Dr. David Brenner began his academic career at UC San Diego two decades ago and came back to the university in February 2007 as vice chancellor of Health Sciences and dean of the School of Medicine.  He is a distinguished physician and a leader in the field of gastroenterological research.  He started here as a fellow in 1985, later joining the faculty of UC San Diego School of Medicine, and serving as a physician at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.  He then served as a professor and chief of the Division of Digestive Diseases and Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chair of the Department of Medicine at Columbia University.  In this interview, he talks about why he was drawn back to UC San Diego, the power of academic medicine, and what sparked his interest in gastroenterology and medicine.

Brenner: UC San Diego Health Sciences has the opportunity of becoming a premier academic medical center for the 21st century. I wanted to join the leadership team to participate in the excitement of this challenge. I have previously worked at several outstanding academic medical centers (Yale, NIH, UNC and Columbia) and I want to bring the skills that I learned at other academic medical centers to UC San Diego. Of all the places where I have worked or visited, UC San Diego has the greatest potential to develop a novel, successful program, in which health sciences is integrated into the university and into the community.

Brenner: The most “concrete” priority is to increase our facilities for patient care, education and research. We also need to grow our clinical faculty and clinical practice in focused areas.  As the founding members of the medical school retire, we need funds to recruit the next generation of researchers and educators. Finally, we need state financial support for the new Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Brenner: Academic medicine has three missions—teaching the next generation of health care providers and researchers, conducting research in the biomedical sciences, and providing patient care, including state-of-the-art treatments and care for the underserved.  The power of academic medicine is the synergy that occurs when all three missions are balanced and interactive.  An example is students participating in the highest quality care and the most exciting research.

Brenner: There is no lack of excitement here. In patient care, we broke ground for the Sulpizio Family Cardiovascular Center, which will provide multidisciplinary, patient-friendly care. In education, we are actively planning new curricula for the medicine and pharmacy students. We will soon break ground for a new medical education building that will provide an integrative education with interactions between all students and faculty through learning communities, telemedicine and medical situation simulations. In research, the San Diego Stem Cell Consortium—a partnership between UC San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute, Burnham Institute for Medical Research, and Salk Institute for Biological Studies—is planning a new research facility devoted to stem cell research. This will be the first time the research institutes on Torrey Pines Mesa will share a facility to perform collaborative research and training.

Brenner: UC San Diego Health Sciences is rich intellectually but not financially. Unlike older schools, we do not have an endowment to provide support. Therefore, budget cuts at the state and federal level can compromise our ability to perform our missions, including attracting and retaining outstanding faculty and students. 

Brenner: My colleagues in the Health Sciences, the rest of UC San Diego, and the biomedical research community are incredible. There is a sense of excitement and collaboration that is unique. Many people visit us to try to understand and reproduce the success of this community.

Brenner: I always knew I wanted to enter academic medicine because it provides such a wide range of opportunities for scholarship and service. It is the only profession that I know of that allows you to reinvent yourself as your interests and skills change. I liked the opportunity to do basic research, patient care, and teaching at all levels. As a clinical discipline, a gastroenterologist is a complete physician, involved in all aspects of patient care, from the original patient history and physical, to endoscopic procedures, to interpretation of the tissue specimen, and finally to many aspects of therapy. I took on leadership positions in gastroenterology, internal medicine, and now Health Sciences, in order to build new programs and improve the environment for students and faculty.

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