J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, was named interim president of the University of Pennsylvania in a unanimous motion by the school’s board of trustees last month. Jameson had previously served as dean of Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.
“Penn is a remarkable institution that I am honored and humbled to lead and serve,” Jameson says. “Penn, like so many of your institutions, is poised to make breakthroughs – like the mRNA platform for vaccines and gene therapy that was recently recognized with the Nobel Prize.”
The news comes after the university’s former president, Liz Magill, stepped down amid criticism stemming from Magill’s controversial remarks at a Congressional hearing.
A past president of the Endocrine Society and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Endocrine Society – among many other leadership roles, both in academia and within the Society – Jameson has been at the helm of the medical community in one form or another since he joined Northwestern University Medical School as chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Molecular Medicine in 1993.
“The field of endocrinology, founded on concepts of systems thinking, feedback loops, and homeostasis, is a natural one for today’s leaders. I hope those with similar endocrine backgrounds will also contribute as academic leaders.”
One example of Jameson’s leadership in a difficult time came in a March 2020 opinion piece he wrote for The New York Times on behalf of himself and six other medical experts, urging national leadership to continue social distancing policies. “It will be important for us to continue to emphasize a social contract in which we support one another to get through this as effectively as possible,” he told Endocrine News at the time.
Now, Jameson says he hopes that stewardship will help inform his new role. “I served as president of the Endocrine Society in 2000, and that leadership experience was transformative for me given breadth of the endocrine community, the rapid changes in the field, and access to the extraordinary mentors in our Society,” he says. “The field of endocrinology, founded on concepts of systems thinking, feedback loops, and homeostasis, is a natural one for today’s leaders. I hope those with similar endocrine backgrounds will also contribute as academic leaders.”
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