A Message from the President

Janus was the ancient Roman deity who simultaneously looked backward and forward, viewing both endings and beginnings. Today, Thomas Jefferson University stands at a Janus-like point: gazing back on 200 years of impact on education, scholarship, research discovery, and application, and looking forward, defining how we’ll have a deep, meaningful impact for decades to come.

As we enter our third century, this is the overarching goal we have set for ourselves: We will build on our legacy of achievement in ways that ensure the value of a Jefferson education continues to grow — for both students and alumni — and the impact of our research continues to increase.

Toward that goal, we’ve been addressing a series of strategic questions that will help us set our path forward. The three most important of those questions are:

1) What does the world most need from higher education?

2) What are the most significant emerging characteristics of the nature of work and employers’ workforce needs?

3) What aspirations should we have regarding our comprehensive research programs, and how should we prioritize those aspirations?

Ultimately, our answers will be both multifaceted and interrelated and could be summarized this way: The world needs us to help improve human lives, fuel innovation, drive economic growth, develop and promote sustainable practices, and build broader understanding and equity. It needs us to continue nurturing our graduates’ ability to recognize, navigate, and leverage the opportunities that economic, environmental, and technological change creates; to curate their lifelong learning; to identify problems; and to be creative, innovative, and collaborative problem-solvers. The world needs us to catalyze discovery of new knowledge and the application of that knowledge to benefit people, communities, and society at large.

Over the past year, university faculty and academic leaders — collaborating with leaders of the broader Jefferson enterprise — have been working hard to identify the specific strategies and tactics that will best enable us to meet those needs. That planning process continues, but I want to share with you several especially exciting initiatives.

Building on the National Cancer Institute’s designation of our Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center as a Comprehensive Cancer Center (see the article on page 26), we are developing plans to become a National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) “Hub Institution.” Applying for CTSA designation will require at least three years of assessment, program planning, budgeting, and partnership development. But if our application is successful Jefferson would be recognized as a national leader in translating research into improved patient care. The award would have significant practical benefits: increasing external funding, spurring new research across schools and departments, and fueling expansion of our professional training programs.

Over the past five years, Thomas Jefferson University and its individual schools have been climbing the various “Best Colleges and Universities” rankings. Those jumps are not an end unto themselves, so much as a benchmark of our ability to communicate the Jefferson “value proposition” effectively to potential students and their families, to employers who are evaluating the resumes of both recent graduates and longstanding alumni, and to leaders of colleges and universities around the country. It is a way to ensure that the world knows that we deliver a high-value education with over 200 academic programs and that our graduates are prepared for the future of work and career-long success as leaders in their professions and their communities.