Editor: When I recently interviewed Dr. John Rush, Vice Dean of Clinical Sciences, he said that medicine has been pretty much taught the same way for the past 100 years. Do you agree with him? And how is medical training here at Duke-NUS so divergent?
Dean: John is right. Medical education has been relatively stagnant for 100 years. We have been fortunate to have this opportunity in Singapore. As a faculty, we can ask ourselves: Knowing everything we know now about medicine, research and teaching, what is the best way to train our students?
Dean Ranga Krishnan
Editor: How would you describe your students?
Dean: I would say we have a more diverse group than most American medical schools. Our students tend to be older, some with other post-graduate degrees. We look at more global diseases than other medical schools, so we attract a more international student body with 13 countries represented. Interestingly, our students’ educational backgrounds also are more diverse. We have engineers and even an anthropology major - they bring different perspectives and interests into our classrooms.
Editor: Your approach to training medical students is considered very innovative. What’s the philosophy behind it?
Dean: We’re trying to build what we consider “physician-scientists” rather than so-called medical doctors and by that I mean physicians who will end up doing research, either clinical or at the bench. We also hope many of our students will enter the health sciences field. I guess you could say we try to attract “inquiring minds” to Duke-NUS and our objective is to train them to be the future leaders in global medicine.

Editor: The faculty and staff will be moving into the building this month. With the construction behind you, what lies ahead in terms of planning?
Dean: We will be recruiting one or two more senior faculty and continue to build up our research by hiring young faculty. But you’re right, we’re entering our next phase of growth. We’ll be working on creating an organizational culture for Duke-NUS. Every organization has 2 parts - its structure and function or its DNA and personality, if you will. Our goal is to create a matrix organization - one that learns and grows as time passes. It’s more difficult to do than mapping out an organizational chart. We will be developing the tools and language for better communications. I think we’re off to a good start with that. I know I’m surrounded by very high quality people.