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A Letter from the Dean

The community spirit and sense of collaboration that permeates the Geisel School of Medicine and our partners at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the Veterans Affairs hospital, and Dartmouth College is a source of great pride. We live and work in an area with an undeniable 'sense of place' that fosters a close-knit community that draws faculty, students, and staff together to fulfill our mission to address the world's health problems through research and discovery, the evaluation and improvement of systems of healthcare, and the education of the best physicians and scientists.

Interaction naturally springs from that community spirit. It is the heart of the faculty-learner dyad and is felt profoundly among our faculty, students, and staff, and the patients whom we serve. Our faculty are remarkably dedicated to the professional development of our students, and our programs are designed for students to be active participants in their growth and learning and not to be merely passive consumers. Because of this, our students actively contribute to the generation of new scientific knowledge and provide healthcare to our region's citizens. It is this interaction that builds and sustains our community while establishing lifelong relationships.

Interaction also fuels our scientific innovation and discovery. Many of our research programs succeed because they draw together interdisciplinary teams of scientists to solve very complex biological and clinical problems. We can point to groundbreaking work that grew from our interdisciplinary teams that spans the full spectrum of biomedical science from immune-based therapy for cancer, to cystic fibrosis, to dietary toxin exposure in children, to mobile platforms to manage mental health treatment, and quantitative analysis of the costs and effectiveness of clinical procedures across the U.S., just to name a few. These impressive discoveries not only improve patient care locally, they scale to health systems throughout the country extending the impact of our programs.

Finally, the interactions between our faculty and the patients they care for is at the heart of our outstanding clinical programs. An example of this dedication to providing the best and most effective care is the fact that Norris Cotton Cancer Center consistently ranks among the best in outpatient patient care among NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center Consortium for Quality Improvement members.

For these reasons, it is appropriate to call our fundraising campaign for Geisel Interaction: The Campaign for Dartmouth Medicine. In this issue of Dartmouth Medicine, we introduce you to many of the priorities of our campaign, through which we seek to enhance our distinctive strengths with programs at the interface of biomedical discovery and health systems science, and to augment our outstanding clinical education program.

Our success in driving innovation in biomedical research, clinical care, and medical education is propelled by interactions with our philanthropic partners. This campaign is an important opportunity to recognize the power of those existing partnerships and an occasion to foster relationships with new partners in our community. The spirit of interaction that inspires these partnerships fuels the impact of our programs on the national healthcare landscape.


Duane Compton, PhD
Dean, Geisel School of Medicine


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Geisel School of Medicine at DartmouthDartmouth-Hitchcock Medical CenterWhite River Junction VAMCNorris Cotton Cancer CenterDartmouth College