Retirement of Mike Weisfeldt, director of the Department of Medicine

To the Johns Hopkins Medicine community

Dear Colleagues:

It is with enormous appreciation for an extraordinary job spectacularly done, as well as a sense of loss—personal and professional—that we write to announce the intention of Myron (Mike) Weisfeldt to retire from his position as the William Osler Professor, director of the Department of Medicine and physician-in-chief of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, effective June 30, 2014.

Mike has been an exceptionally effective leader of the Department of Medicine, the 13 divisions of which cover an enormous range of medical specialties. He has forcefully strived to eradicate gender inequity in the department's divisions and promotions, while also staunchly improving the recruitment of under-represented minorities to our faculty. It was for his intense dedication to the advancement of diversity here at Johns Hopkins and in academic medicine that the national Association of Professors of Medicine bestowed upon him its 2008 Diversity Award.

Despite the regret that accompanies this announcement, it also is with delight that we congratulate Mike on his remarkably meritorious career in academic medicine—begun when he graduated as a pre-med from the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in 1962 and went on to graduate from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1965. His subsequent impact on the practice of medicine—especially in the fields of coronary artery disease and cardiopulmonary resuscitation—has been profound.

Mike has influenced physicians—and saved countless lives—through his research, teaching and advocacy. His reputation as an insightful, far-seeing cardiologist was showcased dramatically during his term as president of the American Heart Association from 1989 to 1990; it has been reconfirmed repeatedly by his international renown for promoting public access to portable defibrillators in such venues as airport terminals and other locations where crowds of people converge.

Mike also has been instrumental in guiding Johns Hopkins' legendary Osler Medical Residency program through a period of significant change and challenges, ensuring that it not only retained its reputation but enhancing it with the publication of the Osler Housestaff Manual, recognized by one reviewer as "the best of its type…for education of medical students and residents."

We are grateful that Mike is staying on for another full year. A search committee headed by Landon King, executive vice dean of the School of Medicine, vice dean for research and director of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine; and Jonathan Lewin, director of the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science and radiologist-in-chief of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, will lead the daunting task of finding his successor. 

We also are pleased that after Mike steps down from the department's directorship, he will  remain active on the faculty—conducting research, exercising his considerable prowess as an encourager of philanthropy and, as he says, doing "anything that might help" the new director to succeed.

Sincerely,

Paul B. Rothman, M.D.
Dean of the Medical Faculty
CEO, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Ronald R. Peterson
President
The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System
EVP, Johns Hopkins Medicine