Steven Webber, MBChB, MRCP, began serving as Executive Vice Chancellor of UAMS and Dean of the College of Medicine on March 1. (Read Dr. Webber’s bio here.) Now that most of his boxes are unpacked and he has had his feet on the ground for a month, we asked Dr. Webber to help the College of Medicine team and others get to know him a little better. Our Q&A touched on his background (including, for the benefit of many of us, what those credentials after his name stand for), his priorities for the College of Medicine, and what you might find him doing in his spare time.
Dr. Webber, you have had an illustrious career as a pediatrician, researcher and leader in academic medicine. You were recruited from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where you served for 12 years as Chair of the Department of Pediatrics and Physician-in-Chief of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital. Earlier, you held leadership posts, particularly in pediatric cardiology, at the University of Pittsburgh. Could you talk a little about what drew you to UAMS and serving in the role of Dean and Executive Vice Chancellor?
Thank you. Yes, I am very fortunate to have had several wonderful career opportunities, all of which provided platforms for continuous learning and personal growth. For a while, I had been considering one last career move that would be both challenging and at the same time rewarding. There are quite a few Dean opportunities out there right now. I was looking for a college of medicine that is deeply committed to all its missions – clinical care, education, research and community engagement – and where the college, hospital and clinics are part of the same entity, which often is not the case in academic medical centers. This structure facilitates close alignment between the clinical enterprise and the college, with everyone working toward common goals.
Another key “must have” for me was the desire to work at an academic medical center where collegiality and teamwork are core values. I was also struck by the deep commitment of the UAMS faculty and staff to improve the lives of all Arkansans, and to further develop a statewide network of care focused on health equity and to rural as well as urban communities. These and many other factors led me and my family to Little Rock, and we are delighted to be here and to call Arkansas our home.
Now that you have been here full time for several weeks, and you’ve worked with UAMS leaders for several months, what have been some of your impressions about our college and academic medical center? What has surprised you the most?
Yes, I started working with UAMS leaders a couple of months before I arrived, and I have now been here a month. It was wonderful to work with Interim Dean Rick Smith during this transition period. Dr. Smith is the quintessential servant-leader and helped stabilize the college at a very difficult time, following the untimely passing of Dean Susan Smyth and as health care institutions including UAMS emerged from the pandemic.
Although April 1 was the one-month anniversary of my arrival, I don’t think I have been “fooled” by anything or anybody yet! My first impressions are straightforward – firstly that UAMS has, as expected, the same fiscal challenges that exist in all academic medical centers at this time as we continue to recover from the pandemic and adjust to the new realities including high health care inflation and constraints on revenue growth. But I am convinced that UAMS has the talent, experience and ideas to emerge ever stronger from these challenges. So, I am very optimistic about the future.
My second observation is how wonderfully friendly everyone is. People just say “hello” as you walk by. You may all take that for granted, but I promise you that is not the norm around the country. My third observation is the obvious deep commitment of everyone at UAMS to our core missions, in particular the desire to improve the health and well-being of the communities we serve.
What are your top priorities for the College of Medicine and what we can do in the years ahead to enhance health in Arkansas?
There are many priorities to work on. Fortunately, thanks to the excellent leadership within the college and university, there are not too many immediate fires to put out. We must focus on making sure we stay on target for UAMS Vision 2029. I plan to partner extremely closely with Dr. Michelle Krause, Senior Vice Chancellor of UAMS Health and CEO of UAMS Medical Center, and her leadership team, to help ensure that the clinical enterprise is firing on all cylinders. The hospital and College of Medicine must be in complete alignment to help support our mutual goals.
Beyond the obvious goal of improving health, a thriving clinical enterprise is needed to support our academic missions of training the next generation of providers and expanding our research footprint. The ongoing research in the College of Medicine is already impressive, but there is clearly room for growth. We must be strategic as we invest our research resources, focusing on areas of current strength, and select new areas where we believe we can excel with appropriate investments. Cancer will remain a top priority as we drive toward NCI designation. There is also great opportunity to bring the clinical and basic science departments closer together to support translational research in areas such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. All of these are areas of strength at UAMS and all are key drivers of the health of our population.
I hope to see significant increases in grant and contract support in the coming years, and this will be supported by the development of more formal physician-scientist and Ph.D. scientist research training programs. This should also entail strong efforts to increase our portfolio of training grants. I also plan to focus on expanding philanthropy to better support our ambitious goals.
What are some of the first things on your agenda?
There are many “first things” on my agenda – and the rate limiting step right now is the hours in a day! I am trying to meet as many people as possible across the enterprise to help me better understand the challenges and, most importantly, the opportunities for the College of Medicine and UAMS. I am also seeking to meet community leaders and hospital partners around the region, so that I will understand the state better. This will involve visiting all our regional campuses and our regional partners across the state. It is also very important for me to help build an ever-stronger relationship with Arkansas Children’s so that we can continue to grow and thrive together. Our faculty serve both campuses, and our missions are very closely aligned. We are partners that must grow stronger together. This partnership creates many excellent opportunities, such as enhancing transitions of care for teenagers, growing combined educational programs and enhancing research across the lifespan.
Let’s talk for a moment about your medical degree and credentials, which may be a little unfamiliar to some of our team members and readers. After your name, you use “MBChB, MRCP.” What do those mean?
