Dermot Kelleher: Principal aims

One-time dentistry student Professor Dermot Kelleher is getting his teeth into the challenges of leading Imperial's Faculty of Medicine.

Looking back on Dermot Kelleher’s career as a gastroenterologist, an eminent researcher in immunology and latterly Head of the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, it might appear that he was always destined to be a medical leader. But that wasn’t quite what he had in mind at the start of his academic life, which he began as a dentistry student. In his second year, he realised that he was on the wrong path, and transferred to medicine. He hasn’t looked back since.

“From the point when I started contacting patients, that’s when I thought that medicine was the career for me,” he says. “It gives you something that very few careers can. You’re looking at different problems every day. If you have an academic career, you have the capacity to take on and analyse major research questions and it’s a fantastically challenging career.”

On 1 October, after 23 years at Trinity, Dermot took up a new challenge as Principal of the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial. He was particularly attracted by the College’s capacity to undertake translational research. Driving new discoveries into clinical practice has been a theme of Dermot’s work in Dublin, exemplified by his role in founding the Dublin Molecular Medicine Centre, a joint venture between three major medical schools and their associated hospitals, to accelerate the translation of biomedical research into improved diagnostics and therapies.

“We have within our labs wonderful findings and new knowledge about mechanisms of disease, but the critical issue is how we take that to a place where we can deliver changes to health for patients and populations.”

Key to this, Dermot believes, is working with a mix of disciplines. “If we stop thinking about what we’re doing on a regular day-to-day basis and think about what we could possibly achieve with engineers, physicists, chemists and academic clinicians working together, the opportunities here are endless.”

Dermot is already leading a multidisciplinary working group to harness expertise from across the College in the field of imaging. He says one way to encourage more collaboration between disciplines is to set up Master’s courses that span different faculties. “When you bring people together to think about education programmes, they very often find ways to work together in research.”

There are challenges ahead for the Faculty which will require strong leadership. The NHS is planning a major reconfiguration of services in north west London which could mean that Imperial’s teaching activities at the Charing Cross Campus have to move elsewhere. “That could cause us difficulties, or if we do it properly it gives us an opportunity to streamline our academic offerings and our hospital care,” Dermot says. “It’s a very important opportunity.”

The new principal is relishing life in London, and he’s already been impressed by what he’s seen at Imperial. But he’s determined to aim even higher. “To me the most exciting thing is to take the raw material that we have right now, which is really excellent, and make something even better,” he says.

His goal is to move up the international rankings, by further improving the quality of education the College offers. The opportunity for Imperial to develop an innovative curriculum for the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in Singapore could play an important role. When the first students begin at the School in 2013, they will be using a new, team-based learning approach to medical training, and if it works as well as hoped, there’s a high chance that such an approach will be brought back to London. “There’s huge enthusiasm around this for the education of prospective students. We will be looking at how we can modify and optimise team-based learning, but it’s extremely likely that elements of that will be brought in here.”

Academic rankings are a convenient yardstick for assessing the Faculty’s performance, but success or failure for Dermot ultimately boils down to the impact of its work outside the College walls. “We measure our success by our capacity to change the world in which we exist, to develop new discoveries that change the way we live.”