Michigan Medicine Presents: Tommy Wang, M.D., Dean, University of Michigan Medical School

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Join MD student Cassie Evans and PhD student Sam Collie for a wide-ranging conversation with Dean Tommy Wang, M.D. As he reflects on his journey to medicine and academic leadership, Dr. Wang shares his perspectives on student well-being, artificial intelligence, education, research and patient care through the lens of his new role as dean of the University of Michigan Medical School.

Transcript

Sam Collie:

Hello and welcome to Michigan Medicine Presents podcast. I'm Sam Collie, your co-host for today's episode. I'm a sixth-year graduate student in the cellular and molecular biology program at the University of Michigan Medical School. I study white blood cell migration and signaling in the context of inflammation, and I'm graduating in the fall and hoping to continue to pursue scientific research as a postdoctoral researcher.

Cassie Evans:

Hi, I'm Cassie Evans. I'm a rising fourth year medical student at the University of Michigan and I'm one of our student council co-presidents. I'm planning to apply into general surgery this upcoming residency cycle. So I'd like to introduce you to our special guest for this discussion, Dr. Tommy Wang, Dean of the University of Michigan Medical School. Dr. Wang came to U of M from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he was a professor and chair of internal medicine as well as being the physician in chief at William P. Clements Junior University Hospital. A little bit about Dr. Wang's time at UTSW. He joined in 2020 and led the department through the COVID-19 pandemic, leading the hospital as it served vast numbers of patients and grew in its clinical and research capacity. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including from the Association of American Physicians, the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and the American Heart Association, among many others.

Sam Collie:

Dr. Wang, we're happy to welcome you to the UMMS community and we're looking forward to sitting down with you today.

Tommy Wang:

Great to be here. Thanks guys.

Sam Collie:

Yeah. So our discussion is going to focus on getting to know you a little bit as well as what your vision is going to be for leading the University of Michigan Medical School into the future. So why don't we start with a little bit about your background? So before getting into medicine, you originally trained in economics, is that correct?

Tommy Wang:

That's right. When I was in college, I was an economics major. Probably halfway through college. If you had asked me, I would have said I was going to be a professional economist. At some point during there, I obviously changed my mind and here I am. I became a physician.

Sam Collie:

So I find that really fascinating. What made that transition for you? What made you decide medicine is actually the thing for me?

Tommy Wang:

Yeah, it wasn't so much a eureka moment, but one of the things that I was really interested in in college was health economics, the economics of healthcare. And I wrote my senior thesis, for instance, on physician labor supply with a healthcare economist. And I suppose the more I learned about healthcare and the enterprise of healthcare and what physicians did, which of course I knew a little bit about because my father and my grandfather were physicians, so I was exposed to the profession, but it became apparent to me that I was more interested in being part of healthcare than just studying healthcare. And that's what ultimately led to my decision to pursue medical school and medical training.

Cassie Evans:

That's so amazing. Have you found any favorite spots or activities you like here so far?

Tommy Wang:

Not yet. I found a favorite time. I really like springtime. It's been great. It's a nice transition from winter. I wasn't aware before I arrived how outdoorsy Ann Arbor is between the trails and the river and the lakes. I suppose I probably could have figured that out if I thought of where Michigan was located and the characteristics of Michigan, but I'd always thought of Ann Arbor as a university town and a college town. And so the other aspects of the town have become much more apparent to me.

Sam Collie:

Yeah. Well, just wait for summer. I'm telling you, it's amazing here. I also was thinking about your research background, which is also extremely strong. And I kind of wondered this to myself being a researcher, how you're able to manage research, which I consider to be something that requires all of my mental energy and physical energy, while at the same time also being a leader in the space of medicine and for a medical school and a medical center. What kind of work-work balance are you running there?

