Robert M. Donaldson has served twice in critical leadership positions at the Yale School of Medicine. A native of Wellesley, Massachusetts, Donaldson received his B.S. degree from Yale College in 1948 and his M.D. degree from Boston University. He joined the Yale faculty in 1973 and later served as vice chair and acting chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. From 1991 to 1992, he was acting dean. A specialist in gastroenterology and a prolific contributor to the medical literature, Donaldson has edited the journal Gastroenterology as well as Current Opinion in Gastroenterology and served on the editorial board of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Gerard Burrow, a Boston native, received his B.A. degree from Brown University in 1954 and his M.D. from Yale in 1958. Before becoming dean of the Yale School of Medicine, he served as dean and vice chancellor at University of California at San Diego where he guided a major reconstruction program and helped recruit outstanding faculty. He was previously physician-in-chief and the Eaton Professor and chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Toronto General Hospital from 1981 to 1987. He had directed the division of endocrinology and metabolism and served as professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Toronto from 1978 to 1987. A renowned endocrinologist, Burrow is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. At Yale, he led the School of Medicine through a difficult time of transition and was successful in promoting science and education despite threats of reduced external support. Since stepping down as dean, Burrows has served as special advisor for health affairs to the president of Yale University. He is currently the David Paige Smith Professor of Medicine and is writing a book on the history of Yale School of Medicine.

Photo by Frank Poole.

The Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine was dedicated in 1991. The completion of the center culminated an effort started seven years earlier by the newly appointed dean Leon E. Rosenberg, who envisioned an interdisciplinary approach for molecular understanding of disease. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute had just embarked on a major reorganization and agreed to fund half the center's research space as well as investigators in two of the four research programs: molecular neurobiology and molecular genetics. Other organizations also contributed funding and, in 1990, Herbert W. Boyer and his wife Marigrace, gave the single largest donation bestowed on the School of Medicine by an individual. Boyer had been a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Edward Adelberg and, in honor of the gift, the Center was named for the Boyer family. Designed by Cesar Pelli, the building emphasizes the sweep of College Street into Congress Avenue.

Information Technology Services for the School of Medicine (ITS-Med) was formed in December 1996 by a consolidation and reorganization of the Biomedical Computing Unit (established in 1982), Academic Computing (established in 1988), and Administrative Systems (established in 1982). ITS-Med provides computer facilities and applications, support, data networking, and multimedia services that complement services offered by Yale University and meet the specific needs of the School of Medicine. Since 1996, ITS-Med has grown from a staff of 28 to 125 and has taken on new responsibilities including Media Services, the Center for Advanced Instructional Media, the Medical Copy Center, and recently, Clinical Information Systems, part of Yale Faculty Practice (now Yale Medical Group).

Neurosurgery at Yale was first organized in 1918 in the Department of Surgery under Samuel Harvey. Samuel Harvey had trained with Harvey Cushing, considered to be the father of American neurosurgery. In 1997 Neurosurgery was established as a separate department with Dennis Spencer as first chair.

This chart of Medical School departments over the past fifty years, which shows when departments were created or changed names, was created by Lilli Sentz and designed by Gillian Mayman for the Yale Tercentennial..