1923 Graduating Class

55 student in the class. 45 men are present along with the only three women in the class.

Photo Courtesy of IUPUI Image Collection, IUPUI University Library Special Collections and Archives UA24-000270.

Catherine Palmer, PhD. established the cytogenetics laboratory for analysis of human chromosomal disorders, 1962.
IUSM graduate, 1953
Professor Emerita of Medical and Molecular Genetics

For a more detailed account of this event, read the Medical & Molecular Genetics at IUSM A Brief Glance Back from the Long Road forward.

Indiana University School of Medicine News Releases/Media Advisories. Accessed 12/10/2007.

Louise Yoh Owens, MD, class of 1970, a Bloomington, IN, gastroenterologist and family practitioner, received in June 1997 the U.S. Attorney General's Special Recognition Award for Service to Victims. A former president of the Monroe County Council on the Prevention of Child Abuse, she has worked to emphasize the connection between some chronic stomach and intestinal problems and physical and sexual abuse.

Alumni News, 1970 Louise Yoh Owens. Indiana University Medicine. M.D. Fall 1997: p14.

"Jane Henney, MD, was approved last October as the new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. For the past three years, she served as vice president for health sciences at the University of New Mexico. Before that, she was dean of medicine at the University of Kansas. Dr. Henney's husband Bob Graham serves as executive director of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Her brother, Frederic Alan Henney, '80, practices family medicine in Monticello, Ind. Dr. Henney took her post in November. "

Indiana University Medicine. Alumni News, 1973. Indiana University School of Medicine Winter 1998:p14.

Scholarships: The Decidingfactor inWhether many Excellent Studentscan Finance a Medical Education

As costs for higher education continue to skyrocket, so does the importance of -and competition for - financial aid.

At the Indiana University School of Medicine, the Financial Aid Office distributes more than $310,000 annually in scholarships to approximately 850 medical students like third-year student Linda Quinn, who for the last two years has received lU's Distinguished Student Award. Quinn was the first student to receive this $4,000 scholarship, which is renewable based upon her continuing academic excellence.

For three years the Lake County, Indiana, native also received the $2,000 Peter B. Westhaysen Award for students from that county. For the last three summers, she completed research projects valued at $2,000 each, and she won the $1,000 oral presentation contest associated with the research program.

"Altogether, I am now receiving $6,000 per year in scholarships which covers my tuition," she says. "That helps considerably." Quinn, who also paid her way through undergraduate school, says she probably will owe about $40,000 when she graduates. But that is not unreasonble, she says without the scholarships, she more likely would owe $60,000.

"I was accepted at four other schools," she says, "and some did not offer scholarships. Johns Hopkins and IU offered similar financial aid packages, but the in-state scholarship is what made the difference. I couldn't get that anywhere else. The education I'm receiving at IU is comparable to the education I would receive at other, perhaps more well-known schools. If you want to learn, IU has the resources available. For me, it also had helpful scholarships.

"I love medicine, but had no family resources to support my training," Quinn adds. "The scholarships have helped me come through with substantial - but not unreasonable - debt. Scholarships will become even more critical to future medical students. Medicine will become much more selective - those who can afford to go to school will go, and we will miss out on a lot of talent because some people will not be able to afford it."

In fact, at IU less than half of those seeking the $310,000 available in scholarships receive financial awards. Robert Stump, director of admissions at the IU School of Medicine, says, "Unfortunately, scholarship funds have not kept pace with the increasing costs of higher education."

In addition, the national medical student applicant pool is shrinking. As recently as the mid-1970s, about 40,000 students were applying for 17,000 places. Today, 28,000 are applying for 16,000 spots nationally. At IU, the numbers have decreased to about 1,300 applications (404 from Indiana residents) from 1,800 (800 from state residents). Consequently, as the national applicant pool has decreased, competition among medical schools for the top students has increased, and scholarships have become an important drawing card.

"In admission questionnaires, many students say financial aid is a deciding factor in which school they attend," Stump says.

According to James Carter, M.D., associate dean for student and curricular affairs, the School's individual scholarship goal is a minimum of $1,000. Only the Distinguished Student Award - the largest scholarship available - is worth $4,000. Often, these scholarships help with tuition but fall short of covering a student's total expenses. For example, when IU students add up tuition and all living expenses, the total annual bill amounts to more than $14,000 (more than $20,000 for out-of-state students).

