The health care delivery sciences and globalization academic clusters have each received $10 million gifts, bringing the total number of endowed clusters to four of the 10 the College hopes to endow by the end of 2015.
The College announced today that the first gift, committed by Richard “Dick” Levy ’60, will support a faculty team in health care delivery science to determine ways to cut costs while maintaining a high quality of care and access. The second gift, from an anonymous alumnus, will create a faculty team focused on globalization and promoting humanitarian efforts in societies around the world.
These gifts contribute to College President Phil Hanlon’s academic cluster plan announced earlier this year as part of the “Moving Dartmouth Forward” policy initiative. The campaign works to recruit top scholars to the College to teach and conduct research in interdisciplinary teams focused on major global challenges, he said in his speech.
Elliott Fisher, director of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, is currently focusing on three major areas of work — evaluating the health care systems through research and evaluation, educating patients on their options in health care and creating and implementing new innovations in health care to improve patient care.
Fisher said the institute’s innovations include both types of health care and payment options, and that the gift is meant to further support this work.
“This is intended to support that third area — how can we actually, on the ground, in health care, support people with real needs and help develop and spread models of health care that will transform the healthcare system,” Fisher said.
Fisher said that Levy expressed a firm belief with his donation that Dartmouth has the potential to lead the nation in health care.
The gift is specifically structured to enable the institute to recruit three new faculty members. These members will contribute to the multidisciplinary work of the cluster, Fisher said, and they would almost definitely include the disciplines of engineering, health sciences research, behavioral economics and sociology. Fisher said that this multidisciplinary approach reflects the various components of health care.
In 2014, an anonymous donor gave the College a $100 million gift, of which half will be put toward the creation of these clusters. As a result, the new gifts will be matched with a further $5 million investment from the previous gift.
Fisher said that the average Dartmouth student would benefit from the expansion of the cluster, and the conversation about what an undergraduate program in health care education will look like is ongoing.
The faculty members will be recruited nationally and internationally, Fisher said, and the search will begin in the next few weeks. He said that searching well was more important than searching quickly, and candidates will likely be identified within the next three to six months with the hope of having new faculty in place a year from now.
“I think the great thing about this gift is that it will allow us to attract really high-caliber talent, the best people in the country,” he said.
John Damianos ’16, who was on the “Moving Dartmouth Forward” presidential steering committee, said the gift was exciting to him as both a student and a hopeful future physician.
“The goal of such clusters is to be a sort of incubator for innovation and ideas that’s bringing students, staff and faculty together,” he said.
The College has not been known for its research in the past, Damianos said, and these developments will help improve Dartmouth’s reputation as a research university. He added that he believes this academic cluster model will not take away from undergraduate teaching, for which Dartmouth has been recognized in the past, but will improve it.
“It’s bringing students and faculty together to do cutting-edge research,” he said.
College spokesperson Diana Lawrence wrote in an email that these clusters will help position Dartmouth as a worldwide leader in addressing critical challenges, and that the College is very grateful for the generosity of the two donors.
The other clusters that have received donations are the William H. Neukom academic cluster in computational science, which received a $10 million donation from Bill Neukom ’64 in late April, and the Jack Byrne academic cluster in decision science, which received a $20 million donation last week from the late Byrne’s wife, Dorothy Byrne, in his honor.
