Francisco Cigarroa, MD, has agreed to serve as the acting dean of the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine and will continue to direct the Alvarez Center for Transplantation Hepatobiliary Surgery and Innovation.
Robert Leverence, MD, will continue his role as executive vice dean for clinical affairs under the acting dean, and will also serve as acting vice president for medical affairs of UT Health San Antonio.
The transition to these interim roles will begin immediately and present an exceptional opportunity for these dedicated individuals to continue to advance the organization to elite status among academic medical centers nationally. UT Health San Antonio has nearly doubled the size of its research and clinical missions in the last six years and has also significantly increased the size of its educational mission.
The basic science chair, clinical chairs and the vice deans will report to Cigarroa.
Leverence will continue to oversee the clinical infrastructure and staff, as well as fill the health science center-wide role of supervising medical affairs. During this transition, Acting President Robert Hromas, MD, FACP, expects to personally complete the Long School of Medicine budget process and complete some of the key recruitments to chair positions currently in search, as well as the Mays Cancer Center director search.
New associate vice president for innovation and development named
Anthony Francis, a renowned leader in translating research to market opportunity, was appointed as associate vice president for innovation and development in the Office of the Vice President for Research.
His primary role with UT Health San Antonio will be to foster entrepreneurialism and innovation in support of complex projects across various technical areas at the university. He will work with investigators, inventors and researchers to translate their innovations into commercial opportunities that will positively impact people’s lives and benefit the global community.
He joins the institution from the University of California, San Francisco, where he was executive director of the Office of Technology Management and Advancement. Francis is credited with transforming the university’s commercialization and partnering approach to become a “market first” process, substantially increasing equity and license revenue with year-on-year record levels of income and activity.
New director named for Charles E. Cheever Jr. Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics
Matthew Dacso, MD, MSc, has been appointed as the new director of the Charles E. Cheever, Jr. Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics and professor in the department of medicine. He is slated to begin his role May 1. Dacso was selected after a national search led by Francisco Cigarroa, MD.
Dacso joins UT Health San Antonio from The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, where he is chair ad interim of the department of global health and emerging diseases in the School of Public and Population Health, a tenured associate professor in the departments of internal medicine and microbiology and immunology and the director of the John Sealy School of Medicine Global Health concentration.
As a clinician, he provides care in the outpatient primary care clinics as well as the inpatient general internal medicine teaching service. He is also an active member of the UTMB Biocontainment Care Unit emerging/special pathogens response team.