A scholarship liaison committee, chaired by George T. Lukemeyer, M.D., executive associate dean, which includes representatives from Admissions, Students Affairs and the Office of Development, is investigating ways to increase scholarship funds.
"One of our major goals is to significantly increase the number of large scholarships we offer to help attract top medical students," Dr. Lukemeyer says.

The committee also hopes to increase the average scholarship award to all students who have financial need so the award more reasonably covers expenses. The average indebtedness of an IU medical student, with loans, is approximately $29,000. The national average is higher as it includes many private institutions.

IU School of Medicine alumni and friends, corporations and foundations are recognizing, now more than ever before, the need for scholarship money and have begun making contributions to the School's scholarship program.

For example, Walter Laudeman, M.D., Class '26, recently made a generous gift to establish the Dr. Walter A. and Polly Roberts Laudeman Scholarship Fund to help ensure quality medical practitioners in Indiana. Interest income from the endowment will create scholarships for worthy, financially needy medical students.
These gifts - and others like them - will boost financial aid programs, enabling IU to attract the highest-quality applicants and help offset the ever-increasing costs of higher education for excellent students like Linda Quinn.

Scholarships: The Deciding Factor in Whether many Excellent Students can Finance a Medical Education. Center. Indiana University Medical Center Winter 1990: p.19.

Nurturing the Nurturers: Center of Excellence Will Champion Advances in Women's Health Dewana Stubbs, MD, clinical assistant professor of medicine, initiated and manages an education and intervention program on domestic violence for adolescent men and women seen at the Wishard Health Services Westside Health Clinic. "We are focusing on the adolescent in this program because we want to intervene at a time that will prevent future abuse," she says. "We believe we can instill skills to prevent young adolescent women from becoming victims and young adolescent men from becoming abusers." Nellie is a young working mother of a one-year-old. She's been married for two years, a June bride just two weeks after graduation. Determined to be independent, Nellie talks tough when she's with her friends and acquaintances. She believes her marriage has liberated her - it is her equalizer with her parents. She and her husband are buying a house, own two cars and a truck, and are starting their own business. But Nellie has a secret life too: she is a battered woman. Only recently, after arriving at work with serious injuries for the third time in six months, did she share her secret with a secretary. Nellie didn't fall down the stairs and break her arm, and she's not suffering from TMJ but from a broken jaw. The plain fact is that her husband is beating her. Friends and family tell her to leave because her husband's behavior won't improve. But Nellie believes she must work it out. Besides, she argues, he truly loves her he is so sorry after he hurts her. What would her leaving do to her husband? And, her son needs his dad. Her friends don't have the answers. They wonder why Nellie's doctors and nurses don't do something. They are the experts can't they see what's going on? Thousands of women in Indiana are in abusive relationships, sometimes with an angry husband, other times related to alcohol or illegal drugs. Their friends and families don't know how to help them, and many times they are unaware of the problem. The resources in the community are nearly invisible, and often inaccessible to many women who need them. But there is an action under way to improve this situation for Nellie and the millions of women who are living with health dilemmas, whether caused by abuse or by other factors. Most major illnesses among women are preventable. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women, almost entirely attributable to smoking. Heart disease is the other leading cause of early death among women. It is attributed to poor diet and lack of exercise, but more notable is the fact that it is diagnosed and treated at a much lower rate than it is in men. Based on the belief that changes in the country's health profile will begin with changes in how the health community and other service organizations approach women, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Officeof Women's Health has created eighteen Centers of Excellence (CoE) in Women's Health. Through its funding to the IU School of Medicine and seventeen other academic medical centers throughout the country HHS intends to nurture an initiative to significantly improve women's health. To accomplish this, the eighteen centers are charged with developing networks among existing agencies that serve women, aiming to build critical mass through common goals. The components of the CoE in Women's Health include clinical care, research, professional education, outreach and consumer education, and leadership mentoring for women. Rose S. Fife, MD, is director of the CoE in Women's Health at IUSM. Ann Zerr, MD, is co-director. Four other IUSM faculty members focus on each of the five components outlined by the HHS Office on Women's Health. The Center of Excellence designation gives Dr. Fife and her colleagues a platform that attracts additional grants and collaboration from other state and local agencies. Their most recent success is obtaining a one-year, $56,000 grant from HHS. It will allow DaWana Stubbs, MD, a young general internist on the IUSM faculty, to initiate and manage an education and intervention program on domestic violence for adolescents seen at a Wishard Health Services Westside Health Clinic. This initiative is the latest ina series of accomplishments byDr. Fife and her colleagues since receiving the designation as aCoE in October 1997. Others include an undergraduate biology course that focuses on women's health, now taught by Florence Juillerat, PhD, through Women's Studies in the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis. IUSM faculty members Eynda Means, MD, and Valeric Jackson, MD, lead a mentoring program that connects female faculty and medical students (see Indiana University Medicine, Winter 1998) to build an intergenerational network of female physicians and researchers. Monthly programs about women's health are open to university faculty and staff in an effort to inform colleagues about research in women's health and to create an information exchange among people in research, education and patient care. As assistant dean of research at IUSM, Dr. Fife is active in developing research with a focus on women's health. Her personal interest is research on the role that tetracyclines might play as anti-angeogenic agents for the treatment of breast, prostate, ovarian and bone cancers. A Phase II study of tetracycline in women with breast cancer is likely to begin this year. Most importantly, Dr. Fife and her colleagues are developing new programs to reach the community at large. Working with several other organizations, the IU CoE on Women's Health is planning a series of public presentations on women's health for the fall of 2000 to champion advances in women's health throughout the next century. In The Works An educationand intervention program for adolescent women on domestic violence. An undergraduate biology course focusing on women's health A mentoring program connecting female faculty and medical students Research focusing on women's health issues Monthly information exchangesabout women's health for university faculty and staff Public presentations on women's health Nurturing the Nurturers: Center of Excellence Will Champion Advances in Women's Health. Indiana University Medicine.Summer 1999: 6-7.