Tommy Wang:

Yeah, good question. Well, I'll start by saying that I've always had a philosophy, and this is one that I had when I was a department chair and now being in this new role as a dean, that whatever your administrative job, that you can do the best job in that position if you continue doing the things that you have done throughout your career. In other words, I had never had a big desire of moving into an administrative position and stopping research or stopping seeing patients. I think that's why I'm in medicine, as we talked about, was to see patients and to study things that hopefully improve the health of patients. And so continuing those activities were important to me and I think should be important to people in positions like these. In addition, it obviously gives you some insight into some of the realities that people who are pursuing investigation or pursuing clinical care or both are experiencing on a daily basis. So actually, I think it allows us to do our jobs better as well.

Cassie Evans:

Yeah. And I think to add on to that, what piece of advice would you give to students that are interested in pursuing academic medicine and leadership and research?

Tommy Wang:

Yeah. Well, I'll start by saying when I was at your stage or shortly after your stage, I didn't really ever think of myself as moving on to these academic leadership positions in the future. I was really focused on what do I enjoy doing. I love clinical care and medicine and eventually grew to really love clinical care and cardiovascular disease. And I was also very interested in doing research in those areas. And so my conception of a professional career was really based on those activities. Over time is when I developed an interest in some of the more administrative aspects of the role. And that actually gets to what you asked, which is what advice that I would give. The advice that I would give is fairly straightforward. You should do what interests you during your career as opposed to what you think might necessarily lead in a stepwise basis to some future goal.

As long as you do what interests you, and generally when you're doing what you're interested in, you tend to get pretty good at it, then other opportunities will arise over time, and you can consider these things that you might not have considered earlier in your career.

Cassie Evans:

Yeah. And then I think you've mentioned your patients a couple times now. Do you have any stories that are really meaningful or impactful that you still think about?

Tommy Wang:

Well, for sure. I mean, I can think of a lot of patients that I've seen throughout my career. The good news and bad news is that I don't always think about the patients that have incredible outcomes. And we had a lot of them. I was a transplant cardiologist in the first decade of my career, and so we had lots of patients who came to us literally deathly ill, including some very young patients. Unfortunately, some of the rare forms of heart disease can impact people regardless of their age. And to see people like that go from literally moments away from dying to living fruitful, in many cases, normal lives after a heart transplant was amazing, probably one of the most dramatic transformations that you see in the clinical setting.

But you also remember and think about those things where there were bad outcomes and bad outcomes that in retrospect could have been avoidable if different decisions were made. Make the best decisions that you can on the basis of information you have, but things don't always turn out the way you want, and it's natural to think back at whether those decisions could be different.

Cassie Evans:

Yeah. No, I'm on transplant surgery right now, so-

Tommy Wang:

There you go. Yeah, absolutely.

Cassie Evans:

It's good to have that perspective for sure.

Tommy Wang:

Yeah.

Sam Collie:

Yeah. And I mean, speaking about perspectives for a second, because you mentioned that continuing to pursue research as well as patient care is really helpful in forming your leadership roles, I'm kind of curious about the reverse. Do you ever get any insights from the perspective being in leadership offers you that is helpful in research and patient care?

Tommy Wang:

I would say in general, yes. Having the broad scale view that having an administrative position allows does allow you to think about what areas of research, let's say, are particularly advancing and where the synergies are really occurring, what are the hot areas basically. Now, you can't easily redirect a longstanding research program, but it can give you ideas about how you can make some corrections or modifications in that program to really take advantage of where the advances are being made. And also, you understand, of course, who's doing what across an institution and it gives you an idea of potential collaborators.

And similarly, on the clinical side, being in an administrative position in many ways gives you a better idea of, for instance, what patients are experiencing and where some of the challenges lay. Of course, being empathetic and understanding the challenges of being a patient is one of the critical aspects of being a physician and the more exposure that you have that from multiple angles, I think it can only help you become a better physician.

Cassie Evans:

Yeah. And to switch gears a little bit, Dr. Wang, so you've brought a lot of energy and excitement, I feel, to Michigan and I know just being in student leadership roles, it's been really fun to see that. So what are some things that have surprised you most about the medical schools since stepping into this role?

