Dear Health Sciences Faculty, Staff and Students:

I am pleased to announce the following health sciences leadership appointments at the associate vice chancellor level.

Derek C. Angus, MD, MPH, has agreed to become our inaugural associate vice chancellor for health care innovation, a role that will complement his recent appointment as UPMC’s chief health care innovation officer and foster more strategic linkages between the two organizations as we seek to enable learning health systems.

In his new University role, Dr. Angus will work to stimulate the fusion of multiple disciplines and skills, blending expertise in clinical care delivery with organization science, decision psychology, machine learning, Bayesian trial designs, causal inference, implementation science and behavioral economics, among others.

Dr. Angus’ mandate is to enable us to learn while doing—to make smarter, faster decisions and create better integration across all of the translational, clinical, and health services and health policy domains on campus. In doing so, Dr. Angus will be supporting our entire health sciences community in working together more effectively and in concert with UPMC.

I have also asked Dr. Angus to give equal attention to creative disruption in health sciences education. Progress in health care innovation requires the development of leaders and teams with considerable range across disciplines that have not necessarily been emphasized and have rarely been united in the same person or team. Thus, Dr. Angus will also be identifying opportunities to think about curricular innovations and novel training programs across the health sciences.

Dr. Angus is ideally positioned for his new roles. He is an internationally renowned and highly prolific scientist who has developed and led many successful multidisciplinary collaborations of basic scientists, clinicians, data scientists, economists, and behavioral and social scientists. In recent years, he has been a leader in developing and evaluating approaches that facilitate smarter decision-making and faster learning in health care, including novel Bayesian adaptive trial designs, the application of machine learning to large-scale data, and the use of behavioral economics and decision psychology to support optimal decision-making.

Dr. Angus is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and has received multiple national and international honors. He completed medical school and internal medicine training at the University of Glasgow and affiliated teaching hospitals, and he completed a fellowship in critical care medicine and his MPH in health services administration at Pitt.

Promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and health justice is a top priority for the future of our health sciences schools. To lead our initiatives in these areas, I have engaged someone most of you know already—Paula Davis, MA—and am delighted to announce her promotion to the newly created position of associate vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Ms. Davis will be responsible for coordinating the recruitment and retention of diversity among faculty, students and staff in the health sciences schools. She will also provide education on cultural competence, creating an inclusive environment and eliminating structural and implicit bias. In addition, her office will aim to increase engagement among all health sciences stakeholders through a number of new initiatives and events that will examine the intersection of health sciences, racism and marginalized populations.

As the founding assistant vice chancellor for health sciences diversity since 2007, Ms. Davis has led the Office of Health Sciences Diversity in promoting a diverse and inclusive environment throughout the schools of the health sciences. At the School of Medicine, she has served as assistant dean for admissions and financial aid, for student affairs, and as director of diversity programs.

Ms. Davis has worked in a variety of student-support fields over the past 35 years, including academic advising, admissions, alumni relations and financial aid and has worked with pre-college, undergraduate, graduate and medical students. She was director of admissions, financial aid, and alumni relations for Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management (now the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy) before joining Pitt’s School of Medicine in 1994.

In 2003, Ms. Davis was honored with the Chancellor’s Affirmative Action Award. Her professional activities have included two terms as director of the northeast region of the National Association of Medical Minority Educators, vice president of the board of the FISA Foundation, vice president of the Greater Pittsburgh Higher Education Diversity Consortium, and advocacy for autism research and education. She earned her BA in English and MA in communications at Pitt.

I’m pleased to appoint Mark W. Geraci, MD, who recently came to Pitt Med from Indiana University School of Medicine, to the position of associate vice chancellor for interdisciplinary research. This position is an update and reconfiguration of the role of associate vice chancellor for biomedical research, which was held by Michelle S. Broido, PhD, for the last two decades. Dr. Broido retired at the end of August 2020, and we owe her a debt of gratitude for her extraordinary service in establishing and leading this essential health sciences-wide function.

One of my goals for the future of Pitt Health Sciences is to be among the top five programs nationally in translational excellence, team science, large center grants, and commercialization and product development—and to be among the top three in overall research excellence. As a key step in achieving this vision, I have asked Dr. Geraci to advance research efforts across all six health sciences schools by enhancing the infrastructure necessary to support the University’s expanding biomedical research activities—especially large-scale, interdisciplinary projects that extend even beyond the health sciences to other Pitt schools and programs. Dr. Geraci will work to build strong, cross-cutting collaborations, with the ultimate goals of promoting health and healing, curing disease and generating life-enhancing products and technologies.

At Pitt, Dr. Geraci will also serve as professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonology, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine. His research interests center on the role of the signaling molecules eicosanoids in the biology of lung cancer and pulmonary vascular diseases. His lung cancer research also focuses on early carcinogenesis and chemoprevention and the use of lung cancer animal models. Dr. Geraci’s work has yielded important insights, such as the finding that airway dysplasia could be reversed in former smokers by using the drug iloprost.

Prior to joining us in August 2020, Dr. Geraci was the John B. Hickman Professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine. There, he expanded the department’s research portfolio, clinical growth and financial position while broadening diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. He also held leadership roles with the Precision Health Initiative program and Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.

Dr. Geraci earned his BA at the University of Colorado studying molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and psychology. He received his MD from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and trained in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School before completing a pulmonary sciences and critical care medicine fellowship at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

Please join me in welcoming these outstanding leaders to their new roles.