonatal fellow in Atlanta, an environment of high-tech neonatal intensive care medicine, to being confronted with maternal and child health issues in Bangladesh, at the time, one of the poorest countries in the world with one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the world. Those years expanded my worldview and changed the direction of my career. Although I returned to a much more traditional U.S. academic career, I have always been interested in the broader aspects of health disparities, social determinants of health and health as a human right. I look at Bangladesh as a real gift. We often said that Bangladesh was to health and development, certainly at the time, what Paris was to fashion. If you're a fashion designer and you're young and you're excited, where do you go? You go to Paris or New York. If you want to learn about global health problems, health disparities and economic development, where do you go? You go to Bangladesh. When we went overseas in the early '80s, few young academics left a U.S. academic career to work in a developing country. In fact, one of my mentors at Emory counseled me, 'Please don't do this. You're throwing away a promising academic career.' And the irony is that when I came back to Atlanta some years later, he was doing global health. After Bangladesh, we went to Sweden and lived in Gothenburg for almost a year, working with outstanding scientists. We've had other adventures—worked in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand and spent a wonderful year at the World Health Organization in Geneva work- ing on issues of global neonatal health and survival. Q | Tell us about what attracted you to come to the Texas Medical Center to lead UTHealth's medical school? A | I was not looking for a move. I had a perfect job. I was chair of a wonderful department that I had helped build over 12 years. During my tenure as chair the department grew from approximately 150 faculty to over 400 clinicians, educators and investigators. I had the opportunity to build clinical programs, training programs and research pro- grams and to help forge a close partner- ship between the medical school and children's hospital. We had remarkable growth in extramural grant funding, moving from 51st in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to the top 10. As I said, I was not looking for a job. I thought if we had one last fling, we would go back overseas, especially since I had ongoing collaborations with people in India and in Pakistan. My husband is the associate director of global health for NIH and director of the Fogarty International Center. If I called him up today and said, 'Let's move to India, or Kenya, or…' he'd say, 'What's your frequent flyer number?' He breathes adventure.