I was born in London and did my medical school training at Bristol University in the west of England. Latin scholars will know that “MBChB” stands for “Medicinae Baccalaureus, Baccalaureus Chirurgiae,” that is, Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. This is the standard British medical degree. But please don’t be taken in by the ChB part. It would not be good for me to operate on our patients! The “MRCP” stands for Member of the Royal College of Physicians. In the U.K., this is the equivalent of internal medicine boards in the U.S. Although most people know me as a pediatrician and pediatric cardiologist/transplant physician, I actually did three years of internal medicine internship and residency before I “saw the light” and switched to pediatrics – and then completed a second full residency.
After graduating first in your medical school class, and completing residencies in medicine and pediatrics, you continued your training with fellowships in pediatric cardiology in British Columbia and at the University of Pittsburgh. You went on to serve in leadership posts such as Chief of Pediatric Cardiology, co-director of the Heart Institute and medical director of the Thoracic Transplantation Program at the University of Pittsburgh and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. What drew you to the specialties of pediatrics and pediatric cardiology?
I initially planned to be an adult cardiologist. I always loved cardiology. However, my training occurred before the revolution in medical and catheter management of arrythmias, and we saw little rheumatic heart disease or tuberculous pericardial disease in the U.K. at that time. So, almost all the patients had coronary disease and/or heart failure. The former was managed mainly by vein grafts in those days, and these frequently clotted off early – especially with so much tobacco usage and poor self-care. The options for managing heart failure were primarily digoxin, Lasix and captopril, so there were far fewer of the options than we have today. Transplantation and assist device support were only in their infancy.
One day, I was working with a wonderful mentor, an adult cardiologist from South Africa who had cared for both adults and children. He said to me after rounds, “If you love cardiology but are not sure that you want to take care of adults all your life, why don’t you become a pediatric cardiologist?” He then took me several times a week to the pediatric cardiology wards and taught me about “blue babies” and complex congenital heart disease. I was hooked immediately. Here were patients we could really help in a meaningful way – children who just one or two decades earlier almost always died in infancy.
However, my training in adults was never wasted, as it set me up well to manage the growing population of young adults with congenital heart disease – a rapidly growing population and one of the true success stories of modern medicine, thanks in large part to the ingenuity of cardiovascular surgeons. Later, I moved to Pittsburgh to complete a fellowship at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. CHP and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center were then the leading international centers for solid organ transplantation, under the leadership of the late Dr. Thomas Starzl. Once again, serendipity played a big part in my career development, as I then became focused on how to help children with end-stage heart and lung disease who could not be managed with conventional medical and surgical approaches. Transplantation offered a final chance of life to those who had run out of other options. It was an honor to be there at the earliest stages of this work. We were learning on the fly, the patients being our main teachers.
The College of Medicine team is looking forward to working with you and getting to know you. Could you tell us a little about yourself and your family?
As I mentioned, I am from London, England. My dad was an electrician, and my mom was a homemaker. Both instilled in me the critical importance of education. Both had their education cut short during the Second World War, when most children in London were evacuated to remote rural areas without their parents, and schooling ceased. On returning to London, most did not get the chance to resume secondary education. So, my brother and I were first-generation college students, and we have tried to really make use of the opportunities that my parents did not have.
My wife, Jennifer, works in the not-for-profit sector to support college success for first-generation college students. I have two daughters, Hannah and Katie. Hannah is a health care attorney in Nashville and Katie is a third-year medical student in Washington, D.C. She also plans to pursue a career in pediatrics – or at least that is the current plan!
What are some of your favorite things to do in your spare time, when you can find it?
I am an avid reader and try to read a book a week, but I don’t always succeed since we all have busy jobs. I like to alternate novels with history books or biographies. I am always struggling with the desire to read late into the night versus the need to get a good night’s sleep to face the next day! I am sure I am not alone with that conflict. I also love to learn other languages, although I can only speak most at a rudimentary level. My French is quite good. My latest foray is into Norwegian, though I am not quite sure why, as 99% of Scandinavians seem to speak perfect English!
What is your favorite book, and what is the last book you read for enjoyment, not professional purposes?
I don’t have a single favorite book, but some of my favorite authors include English writers Graham Greene and Julian Barnes, Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, Tanzanian-British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah – who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature – and the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiongo. The last three have all written novels set in darker periods of British colonial history. I just finished Ghosh’s “Sea of Poppies” trilogy. It is beautifully written and describes the shocking but true story of how the British went to war, starting in 1839, to force the Chinese to continue to accept imports of raw opium from India, even though it was killing huge numbers of Chinese citizens. Oddly, we never learned about the history of the Opium Wars at school, or how Hong Kong was ceded to the British as part of the settlement. We teach the things we wish to teach – which is not necessarily the same as teaching what should be taught.
I also like to read about topics I know absolutely nothing about. Since we all seem destined to be gobbled up into a Black Hole one day, I just finished Carlo Rovelli’s “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.” However, I quickly got lost when he started to speculate about the existence of “White Holes,” where time seemingly might go backwards. I encourage everyone to randomly read about things we never learned about. It is a lot of fun.
What do you like to watch on TV?
I don’t own a functioning television, so no, I never watch!
Who would be your ideal guests (anyone living or deceased) for a dinner and conversation?
I am not sure who my ideal guests would be. I met Dolly Parton once when I was in Nashville. She is a fascinating person and it would be fun to learn more about her. Maybe I would also ask the actor Hugh Grant to join us. He was in my high school class, and he was exactly the same then as he is in his movies. So, he has made his fortune being himself! Maybe something we could all try?