Bartlett Awarded Fulbright Grant

Marilyn Bartlett, Professor Emeritus ofpathology and laboratory medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, has been awarded a Fulbright grant to improve the diagnoses of infectious diseases in immune compromised patients (such as those with AIDS) in Kenya, Africa.

Her work includes two aspects: one focuses on the role of pneumo-ystis carinii as a cause of pneumonia and the other focuses on the role it recently recognized intestinal parasites such as microsporidia, cyclo-pora spp and cryptosporidium parvum in serious diarrhea.

Bartlett will re-establish a diagnostic laboratory that she had deviously set up in Eldoret, Kenya. One of the goals supported by the grant is to bring together people of both cultures to collaborate on building and maintaining a laboratory that would focus on diagnosing parasitic intestinal infectious diseases as they affect people in Kenya.

Bartlett is one of approximately 2,000 U.S. grantees who will travel abroad for the 1999/2000 academic year through the Fulbright Program. Bartlett has developed and managed clinical diagnostic parasitology and mycology laboratories at the IU School of Medicine during the past thirty years. She has held twelve research grants or contracts from the National Institutes of Health.

Indiana University Medicine. Bartlett Awarded Fulbright Grant. Indiana University School of Medicine Summer 2000: p11.

Stepping Stone to Success

A progressive graduate program challenges and helps students find their way to medical school, prepares them for other science careers and broadens the School's goal topromote diversity.

When Selika Owens recited the Physician's Oath with the entering Class of 2008 during the traditional White Coat Ceremony this August, her experience was a true rite of passage: it heralded the beginning of her long-held dream to become a physician.

The path Owens followed was through the IUSM Master of Science in Medical Science program, which helps students strengthen their learning skills and prepare for the rigors of medical school. The two-year program, established in 1995, is not only a route to success in medical school, but provides broad training for other biomedical careers such as health care, research and pharmaceutics. About sixty-eight percent of MSMS students have been admitted to medical schools.

"Certainly the MSMS enhanced my candidacy for medical school," claims Owens, a biology graduate from Xavier University in Louisiana. "I chose this program because I felt it would offer me an unparalleled transition into medical school."

To be considered for admission to the MSMS program, a student must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident and educationally or economically disadvantaged. Candidates must have completed a four-year bachelor's degree from an accredited institution, earned a cumulative and science GPA of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale and completed all premedical science requirements. Applicants also must have scored a 5.0 in the physical sciences, verbal reasoning and biological sciences on the Medical College Application Test.

"No single factor is determinative," says MSMS program director William Agbor-Baiyee, PhD, MPA, assistant professor of family medicine. "The admission process provides an individualized, thorough and holistic review of each applicant, taking into account personal and academic factors including but not limited to socioeconomic or educational criteria."

