City of Hope has established a new Center for Graduate and Professional Studies, which will bring together all academic and training programs and foster a unified educational thrust.
Susan Kane, Ph.D., associate director of Beckman Research Institute, will lead the new center. Kane explained that the new center aims to coordinate City of Hope’s educational strengths and create a cohesive academic campus.
In the past, the Graduate School of Biological Sciences and the Office of Continuing Medical Education have operated independently of each other without shared resources; departments created their own research or training programs, and postdoctoral fellows formed their own campus association to meet their common needs. The new center will align such efforts.
Kane will lead the center in her new capacity as senior vice president of academics. Steven Novak, Ph.D., will oversee the administrative aspects of the center and work with external accrediting agencies. Tom LeBon, Ph.D., will provide support in student affairs, while Queenie Du will serve as registrar. April Armendariz will provide overall administrative assistance for the center.
The Graduate School of Biological Sciences will continue under the deanship of John J. Rossi, Ph.D., and the Office of Continuing Medical Education will operate with its current staff, with Jean Kagan as director. Kane said that both areas will benefit from the center’s centralized administration of registrar, recruitment and outreach, and outcomes research.
The center also will house two newly created offices: the Office of Postdoctoral Studies and the Office of Clinical Research Training.
Kane soon will begin recruiting a leader for the Office of Postdoctoral Studies, the central point of contact for all incoming and current doctoral fellows. In the Office of Clinical Research Training, Jonathan Espenschied, M.D., will serve as clinical research training developer and Ann Geva has moved from the General Clinical Research Center to be clinical research training coordinator. Espenschied and Geva will be responsible for developing and implementing coordinated curricula and training activities for clinical researchers.
“We have a number of outstanding clinical fellowship programs and world-class clinical researchers who have been underserved in the didactic portion of their training,” Kane said. “There are tremendous synergies to be gained from taking a more integrated approach to these programs.”
City of Hope also is organizing a faculty senate, which will advise the center once the senate is fully chartered and operational. “I am a big believer in shared governance and I look forward to having a productive and collaborative working relationship with the faculty senate,” said Kane.
Kane’s office is currently located in the Helford Office Building, but will move to different quarters when the building is razed in preparation for construction on the new Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for Cancer Immunotherapeutics and Tumor Immunology, which will house the graduate school.
“We are entering into a new era at City of Hope and raising the visibility of educational activities on campus,” said Kane. “The Center for Graduate and Professional Studies will provide a more efficient and collaborative approach to sustaining our educational programs for students, fellows, staff and faculty alike.”