Tommy Wang:

Well, I came in knowing by reputation that this was a place where there was a lot of excellence and great people, and certainly that's what I've found. I would say what was a little unexpected is how broadly that excellence extends. I mean, there almost is not a department here which I would not consider one of the top departments in the country in what they do. And within those departments, there are just some amazing faculty who because it wasn't my field or I just didn't know it, I just didn't realize the strength that existed. And that's been definitely eye-opening for sure. Secondly, I came with an appreciation that yes, Michigan has 19 schools and colleges and they're really good, but they are really, really good. And so the excellence for sure extends well beyond the med school and in the schools that are aligned with us, for instance, engineering or public health, nursing, even LS&A with all the basic departments. The breadth of that excellence has really been quite eye-opening and pretty incredible.

Cassie Evans:

Yeah. And I feel like we all appreciate you investing in all of those different areas. I think that's really important for our school and community at large, right?

Tommy Wang:

Yeah.

Sam Collie:

Yeah, definitely.

Tommy Wang:

I appreciate that. Yeah.

Sam Collie:

Yeah. And I mean, thinking about investments, I think something that is on my mind a lot as a researcher right now is funding constraints because nationally it's just becoming harder and harder to get funding for research. And so I'm wondering how the medical school and your leadership is thinking about kind of supporting students both in clinical and research positions facing these challenges.

Tommy Wang:

Yeah, for sure. And I completely understand and sympathize with some of the uncertainty that exists, especially for someone like yourself who's nearing the end of your formal education period and thinking of the progression of your career through setting up a lab, getting funding for the lab. And there are uncertainties out there. There have been disruptions and the flow of money to institutions.

There's been a lot of talk about different ways of evaluating grants and there is a real anxiety out there. That being said, I think fundamentally that the people who invest in research, our funders, understand the incredible value of biomedical research, how it's put us in the position that we are in to address human health and how those investments pay off in terms of every dollar spent in terms of what we gain in human health and the economic benefits of that. I honestly don't think there's a legislator out there who doesn't at some level understand that.

Do we have to communicate it better at times and communicate better at times that there's a horizon needed and these investments don't immediately pay off, but they pay off in the long term? Sure, I think we can do a better job of communicating it. But fundamentally, I think most people understand that there's so much long-term benefit from this. So if I were in your shoes, what would I be thinking? I mean, a couple of things. Just for historical context, this is not the first time there have been uncertainties in funding for research and medicine. It's not the first time there have been uncertainties and concern around the cost of healthcare and how healthcare and the clinical enterprises are funded. We go through waves. This will be better at some point. We don't know how long it will be. Secondly, it's great to be at places like Michigan or our peer institutions, because those institutions, those universities, those academic medical centers fundamentally understand that you have to support the people.

If it's not for the people, none of this would be possible. And so all of our attention and resources during this time should be geared toward understanding what can we do to support individuals through periods of uncertainty and periods of stress? Because the last thing we want to do is for people to drop out of the field or go into other areas that they might not have done if these anxieties or stresses didn't exist. And so I think you can be confident that Michigan and not just Michigan, our peer institutions, really have that as really a signature priority.

Cassie Evans:

And I think all of these research funding limitations and just the daily stressors, et cetera, can contribute to burnout. And then specifically for our medical students as they're entering this field, what's some advice you have or what is the institution doing to help alleviate some of that burnout or prevent it?

Tommy Wang:

Yeah. I would say the field of graduate medical education is much more sensitive to these issues now than back a decade or several decades ago when I was in training. I think that's good news. It's not to say that we have achieved our goals and that there aren't challenges still to come, and I see the reports and the testimonials from students that are really stressed by the environment or the rotation or in certain settings might not feel the right level of psychological safety so that they can maximize their learning experience. And I think that myself and the leaders on the educational side are very sensitive to that and are very motivated to do the things that will address it. Some of it is cultural at the level of interactions with our faculty and the mentors and just making sure that they understand that they need to be fully cognizant of what they can do to create a safe learning environment for students and not one that creates undue anxiety.

