Dean's Holiday Message

The Holiday season is a time of rejoicing, the exchange of gifts, and a measure of the promise of things to come. There has been much to rejoice over this past last year; individual recognition for the research spearheaded by our basic science and clinical faculty in the form of multiple new and renewed contracts and grants during an increasingly difficult time of constrained federal resources, individual recognition for both exceptionally promising novel thinking as well as prior pioneering concepts put to practice on a world scale, major team wins like the NIH-funded Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences, and the opening and routine use of the Surgical and Clinical Skills Center. Similarly, we have or are about to open hard earned gifts from our fellow Texans and many friends; the Institute for Molecular Medicine, the Research Replacement Building, and further on the horizon, the new Dental School, Stem Cell Center and Neuroscience Institute, marked expansion nearing completion at Memorial Hermann Hospital and long awaited additions in final planning by our other partner in the Harris County Hospital District at LBJ - some integrally part of the medical school, but all a part of what we are about - providing the best functional laboratory possible in which to incubate the caretakers of the future. One can only look to the future with much hope and expectation. This has been a year of outstanding successes and much promise.

This medical school has come a long way, and I thank each and every one of you for the part you play in making that happen. Building a great medical school is not simply about structure - it is about its people, about shared visions, about enduring commitments, about unfaltering efforts, about endless compassion and understanding. To be successful we all must do our best to assure that we contribute our best every day in every way. Most of what we individually do never appears in Scoop, on the Web site, or in the news, but cumulatively they contribute to each more visible marker of success - steps can never be achieved alone.

I thank you for each and every success story that you helped to happen in 2006 as we look forward to an even more academically prosperous New Year.

Happy holidays and best wishes for 2007.