Providence Reporter

As dean of Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, Dr. Mukesh K. Jain wears many hats. And many coats, too — from sport coats as he explores new collaborations with Rhode Island’s health systems to white lab coats as he conducts research in his lab at Sidney E. Frank Hall on genetic factors that regulate the immune and metabolic systems.

An accomplished physician-scientist, Jain is a champion for biomedical research and an academic leader who spent much of his career aligning clinical, academic and research missions between a major teaching hospital and medical school in Cleveland. Since arriving in Providence in March 2022, he’s been dressing that part at Brown in a number of new and intersecting roles.

Jain is the leader of Brown’s Division of Biology and Medicine, which encompasses the medical school, four biological science departments, 14 clinical departments, two hybrid departments and a dozen centers and institutes. He also holds the additional role of senior vice president for health affairs, overseeing initiatives that involve Brown faculty and hospital partners; leading arrangements regarding clinical, research and teaching activities; and providing strategic vision for the life sciences at Brown and in collaboration with hospital partners to advance Rhode Island as a center for biotech research and innovation.

As a physician, researcher, educator and academic leader, Jain is able to take a big-picture view of how medical education, basic research, health care and biomedical innovation fit together to benefit the community.

“Simply put, we want Rhode Island to be a place where cutting-edge research is happening in a way that informs the delivery of the most advanced therapies to patients, attracts outstanding researchers and students, garners interest from biotech and biopharma partners and advances the health and economic vibrancy of the local community in a kind of positive feed-forward loop,” Jain said. “That’s already starting to happen, and we are going to build upon it even further.”

On the anniversary of his start at Brown, Jain shared takeaways from his first year and his plans for the future.

Q: Just after your arrival, you helped kick off the University’s 50 Years of Medicine celebration. What have you learned about the history of medical education at Brown that has impacted the way you’ll think about stewarding medical education for the years to come?

There were two things that I thought were especially interesting about the founding of the medical school. One is that when announcing the inaugural Special Program in Basic Medical Sciences in 1963, then-president of Brown Barnaby Keeney talked about how our society has two great medical needs: People who discover new knowledge, and people who apply that new knowledge to help others. The other was that when the program officially became a medical school, the Brown Corporation had a really interesting perspective: they wanted to integrate social sciences and humanism into medicine. In 1972, that was very forward-thinking.

When I look at the history of the school, there's a scientific component to it — making and applying new discoveries. We've trained multiple generations of doctors, many of whom have gone on to do amazing things at national and international levels. We have developed amazing educational programs that beautifully integrate research, science and humanism — for example, the Program in Liberal Medical Education. And as we look at where we are now and where we’re going, we're continuing along the very same lines. The science that we're doing now is cutting-edge with the promise of impact at the highest levels. The investments that the University is making in life sciences are remarkable and we have the privilege of being the tip of the spear in the institution’s aspiration to augment research for impact. And we realize today, more than ever before, as we emerge from the pandemic, how important the humanistic qualities of a physician are to the care of a patient. So we’re continuing to build on those original values, but taking it up several levels moving forward.

Q: A new aligned research collaboration between Brown, Lifespan and Care New England aims to create a unified approach to conducting health and medical research. What are some of the benefits of the ARC?

First, by reducing barriers to collaboration, we will allow all of our faculty to be more productive in terms of grants and publications and, perhaps most critically, allow them to more easily translate their discoveries from bench to bedside and thereby impact on human health.

Second, it will help us recruit the best and brightest faculty, trainees and staff. Our proactive effort to integrate across the entire continuum of research — from the petri dish in the laboratory to patients who are in the hospital to studies at the population level within Rhode Island — is really uncommon nationally and will attract individuals committed to engaging in translational research to address unmet medical challenges.

Original source can be found here.