It's not per se to advise them to create a cushy environment or one where there's not a little bit of challenge, but students obviously need to be challenged whether they're in the lab or in the clinical setting. They need to go through the experience of working through problems for sure, but that's not mutually exclusive with having a safe learning environment. And again, in the past, there may have been an idea that in order for students to learn, they had to be uncomfortable, and that's not true. You can still be comfortable that the environment is a supportive one yet still be challenged.

Cassie Evans:

Yeah. And I do think that's one of our strengths as a medical school and definitely draws a lot of people here.

Sam Collie:

Yeah. And I just want to dig into this a little bit more. Maybe I can ask a little bit about your time in medical training. What was it like for you because you said we're more sensitive now. What was it like for you? Did you ever experience burnout? Did you run into these difficulties? Can you empathize a bit with students who are struggling with this culture of always having to do more and it feels like as kind of knowledge expands constantly, right, you have to learn more just to get up to baseline. And being more conscious of a number of different like environmental social concerns as well makes I think it extra difficult. So I'm just curious about your perspective.

Tommy Wang:

Yeah, absolutely. For sure. Medical training was difficult when I was training. I've also said being a resident was one of the most formative times in my career. So it was an exciting time, and I really overall enjoyed the opportunity. I was appreciative of the opportunity, but for sure there were challenges. Back then, the idea that it was okay for residents to be uncomfortable or overworked or stressed, that was more acceptable back then. I think that's a factual statement. I'm not apologizing for it or trying to justify it, but it was just that's what happened. The vast majority of us got through it, and again, appreciated the experience, but it did, to answer your question, give me an appreciation of some of the challenges that students might face. The second thing that I'll have to say though is that, and this is something that's probably useful for people in my position to agree with, there are new challenges that exist now that didn't exist back then.

Medicine's gotten more complicated. For instance. I mean, back then, especially for some conditions which regrettably we had, there's less we could do about it, now there's more that we can do in many disease areas. But when there's more to do, it creates new sets of challenges in how you can deliver all the care to the patients that they deserve and they need. Second, we're much more cognizant of some of the sociodemographic challenges patients can face when they leave the hospital, which puts a lot more pressure on the time that they're in the hospital.

And so the idea that you can send a patient out of the hospital with 10 medications and expect that they're going to take them or be able to afford them or get access to them, we now recognize that that's not a sure thing and that puts pressure on us as clinicians to think about how do we put patients in the best position to benefit from the therapies that we give them is just one example. But there's so many other things, whether it's the flood of information from information technology, whether it's the burden of the electronic medical record. And I say burden not to try to be critical of it, because obviously delivering care with the support of the technology that exists today does result in better outcomes, but it is harder in general to maintain an electronic medical record than it is to scribble notes in a chart. And so again, there are new challenges that exist today that did not exist back then.

Cassie Evans:

So I think that's the perfect segue to our next, everyone's favorite topic. So in terms of the evolving AI evolution, how are we as an institution starting to integrate that into our medical and other educational spaces?

Tommy Wang:

Yeah. As you might imagine, there's like this tsunami of activity around AI at the institution and trying to address the question that you asked, which is how do we position ourselves to best take advantage of that really? And that's coming from every sector. It's coming from the medical school, it's coming from the health system, it's coming from central campus, it's coming from the multiple departments that have a foot in the AI space, and then it's just coming from every level, faculty, staff and trainees, because they're all individually trying to figure out, how do I use AI in my daily life to make myself more productive?

I'd be disingenuous to say we figured it out and figured out the best way to approach these challenges. The good news is a lot of people are thinking about it, and a lot of people are tackling it. I think we still have to figure out issues like governance and security and privacy, the things that will create the environment that will allow us to make the most use of these technologies and honestly also to contribute to knowledge about how these technologies can be helpful because as an institution, we're not just consumers of technology, but we also want to fuel it and make it better.

In the educational space specifically, obviously we are very cognizant of the fact that AI can bring huge benefits, but it also changes the way students digest and receive information. Again, most of that can be very positive, but we also have to recognize that our old ways of teaching information may not be relevant in an era where people can pull enormous amounts of information and can even in some cases interpret that information on their phone, which obviously didn't exist decades ago when you had to sit in a lecture hall and basically look at what went up on a whiteboard or went up on a bunch of slides and that's a reality. It would be, again, naive to think that we should restrict students' access to that technology and hope that they just learn the old-fashioned way. That makes no sense at all because that's not the way they're going to practice.

