Saint Louis University School of Medicine is creating a Gladney Scholar Residency program that will allow new physicians to research and work in the areas of diversity. The announcement came at this year’s annual John H. Gladney M.D. awards dinner on May 7, which recognized fourth-year medical students for their individual work to further diversity at the school and in the community.
“Our hope is to create an endowment to attract and support the scholarship of young, underrepresented minority faculty at the school of medicine,” said Mark Varvares, M.D. He is a former otolaryngology chair at SLU’s School of Medicine who is now the associate chair for administration at the Department of Otology and Laryngology at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.
“This effort to create the program is critical, because in spite of John’s life’s work, the climb remains difficult; the numbers of underrepresented minorities in academic medicine small.”
The new Gladney Scholar Residency Program will protect 20 percent of a minority SLU physician’s time to conduct academic research. Fundraising has begun to endow the fellowship. The school wants to raise a million dollars for this endeavor.
“We are trying to get policies in place that will not only add to the diversity of the university medical school and the community, but also policies that will be put in place to maintain that we can retain diversity once we improve it,” Michael Railey, M.D., associate dean for Multicultural Affairs and associate professor of Family & Community Medicine at SLU School of Medicine said.
In order to do that, Railey said he talked to Dr. Varvares and Dr. Angela Sharkey, a cardiologist and associate dean for faculty affairs and development, and came up with the idea of a rotating fellowship.
“What that means is, a new faculty person who comes to St. Louis U. would have protected time to do research in the area of health disparity or research in a particular area of interest that hopefully would improve the desire of a diversity candidate to come to St. Louis U,” Dr. Railey explained.
The Gladney awards and the residency program are named in honor of the late John Herschel Gladney, M.D., former chairman of the Department of Otolaryngology at the medical school.
“In spite of the fact he had to go against the grain in every endeavor to obtain his medical education, training and to establish his practice, he accomplished so many firsts,” Dr. Varvares said of Dr. Gladney, who was the ENT chair when Varvares was a SLU medical student .
“He was the first African-American otolaryngologist to be admitted to the prestigious Triological Society when he submitted his thesis on the role of diabetes in hearing loss; the first African-American chair of an academic otolaryngology department in the U.S. He was president of the medical staff at Saint Louis University Hospital in 1970, and later on, at the St. Louis ENT Club and the Missouri ENT Association.”
Dr. Varvares came back to SLU to chair the department himself and then left recently for the position at Harvard.
“In spite of the constant push to reach goals that were unfairly harder for him to reach than his white colleagues, with whom he worked side-by-side, he never lost his incredible grace, sense of humor and scientific curiosity,” Dr. Varvares said.
“For as long as I knew him, he maintained an almost child-like enthusiasm for scientific discovery, and how investigation and the understanding of the mechanism of disease was so critically important to daily clinical practice.”
Railey said individuals, organizations and corporate sponsors who are interested in supporting Gladney Scholar Residency program to contact the Multicultural Affairs Office at the School of Medicine, contact Michael Higgins at mhiggins9@slu.edu in the financing and gift department, call 314-977-2849 or visit giving.slu.edu.
“What we want to do is extend diversity beyond medical students,” Railey said. “We want to have diverse faculty, diverse administration, diverse leadership. We want the university to improve its diversity at all levels.”
