The Feinberg School of Medicine announced the closures of nearly a dozen research centers, along with a merger, in late April as a result of a faculty-led review conducted in the winter, according to an email obtained by The Daily.
The changes were effective immediately, shuttering research hubs that focused on molecular cardiology, biomedical informatics and health equity transformation.
Each medical school center was reviewed by a committee of faculty members which assessed it on a set of criteria: academic impact, funding and faculty engagement. Going forward, the University intends to repeat the review process every three to five years, according to a statement from Feinberg’s Vice Dean for Scientific Affairs and Graduate Education Rex Chisholm.
The Daily spoke with leaders of several closed and merged centers after the announcement. Some suggested it was a practical decision to reduce overlap and improve collaboration between centers, but another accused the University of acceding to the Trump administration’s recent demands to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
Feinberg Prof. Melissa Simon founded the Center for Health Equity Transformation in 2018 to advance health equity research. In April, she received an unexpected email that her center would be closed immediately.
In a later meeting with Chisholm, Simon said Chisholm told her that CHET did not have “a multiplier effect,” meaning the center did not make enough of a difference to justify its presence.
“I think it’s baloney that my center was terminated under those three categories of metrics,” Simon said. “The way it was done was very disrespectful to have a center for eight years and not ever be evaluated … not given a chance to rebrand or to negotiate.”
Concerning the center’s funding, Simon explained she received about $30,000 a year from the University that went toward supporting a center employee. She said CHET played a vital role in supporting other research conducted across the medical school, including in the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.
Simon’s frustrations come as NU administrators have taken a series of preventative measures in the face of funding threats from the Trump administration. That includes capping class enrollment sizes for graduate programs and erasing references to DEI initiatives on webpages.
Simon added that she had worked with university officials to scrub web pages of words related to DEI earlier this year.
“My observation is that this was more of a closure because of obedience or acquiescence to the current federal situation,” Simon said.
Feinberg also announced the closure of the Center for Health Information Partnerships, which was dedicated to bridging human experiences and scientific data to improve health care.
The decision to close the center was due to its “overlap in the people, projects and leadership” with the Institution for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, according to former CHIP director and current IAIM director Abel Kho.
“We felt there was an opportunity to create greater alignment in bringing CHIP people and projects into IAIM to further strengthen our efforts in expanding AI efforts at Feinberg,” Kho wrote in a statement to The Daily.
Norrina Allen, director of Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research — which has now been merged with the Center for Epidemiology and Population Health — said the goal of Feinberg’s research institutes and centers is to promote collaborations and interdisciplinary work across different departments at the medical school.
Allen said the merger came after several months of internal planning and faculty input. She noted the two centers had long shared complementary goals, and the integration aimed to strengthen their work.
“Part of the reason we’ve been reducing, and in our case, combining centers is to reduce duplication, maintain strategic priorities and ensure that all of the centers are of high impact and high yield for the University, so that they’re really all contributing substantially to the scientific environment here at the University,” Allen said.
Allen explained that the decision to merge centers was informed in part by a “strategic retreat” last fall, during which faculty reviewed future priorities and explored how partnering across disciplines in epidemiology and population health could better support health systems and improve care at both the patient and community levels.
The integration, Allen noted, will bring a wide range of expertise across clinical and public health disciplines together to help ensure research outcomes have a stronger impact beyond academic settings.
“We are learning new things, we are finding new fields, we’re learning new ways to collaborate, so we don’t ever expect that anything just stays and lives in perpetuity,” Allen said. “I think the changes in the centers and the institutes are just reflecting the changes in our science, and that’s a good thing.”
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