Masters in Biomedical Sciences Program:

When I took an administrative position in the graduate school in 1999, I did so with the goal of creating a new educational program that I thought could be successful in our Newark environment– a Masters in Biomedical Sciences. The idea for this came straight from a fellow faculty member, Ted Flynn. Ted and several other faculty had been teaching evening courses at nearby colleges – Seton Hall and Rutgers-Newark –  in their masters programs. “We should be teaching these courses,” he said to me one day. “We have the personnel, the expertise and faculty who have the time. And, we could get the tuition income for ourselves rather than go through Rutgers or Seton Hall…” I kept thinking about this and decided it was a good idea and that as an administrator, I might be able to make it happen. The outcome exceeded all of our wildest dreams and is summarized in an article published in 2009 in the educational journal of the American Medical Association: Academic Medicine  (Master’s in Biomedical Science).

 

Educational Internships:

As the masters program grew, new courses were added either because of necessity, a faculty member volunteering (rare) or a student suggestion. We had a course for students considering a career in the pharmaceutical industry called Pharmaceutical Internship. One of our students, Marwa, ( a young woman who had been a dentist in Baghdad and joined our program during the early years of the war) said to me: “If you have a pharmaceutical internship for those students, why not have a teaching internship for students considering going into education?” I thought about it and within a semester the course was launched. I presented a report on the development of this course in the high schools of Newark at a national meeting in 2008 (Teacher Training Internships)