Jonathan I. Ravdin, M.D., the incoming dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin, may be moving only from Minneapolis to Milwaukee, but he comes with a perspective that spans continents.
He has traveled the world learning, teaching and setting up programs.
Among his international projects, he has engaged in research with scholars from the University of Natal Medical School in Durban, South Africa, the only medical school for black Africans in that country.
He developed a partnership program with Manipal Hospital in Bangalore, India, to provide access in India to high-technology care in bone-marrow transportation.
And he lectured at Al Azhar Medical University in Cairo, Egypt with an Egyptian colleague.
Selected by the college in early December, he is currently commuting to the Wauwatosa campus every other week. He is now finishing his term as Nesbitt Professor and chair of the department of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he has worked since 1996. On May 5, he will begin full-time work at the medical college.
According to many accounts, Ravdin raised the position of the University of Minnesota to the status of a top tier research university in the U.S.
The Chronicle caught up with Ravdin in his offices at the Medical College recently and learned a bit about his experience, goals, interests and Jewish background.
“My view of the world is colored by a deep commitment to health equity and also education,” Ravdin said.
Ravdin believes that he might not be a leader in academic medicine, as he is widely considered, if it weren’t for one department chair at the University of Virginia, who asked Ravdin (who was doing research there) to review a course.
“I told him that I thought ‘it was terrible — the worst course in the world.’” The professor countered by saying, “If you’re so smart, why don’t you do it yourself?”
Ravdin visited a colleague at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where an innovative new medical school had just been established. Using models that he observed there, Ravdin developed the course using small group work and no lectures.
Students “studied clinical cases in multiple layers and learned all they needed to know about medicine” from real patients with real problems. Faculty members functioned as facilitators, not teachers, and students discussed and critiqued how they learned, Ravdin said.
“It was the most gratifying experience,” he said of the course he led for five years. “The students and faculty loved it.”
That experience taught Ravdin a life lesson, he said. “If you see a problem and you have a vision and an idea how to fix the problem, and you actually have a chance to fix it, not only do you affect many people, you also leave a legacy. That course is still in existence 20 years later.”
Before that, Ravdin saw himself primarily as a physician-scientist and focused his energies on research in infectious diseases. But, at Virginia he realized that being a leader in academic medicine means being able to make a bigger difference.
Though that teaching experience “turned [him] to a different path,” he has continued for 30 years to do research in Amebiais, the third leading parasitic cause of death worldwide, which kills some 100,000 people annually.
“I am close to developing a vaccine,” he said. It would be the first vaccine for a parasitic disease.
The Medical College of Wisconsin will be the fourth medical school at which Ravdin has played a leadership role.
Before Minnesota, he was professor and vice chairman of medicine and professor of international health at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and chief of medicine at Cleveland Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center.
Mentoring students and impacting medical schools, Ravdin said, are at his “emotional and spiritual center.”
Ravdin, the son of a foreman and salesman father and a mother who worked as a receptionist in a dentist’s office grew up in what he called “rough and tumble Brooklyn.”
All but one of his grandparents were born in the U.S.; but his paternal grandfather immigrated from Russia at age 9. His maternal grandfather worked in vaudeville with Eddie Cantor and other famous performers of the time, he said.
Initially planning to be a mechanical engineer, he studied at City College of New York. Then one night, when he was out on a bridge taking measurements, he decided that he didn’t want to do this for a living.
Raised in a fairly secular home, he became a bar mitzvah at a Reform synagogue, he said. He and his wife of five years, Marcie Christiansen Ravdin, love Israel, he said.
Ravdin has two grown sons, ages 25 and 23. His wife also has a son and daughter, ages 23 and 18, respectively.
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