Perhaps the strongest factor leading to admission is something no test can gauge. "The typical applicant believes he or she has the potential to become a physician," says Dr. Agbor-Baiyee.

Getting Started, Getting Ahead

Students admitted to the School's MSMS program are required to participate in a ten-week MCAT Preparation Program, the cornerstone of the MSMS experience. Total immersion in a concentrated learning environment, focused on improving MCAT performance, helps students develop lifelong skills, attitudes and habits. They spend about thirty-two hours weekly in the classroom, tackling subjects such as biology, chemistry organic chemistry, physics, verbal reasoning and writing. Particular emphasis is placed on learning in small groups.

Collectively, this intense period of study promotes student-directed learning and teamwork, and helps students approach the MCAT with better strategies to succeed. Dr. Agbor-Baiyee says the typical student scores an average of three points higher in rated areas some students have improved their performance by as much as eight points.

Students begin their actual degree curricula in the fall semester after completing the MCAT program. The first semester includes courses in biochemistry, basic histology, human physiology and problem-based learning in medical science. The following semester includes human gross anatomy, infectious microbes and host interactions, and additional studies in problem-based learning medical science. The second year includes coursesin endocrinology, drugs, diseases and poisons, problem-based case development in medical science, guided research and neuroanatomy.

Thirty-five semester hours must be completed before students receive their MSMS degrees. Some of the credits may be transferable toward degree requirements in other graduate and professional programs. But many entering the MSMS program have no intention of completing their master's degree their one goal is to enter medical school. After finishing one year of the program, Robert L. King scored well enough on his MCAT and improved other skills enough to pave the way for admission to IUSM.

The one thing I find unique about IUSM is that they set their standards higher for admission," notes K, a Palmdale, California, native and third-year medical student. "The MSMS courses are taught by many of the same faculty whom students encounter their first year of medical school. I was so well prepared that I really felt my first year of medical school was a review of what I had learned the year I spent in the MSMS program.

"Let's just say that my stress level during my first year as a medical student was kept to a minimum because I was prepared," adds King, whose hard work has earned him a fully-financed medical education through an Eli Lilly and Company Scholarship.

Selika Owens concurs, adding, "The program offers exceptional mentoring opportunities and allowed me to meet and form strong social and professional relationships with many of my future professors and peers. Various on-campus medical associations encourage student participation in important community service programs such as health fairs. I believe these components were preeminent in my success in MSMS and advancement into medical school.

For more information about the MSMS program at IUSM, visit its Web site at www.msms.iu.edu.

Stuteville, Joe. Stepping Stone to Success. Indiana University Medicine. Fall 2004: p. 6-8.

Indiana University School of Medicine, Class of 2006

50% of the graduates from IUSM are female. This is the highest percentage of female graduates since the school's inception.

IUSM Women's Advisory Council Inaugural Meeting, December 2006

Formed "to provide guidance for building a culture that will inspire, encourage and enable women physicians and scientists to realize their personal and professional goals."
—First Chair, Karen West, M.D.

Women in the Medical Professions: A Conversation with Girls, January, 2008

Twenty IUSM female physicians discussed careers in medicine with girls from three Girl Scout troops. These troops are from neighborhoods surrounding the IUPUI campus. (See photos below) This second annual Conversation with Girls was organized by Carole GallMLS, AHIP, Gift Officer & Medical Resources Consultant, Ruth Lilly Medical Library, IUSM.

Downtown-Indianapolis girls participated in the second Women in the Medical Professions: A Conversation with Girls on Monday evening, January 14, 2008, from 6:00 to 7:30 PM at the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM), Ruth Lilly Medical Library.

Purpose: The event will facilitate awareness for girls in our nearby community ages 9 to 12 that the medical profession is attainable for women and that it is a rewarding career that allows for feminine expression and creativity.

At this event in the Medical Library, table groups consisted offour girls and two women- physician table-hosts.Girls can talk with their table hosts about careers, being a professional woman with a family, being a woman physician, etc. The women physicians truly enjoyed their participation in the 2005 event.

The Women in the Medical Professions: Conversation with Girls events were inspired by the national exhibit, Changing the Face of Medicine, which will be at the IUSM Ruth Lilly Medical Library in June 3 - July 24, 2009.