Dean presents compensation plan at town hall

Interim Dean Jerry Wolinsky

Interim Dean Jerry Wolinsky held the second of two town hall meetings regarding the new Faculty Compensation Plan Aug. 23, presenting the basic tenets of the documents and answering questions from the audience.

Approved June 15, 2007, by UT System, the plan was created at request of UT System by administration with input from Faculty Senate.

“If you make changes in the way you are practicing six months from now, it will be too late. That is why we need to talk it over and understand the plan now,” Wolinsky said.

The approved compensation plan, which applies to all full-time and part-time Medical School faculty, may be found in full via a secure link from the Medical School’s homepage, http://med.uth.tmc.edu. A link to the video of the town hall meeting also is available there.

The plan cites five areas of faculty compensation:

1. Medical School core salary component
2. Specialty/discipline-specific component
3. Augmentation
4. Supplements
5. Incentive compensation

These areas provide recognition for increases and reductions for when performances exceed or diminish below expectation.

“You can think of augmentation as ‘salary at risk,’ or salary that is flexible in the course of the year,” Wolinsky explained. “We will be looking at this after the first six months to see if we need to make downward changes in this area.”

An incentives reserve pool has been established for FY08, which can be released at mid-year and at the end of the fiscal year.

“It can be possible for a faculty member to receive an incentive payment in a department that is ‘in the red,’” Wolinsky said.

There is a system of recourse if a faculty member is not satisfied with his or her salary, which goes through the newly created Faculty Compensation Committee.

“If the plan is working well, the salary won’t go up or down during the year unless something unusual happens – unusual good. For the vast majority of the faculty, this will feel like business as usual,” Wolinsky said.

For the full town hall and compensation plan, see the secure link at  http://med.uth.tmc.edu.

-D. Brown


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Kim named chair of Neurosurgery

Dr. Dong H. Kim

Interim Dean Jerry Wolinsky has announced that Dr. Dong H. Kim, an expert cerebrovascular surgeon, will be the new chair of the Department of Neurosurgery, effective Oct. 1.

“This is an important recruitment for our Medical School that will help to catapult us to the forefront in the clinical neurosciences in Houston and beyond,” Wolinsky said. “I personally look forward to working with Dong as I return to clinical research and practice.”

Kim is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. After general surgery training at Harvard, he completed his neurosurgery training under Dr. Charles Wilson at UCSF. From 1998 to 2003, Kim was on faculty at the Medical School and founded the Comprehensive Center for Cerebrovascular Surgery at Memorial Hermann – Texas Medical Center.

He was subsequently recruited to the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he maintained both an active practice and a research program identifying genetic defects related to intracranial aneurysm pathogenesis. In both 2005 and 2006, Kim received the Brigham and Women's achievement award (“Partners in Health”); this year, Kim was named by the American Heart Association as a principal investigator of the newly funded Harvard-Bugher Center for Genetic Stroke Prevention.

Kim is succeeding Dr. Dennis Vollmer, who after nine years of guiding the departments of neurosurgery at the UT Health Science Center at Houston and UTHSC-San Antonio is stepping down as chair. He will remain an active member of the Medical School and focus his talents and surgical skills in three areas.  He will continue to hone his interests in cerebrovascular neurosurgery, broaden his scope as the medical director of the Gamma Knife Facility at MHH-TMC for the non-invasive treatment of surgically inaccessible vascular disorders of the central nervous system and other intracranial diseases, and help to expand a spine surgery clinic with an interdisciplinary approach to more complex disorders of the vertebral column and spinal cord.  

Additionally, Vollmer will concentrate on the establishment of a neurosurgical residency training program at UT and MHH-TMC. “This is a part of the graduate medical education portfolio at our institution that has been long lacking,” Wolinsky said.

Kim also will be the director of both the Mischer Neuroscience Institute and newly formed Mischer Neurosurgical Associates of the Memorial Hermann Healthcare System.

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State Center awards certification to Pre-K Classrooms for the ’07-’08 School Year

The State Center for Early Childhood Development at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston is awarding over 450 classrooms across the state with the new “Texas Readiness Certification” for the 2007-08 school year.

The “Texas Readiness Certification: Ready for School, Ready for Life” program, developed by the State Center and 20 community partnerships from across Texas, evaluates pre-school, Head Start and childcare classrooms and supports teacher training.

The way it works: pre-schools and centers apply to the state center and provide the staff with information about its classrooms, such as the learning environment and curriculum.  The children in those classrooms then are followed from pre-K into kindergarten and evaluated by the state center on their early reading and social development to determine if the pre-K classroom helped prepare the student for success in elementary school.

“This certification will most benefit families. For the first time, parents will finally have something very clear to look at, to see if the pre-K they are considering will help their child be prepared for kindergarten, to help their children start school ready to learn,” said Dr. Susan Landry, the state center’s director and the director of the Children’s Learning Institute at the UT Health Science Center at Houston.

A crucial part of the program is the Web-based training developed for teachers. “The goal is to link the training the teacher receives to the learning experiences they provide for preschoolers – to change what they do in the classroom to make sure it is helping the child get ready for school.  The right teacher, with the right curriculum, can help a child develop a foundation for not just kindergarten, but for their entire education,” said Landry, who is the Michael Matthew Knight Professor of Pediatrics.

- M. McDonald

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