Investing in Biomedical Discovery

To the Johns Hopkins Medicine community

Dear Colleagues,

As part of Johns Hopkins Medicine's commitment to becoming the exemplary model for biomedical research, our Strategic Plan outlines a bold new path with goals to advance and integrate discovery, innovation, translation and dissemination.

Now that we're at the halfway mark of the first year of the Strategic Plan rollout, we are pleased to share some progress.

• The JHM Research Council, established to guide our overall research strategy, convened last month with representatives from most of the school of medicine departments and institutes present. The council's immediate attention is on designing programs to improve success with National Institutes of Health grants and identifying strategies to access alternative funding sources, as well as creating systems to better quantify the impact of our research and developing a governance model for the oversight and administration of its funding.
• A new, transformative Discovery Fund has been created, which will support novel, synergistic, collaborative proposals from school of medicine investigators. The JHM Research Council is currently working on the request for application, which is expected in April for submission of grants in May. Funding begins in July 2014.
• We have a forthcoming plan to reorganize the Office of Research Administration so that processing grant proposals and research agreements is a more efficient process. Our staff members who handle grants will be able to take advantage of additional training programs that will enhance the grant application and investigator experience.

Johns Hopkins Medicine remains at the research forefront within the academic medical center community. Thank you for your support as we work together to implement key tactics of our Strategic Plan, which allows us to continue to lead the nation in biomedical discovery and in delivering on the promise of medicine. We look forward to communicating additional progress in the future.

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