Sam Collie:

I'm a little bit curious about how you and the leadership plan to establish guidelines and maybe even guardrails around usage because I think what I've seen a lot from my colleagues is uncertainty about how am I supposed to use this technology in my learning? Because from my perspective as maybe an older graduate student who didn't start with AI technology in my education, I can see a lot of ways in which it would cheapen the experience to use it, whereas without it, you could come to the critical thinking conclusion after a longer period of time and gain something in that process. Maybe you'll get there faster by offloading the processing to your phone, but are you losing something critical there? And so I guess I just want to get your opinion on how to set up education so that we're still teaching those valuable skills that happen in the processing steps.

Tommy Wang:

That's right. Yeah. Well, I'll start by saying that one of your comments really illustrates what an interesting time this is because you say that you're something like too old to appreciate. I mean, you're not old, you're very young, but it does remind us that five or six years ago when you started your graduate program, ChatGPT didn't exist, right? And so think of how much has changed. That's a little bit daunting because if that was only five years ago, that means we really can't imagine what's going to be in existence five years from now. In other words, the guardrails, for instance, that we absolutely do need to be considering have to take into account that there's a future that we don't completely understand. So to address another one of your key points, which is how do we allow students to leverage this technology but not de-skill them, meaning take away their ability to even think through a problem if they become so reliant on the technology that they never really have to think about the information that they're digesting or go through the process, the very valuable process of trying to interpret that information.

And that's a very real question. I mean, ultimately as a school, we want to upskill, not de-skill. We want to basically teach students how to use the technology and enhance their ability to produce a result as opposed to take away their ability to think on their own. And yes, that's a challenge, but it's one that we're going to have to deal with. And again, it's not completely foreign because if you think of the other transformations in medical education back when I was a student 30 years ago, that was a period when many schools were transitioning from the idea in medical education that the best way to teach medical students was to put them in a lecture hall for two years and have them listen to a bunch of lectures through traditional coursework. And then after that, the last two years, that's when they shifted to the clinic.

Schools became much more proactive about introducing small group learning, flipping the classroom, earlier exposure to clinical experiences with the idea that the knowledge was always changing and so they wanted to teach students how to adapt to changing knowledge and not get dependent on just a fixed body of knowledge because no knowledge was fixed. It was changing all the time. In other words, teaching students how to think and process information rather than just memorize information. And so in some ways this is kind of like the next generation of that. So we've all accepted that knowledge is changing all the time and students have to think and process information, but they can get information very easily. They don't have to rely on their memory, but now there's that overlay that it's easier than ever before, not only to get the information, but now the machines are helping us interpret the information and feeding us the later steps of the process.

But again, I think you have to acquire the wisdom and the judgment to be able to use that in a way, because at the end of the day, we're applying it to humans and there's still a nuance there that can be very difficult in machine terms. The same body of knowledge applied to two patients sitting in front of you may get applied very differently because of the specific needs of those patients, the specific condition of those patients. It's not that machines can't learn some of those aspects but just understanding that point A doesn't lead to treatment B for every single patient, I think is something that at this point at least requires a human involved in the loop.

Sam Collie:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I don't envy your position because like you said, this all happened kind of so quickly, right? It took many years for kind of like pedagogical or research about learning to come to the point where we understood that didactic lectures are not the best way to educate students. So waiting for that research, that body of research to kind of catch up to how to adapt to AI is probably too late. So I don't envy your position, but I like what you said about being aware of that transition that happened previously and thinking about the current situation in an aspect of that and maybe just being adaptable as educators.

Tommy Wang:

Yeah. And maybe one more thing that I'll add again to return to an earlier comment about why we should be optimistic and why this is such a great time and just going specifically, you're a graduate student in the basic science department. If you think about what AI now enables us to do, for instance, looking at protein structure from a sequence.

