Opportunities for Faculty and Staff

Thirty-five years ago, the Academic Health Center students asked that their education prepare them for a team approach to the practice of health care. CHIP is the embodiment of that mission, the bridge across the silos of the separate professional schools.

Faculty, as well as students, have few opportunities to get out of our own disciplinary boxes; for me, CHIP has been an extremely important way to meet faculty in other schools, to get intellectual cross-fertilization, and to try out ideas. The fun part is the people, but my involvement with CHIP also makes me a better teacher. It is a chance to work with my future colleagues (and care givers!), to understand their lives and concerns and the changing face-and faces-of health care in a different way than I can in the classroom. It grounds my understanding of the contemporary history of medicine and makes me a more sensitive and nuanced historian.

The role of the Faculty Advisory Committee is to support the students' initiatives and to facilitate patches across bureaucratic institutional lines to make things happen. Sometimes, we take the students' examples and wishes and make them our own. Increasingly, I think we have our own agenda to make CHIP fill a void in faculty life outside of the interdisciplinary centers in the AHC, to serve as an interprofessional venue for faculty, students, and community members working together. CHIP has provided me with a level of professional and personal, curricular and extracurricular integration that makes being part of an AHC both exciting and deeply satisfying.

Best,

Jennifer Gunn, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History of Medicine
University of Minnesota