How UK prepares Kentucky's next generation of doctors
The responsibility of leading the charge to educate a new generation of healthcare providers, researchers and leaders isn’t something UK College of Medicine Dean Robert DiPaola takes lightly.
With the challenges facing healthcare today, he hopes to position UK as a national leader in solving those issues through multidisciplinary research, transformational education and advanced clinical care.
The UK College of Medicine is expanding both in terms of the research being conducted on campus and the educational opportunities offered beyond the Lexington campus. Watch the video below to learn how this growth is designed to help the overall health of all Kentuckians.
About Robert DiPaola
DiPaola is the dean of the College of Medicine at UK and vice president of clinical academic affairs for UK HealthCare. With considerable experience in the area of translational research and a primary focus on the study of prostate cancer, he was one of the earliest investigators to target the degradation of bcl-2/apoptosis and autophagy/cancer metabolism in both the laboratory and clinic as a means to restore drug sensitivity in prostate cancer. He has led clinical studies that have had impact on standards of care, including recent studies published as senior author in high impact journals including the New England Journal of Medicine (2015) and Lancet (2016).
He has also had considerable experience in leadership and administration in research, clinical operations and education. At Rutgers he led the growth, restructuring and integration of an NCI-designated comprehensive cancer center as a full-financial responsibility center within a large state university matrix; the creation and launch of a full-clinical service line co-managed with Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, where he also served on the board; and programmatic multidisciplinary research initiatives with an emphasis on building upon academic strengths bridging multiple schools and institutes.
As dean at UK, he manages all aspects of operations of the College of Medicine with approximately 1,000 full-time faculty; is leading efforts at state-wide four-year program campus expansions in Bowling Green and Northern Kentucky; is a leader on efficiency-based initiatives for clinical operations in both the hospital and practice-based settings; and has increased philanthropic funding for the College of Medicine.