Sam Collie:

It's amazing. It's amazing.

Tommy Wang:

Something that used to take literally years or decades before, I mean, wow, scientists back then would have loved to have this technology. So I like to think in a positive manner that this is going to transform the ability for you to take what you're doing in lab and really quickly put that in the hands of physicians or create technologies or understanding that will really move the needle in a much faster way.

Cassie Evans:

And I think thinking of transitions, one of your big projects that I've seen you've been working on is our strategic plan and it's been really great because I've been involved from a student perspective on that. How is that going? What are some updates you have for us?

Tommy Wang:

Yeah, it's going super well. I've been incredibly gratified by the engagement of students, faculty, staff in the process through a bunch of work groups, through the retreat that we had a couple months ago, through the steering committee. It's making a lot of progress, and I think within the next couple months we'll have a strategic plan, a fully formed plan. And as I've said to the groups, and as I know that you've heard, this is not meant to be a comprehensive roadmap for what the medical school's going to be doing for the next five years. The main purpose of it is to identify a couple things that we think would be really exciting strategic priorities, things that might differentiate us from our peer institutions and things where we might be really well positioned to make a difference in. And in the education space, there are a lot of great ideas coming from there. I am not at all concerned that we're going to have a shortage of things in the strategic plan that will pertain specifically to education, both medical education and graduate education.

Cassie Evans:

In an ideal world, what in your, say the next five years, what are you hoping to accomplish for this institution?

Tommy Wang:

Yeah. In a very simple sense, I think anyone who walks into a position like mine or a similar position would like to think that when they leave the institution is better off than when they arrived. And so what does better off mean? I mean, Michigan's already in a really good position, as I say to various audiences, is if you think about a school that is one of the best schools, medical schools for biomedical research, top 10 in NIH funding or whatever other metric you would use, part of a health system, academic medical center, which is considered one of the leading ones in the country, whether you look at US News and World Report or other ways that people assess these things. And then thirdly is a great place for medical education, one of the top medical schools, a place that virtually all of the residency programs are considered top 10 or 15 in the country, not many places have that Venn diagram where all of those things are true at the same time. Michigan's one of them already.

Can we do better? For sure. I think in any of those areas, we can do better. I think that with research, as I said earlier, we probably have not fully optimized the advantage that we have by being in this ecosystem with all these other great schools and colleges. I think we can do better there. In healthcare, for sure we can do better. One of the areas that we can do better in is greater access. I think there's still areas where it takes too long for patients to see our physicians. We need to do better than that. And then in education, I think we do, getting to your point, need to think of ways to support our students. Again, whether our graduate students or medical students get through, in some cases, get through more efficiently. I am concerned about the cost and burden of education, both medical education and graduate education.

I know that it's not always an answer just to shorten it, but I do think that the sooner that we can get our students onto productive careers and through the formal stage of their training and with the least debt at the end of it, I think those are really important goals for us.

Sam Collie:

I guess just to focus in on that a little bit more, you mentioned the rising costs of medical education, and you also link that to time, and those two things are inextricably linked in my mind too.

Tommy Wang:

100%. Yes.

Sam Collie:

Across the world, there's a lot of different approaches to this, and most of them are shorter and less expensive than the US system. So I think a lot of those places have excellent medical infrastructure, which works fine in this case. So how can we still provide world-class education, but shorten those costs, reduce those expenses for students? Because I spent six years in graduate training and that's pretty normal actually. Five and a half is the average for my program, which it's four or even less in Europe. And for medical education, it can be just a little bit more than your undergraduate training. So yeah, what are your thoughts on time?

Tommy Wang:

It's a fantastic point. And to give an example for medical education, over 60% of the incoming medical students in our medical school are two or more years out from college. And I have to say, that is different than when I graduated from college and went straight into medical school. I'm not saying that that interval, those gap years aren't valuable, and it shows. Our medical students are not just incredibly mature, but they're really accomplished. And some of that achievement was attained during those intervening years between college and medical school where they gained a lot of valuable life experiences. So again, I'm not saying that that's not a good thing, but there is a real practical consequence of that, which is that they're older when they start and they're older when they finish, and the cumulative burden of the finances and the debt is important. And so you raised sort of two parameters that are important for us to think about. We really do need to be honest about them, time and money.

