Points of Pride - School of Medicine

  • The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the accrediting body for medical education programs leading to the M.D. degree in the United States, granted the School of Medicine the maximum eight-year reaccreditation in June 2015. The medical school has been accredited by the LCME since 1972.
  • The Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE), which has members in 90 countries on five continents, recognized the SIU School of Medicine for its medical education programs. SIU is the only medical school to earn recognition in all three areas – student assessment, student engagement, and social accountability.
  • The General Surgery Residency Program now includes a rotation with Southern Illinois Healthcare to send third- and fourth-year general surgery residents to train alongside surgeons practicing in Southern Illinois hospitals.
  • A new robotic procedure that allows surgeons to make a single incision through the navel for hysterectomy patients is now available at the School of Medicine’s Simmons Cancer Institute in Springfield.
  • A new multispecialty clinic planned to open by spring 2018 will care for patients with complex brain and spine disorders. The Neuroscience Institute (NSI) will consolidate SIU’s departments of neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatry into a single-site outpatient clinical care center staffed by more than 50 neuroscience providers. The institute will care for patients with a range of disorders including stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, brain tumors, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, spine disease, schizophrenia, anxiety and depression.
  • A new family medicine clinic opening in August 2016 will mean easier access to primary care for residents of Morgan County. Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Passavant Area Hospital and Morgan County Public Health Department partnered to develop the SIU Center for Family Medicine – Jacksonville.
  • The SIU Center for Family Medicine, located in Springfield, has been serving patients in central Illinois for more than 40 years. In 2012, it was designated a federally qualified health center or FQHC, also referred to as a community health center. With another access point in Quincy, the facilities serve 22,000 patients annually with more than 75,000 visits, and both are family medicine residency and physician assistant training sites.
  • Surgeon Dr. Kevin T. McVary, professor and chair of the Division of Urology, and his staff have performed a new, minimally invasive, outpatient medical procedure -- water vapor therapy -- for treating an enlarged prostate. The treatment was approved by the FDA in winter 2015, and SIU will now be instructing urologists from around the country on how to perform this technique. SIU’s urology group was one of the country’s first test sites for the device’s clinical trials.
  • Research scientist Don Caspary has received a five-year grant from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance his study of hearing loss and speech understanding in the elderly. The total budget for the project is $2.6 million.
  • The School of Medicine is the exclusive site for a new clinical trial started in 2015 for bladder cancer that combines the current use of drug therapy placed inside the bladder with a new, intravenous drug that increases the response of the immune system. The study will determine if the combination of the two drugs is safe and potentially more effective at eliminating the cancer cells. The new drug, pembrolizumab, may fight the disease and prevent the need for surgery.
  • The National Institutes of Health in fall 2015 provided a $268,000 grant to research scientist Michael Olson, assistant professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Cell Biology, to expand his research in staph infections.
  • Research scientist Brandon Cox, assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology, secured a three-year, $1.5 million U.S. Department of Defense grant in fall 2015 to advance her study of hearing loss and regeneration of sounds-sensing cells in the inner ear. Her research will investigate the genes and proteins that make hair cell regeneration possible. The long-term goal is to develop new treatment strategies to replace the damaged cells and restore hearing.