Dr. Folberg excited to head OU med school

By Lindsey Wojcik

Editor in Chief

When Dr. Robert Folberg was a teenager he began to lose vision in his left eye, and by the time he was 19 years old he had lost most of the useful vision in it.

“I could only see a hand moving in front of my face, I couldn’t even count fingers,” he said.

Folberg would have a life changing experience to correct his vision — a corneal eye transplant. “The first thing I saw when they took the patch off my eye was the edge of a table coming to a point at the corner,” he said. “I forgot what it was like to see something like that.”

While attending Temple University College of Medicine, a mentor would tailor Folberg’s interest in vision to cancer research. Folberg began studying the form of cancer that affects the eye and has since spent the last 20 years of his life with that as his research focus.

On July 31, Oakland University and William Beaumont Hospitals announced Folberg as the founding dean of Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine.

Accomplished in the field, Folberg has focused his career in three areas of medicine: Practicing, teaching and research, specializing in pathology and ophthalmology.

Folberg has spent nearly the last 25 years in academic medicine and comes to OU from University of Illinois at Chicago where he spent eight and a half years as head of the pathology department and a professor of ophthalmology and visual science.  

While at UIC, Folberg began    distance teaching. “Since not very many people specialize in pathology of the eye, I teach this using interactive web based video concept and interactive software that we designed,” he said.

He performed this distance teaching for seven different universities, including two abroad

universities.

“One of our clients was the William Beaumont Hospital, where about every other week, I’d get online. I would see the residents and they would see me and I’d teach pathology,” Folberg said. “I had actually never met any of my students at Beaumont and last summer they brought me up to do an in-service on campus and that’s when I learned about the new medical school.”

September 16 marks his official start date as dean of OUWBSM but because he has to wrap things up in Chicago, he said he might not physically be on campus for a while.  

“I’m looking forward to the experience at Oakland. And although it’s not the Big 10, I have an idea about Midwest public research universities. I’m a big fan of their missions,” he said.

Having been the head of the pathology department at UIC, Folberg has been active in creating a curriculum for medical students and faculty development. He said the faculty in his department at UIC looks at one topic a month and learn new techniques.

One technique they learned was teaching in a small or large setting. “We spend a lot of time on mentoring and role modeling, something that’s very important at Oakland University. [OU] classes are small and you really do get to know your teachers. So this is something that is not foreign to me.”

As far as the process of hiring officials and professors for OUWBSM, Folberg said he is working on it very hard now and the deadline for that would be as soon as possible.

Folberg added that there has not been a discussion yet about how much the medical school will cost to students because a policy has not been set yet.

The first class will have 50 students, a number that, according to Folberg, is typical for a brand new medical school. “That’s what facilities will accommodate right now and until the facilities are built, I think we’re going to be restrained a bit on size,” he said.

The medical school will initially teach out of O’Dowd Hall. There are plans to have building built in the future.

One thing Folberg believes will be unique about OUWBSM is its presence on an undergraduate campus.

“Undergraduates will be able to come into the medical school, interact with them and we’re going to be planning some fabulous interactions with our School of Nursing with dean Thompson because we believe the physicians should be trained in a team approach with the care of patients,” said Folberg of the advantages of locating on campus.  

“The thing that excites me so much about this medical school is the opportunity to take a first rate institution like Oakland, which has a real passion for teaching, and then you take William Beaumont Hospital, which is one of the best hospitals in the United States for critical care and a long tradition for medical student education. And both institutions do research so you understand the excitement for putting both of these together,” he said.

Multiple studies have shown that the state of Michigan will be facing a physician shortage in the near future. It is believed that the state will be short some 4,000 physicians by 2020. Folberg sees OUWBSM playing a role is addressing this problem.  

“One thing that’s really interesting is that more than 60 percent of residents that train at William Beaumont Hospital actually stay in the state of Michigan and so when you pair the school up you hopefully start to address the health care needs of the state,” Folberg said.

As for the long-term goal of the School of Medicine, Folberg said both partners believe it can become something very special. “The type of education that we will be designing and delivering to our medical students will be different, will try to create physicians that patients want to go to, that hospitals want to hire, that researchers and institutes want to engage and I think you’ll just see it evolve. We do not want to copy any other medical school,” he said.

“We don’t see the School of Medicine as having a moat around it, we see it as part of the fabric of Oakland University.”