And so there's the money, which is the yearly tuition, which for graduate education is offset somewhat, but for medical education is less offset, let's say, and can be quite expensive, and then there's time. And so how do you address those? And I think it is useful to look at what other places have done. There are some places that have gone to three-year pathways either for people going into primary care or a certain track or even across the board for all students. And so that is one thing that I've encouraged our groups to think about. I'm not saying that three years is always the best solution, but I think we at least need to consider if we're going to do four years, how can we deliver value in the four years so that the four years creates the best outcome for our students? And maybe there are circumstances where three years might make sense. I don't think we need to adhere to a model just because it has existed for a long time.

Again, as we talked about earlier, the world is changing and so we need to think about that. And then for sure the yearly cost of education is something that is very much a focus of it. Now, so Michigan Medicine, we do have some benefit that some of our tuition, and I'm now referring to the medical students, is offset by scholarships because we do have an incredibly philanthropic alumni and friend community, but we probably can do more with that and think more about how we can leverage those resources to further offset the cost of medical education. And so again, the time and the money are things that we are very much interested in thinking about.

Cassie Evans:

I want to go back to talking about access for patients. So coming here, Ann Arbor is obviously in the lower bottom part of the state. What are some things you're thinking about in terms of serving people from all of our state and from the Upper Peninsula and stuff?

Tommy Wang:

Yeah. I would say there are two ways that Michigan Medicine is currently working to expand its reach across the state. One is an obvious way, which is actually to be at other places in the state. And so obviously in the last decade, we have expanded our operations through the hospitals now in Lansing, in Grand Rapids, and through clinics across the state and now migrating further to the north as well. And there are always ongoing conversations with partnerships or acquisitions, other things that might create a physical presence in other parts of the state to make it easier for our patients. There's also what we talked about earlier, the question of technology. And so as we learned from COVID, sometimes medical care, healthcare can be delivered on technological platforms. Not all the time. And there may be times when it makes more sense than others, but I think we do need to think about whether technology can enable us to expand our reach beyond where we have physical presence. And again, there are many areas at the institution that are working on that very question.

Cassie Evans:

Great. And then in terms of our impact locally, I feel like we do a good job, but how do you see Michigan impacting, I guess, the field of medicine on more of a national and global scale?

Tommy Wang:

We've always impacted medicine globally in a number of ways. Michigan has been a leading institution for biomedical research and continues to be, and I think it's easy to see the impact of that. We see it every week or even every day in terms of things that we read in the news on research advances and therapies. In another way, the school has really delivered on its educational mission and its career development mission, because when you think about leaders in healthcare and biomedicine across the country, across the world, many of them have ties to Michigan. In fact, one of the things that really surprised me on transitioning to this role were how many people had a connection to Michigan that I wasn't even aware of.They might have been college students here or medical students or residents or fellows or spent part of their faculty careers here, and it's been really stunning to me. And again, that continues to be a major part of our legacy, which is to be a training ground for people in academic medicine and in science throughout the world.

Cassie Evans:

Yeah. I'm from Maryland and my parents love wearing their Michigan stuff because they always get compliments on it. So I do think that holds true.

Sam Collie:

Definitely. Maybe I can switch gears a little bit because I wanted to come back to talking about the students a little bit more. One of the things that we've talked about a lot today is how things have changed in education and biomedicine over the past decade, and one big evolution in that regard has been an understanding of students coming from different backgrounds and how that affects how a student learns and what a student has prior knowledge in and a number of sociodemographic factors that you just can't ignore. I think that education has evolved and adapted in that way, but in recent years there's been pushback nationally on that front. And so I guess I want to know how you are thinking of continuing to provide inclusivity and a safe and supportive environment for students in the face of that pushback.

Tommy Wang:

Yeah. I would say while there may be pushback on some of the methods and ways that institutions or organizations went about creating diverse environments for learning or delivering service, I wouldn't necessarily say that there's controversy around the fact that teams that are heterogeneous function better than teams that are homogenous. I mean, people bring different perspectives and backgrounds and experiences to a problem and the result is generally better. We know that from the business literature, from the educational literature. And so I think medicine has always understood and benefited from teams and environments, classes in which people bring to the table their own experiences and backgrounds and those are diverse, not homogenous. Again, obviously there have been some changes and shifts in how to go about identifying that and thinking about that, but the idea that we want people to feel a part of our community and feel comfortable in our community, that certainly hasn't changed. Our commitment to that remains very strong.

Cassie Evans:

So now we have some rapid-fire questions for you. Your first answer, so what's a crossword clue that you've been most proud of solving?

Tommy Wang:

So obviously you read something about my background because I do try to do the New York Times Crossword every day. Sometimes when it gets busy, I get a little behind, so I'm back around last Friday or so. And so I do so many crosswords that it's hard to remember individual clues, but clues that are actually pertinent to the place that I'm at are sometimes a little bit more memorable. So last Friday's crossword had a clue about a lounge chair named after a person, a famous lounge chair, and it was the Eames chair, which as many of you know, was made by Herman Miller, which is based in Michigan, one of the famous mid-century modern styles of lounge chairs.

Cassie Evans:

Amazing.

Sam Collie:

Yeah. We've gone past my understanding, but I can tell you're good at this. So yeah, maybe we'll keep them going rapid fire, right? Cat or dog.

Tommy Wang:

Currently dog. Originally a cat person. They're both great. They really changed our family life.

Cassie Evans:

Can always go back to cat. Is a hot dog a sandwich?

Tommy Wang:

Yes. It's a piece of meat between two sides of bread.

Sam Collie:

I like it. How about University of Michigan or Ohio State?

Tommy Wang:

Okay, that's just easy. University of Michigan.

Cassie Evans:

And then your favorite season in Michigan?

Tommy Wang:

So far, spring, but I'll see how summer goes.

Sam Collie:

All right. Window seat or aisle on the plane?

Tommy Wang:

Definitely aisle. Don't want to climb over people to use the bathroom.

Sam Collie:

Okay.

Cassie Evans:

Texting or phone calls?

Tommy Wang:

Definitely texting. No one seems to pick up the phone anymore.

Sam Collie:

I know. How about a leadership quality you value most?

Tommy Wang:

Transparency.

Cassie Evans:

And then, if you had to talk about a topic for 10 minutes, no preparation, what topic would you speak about?

Tommy Wang:

The New England Patriots.

Sam Collie:

Oh.

Cassie Evans:

Is that your football team?

Tommy Wang:

That is. I grew up in the Boston area. Tom Brady was a quarterback-

Sam Collie:

And a Michigan alum.

Tommy Wang:

... and a Michigan alum.

Cassie Evans:

Oh, there you go. Full circle.

Tommy Wang:

That's right. Yeah.

Cassie Evans:

As we wrap up, what's one message you would most want the University of Michigan Medical School learner community to take away from this conversation?

Tommy Wang:

There has never been a better time to be entering medicine and science. This is a great opportunity that you have. Don't be discouraged by some of the noise around us and some of the uncertainty. Things will get better. These are great careers, and you guys are some of the most talented people to address the major problems affecting us. And so I'm really excited to see what you do.

Cassie Evans:

And we're really, really excited to have you. This has been a super great conversation. So thank you so much for joining us today. I really did appreciate your humanistic approach to medicine, and I really look forward to you carrying that down from a top-down leadership perspective.

Sam Collie:

Yeah. I just wanted to say I agree with Cassie and I think I really appreciated getting your perspective on things today. I especially appreciated how you seem to be ready to take an adaptable approach to modern problems in medical education, be it length, expense, or breadth of knowledge. So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing where you take Michigan Medicine in the future. And we're really grateful for your time, your transparency, and your leadership. So thank you again for being with us today.

Tommy Wang:

Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it. Great speaking with both of you.