CHICAGO – AUGUST 26: Raymond H. Curry, MD, Vice Dean for Education, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, photographed on Friday, August 26, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois.
Photo credit: Randy Belice
Raymond H. Curry, MD, FACP is Senior Associate Dean for Educational Affairs at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and Clinical Professor of Medicine and Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As chief academic officer at the nation’s largest medical school, he oversees educational programs across the school’s four campuses in Chicago, Peoria, Rockford, and Urbana.
A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Dr. Curry is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He completed residency training in internal medicine at Northwestern University/McGaw Medical Center in 1985, and then joined the Northwestern faculty as clinical coordinator on a US Public Health Service grant to establish a primary care track in the internal medicine residency. He was also an associate clinical firm chief and director of undergraduate education in the Department of Medicine before moving to the dean’s administration in 1998.
From 1998-2014 he served as vice dean for education at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, overseeing all aspects of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education. In directing graduate medical education throughout the Northwestern system he also served as president of the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University. In these roles he created and was founding director of the Center for Education in Medicine; participated in the formation and management of the Center for Global Health; oversaw development and initial accreditation of the physician assistant program; and led the corporate reorganization of the McGaw Medical Center to focus its mission on the management of graduate medical education. Other programmatic emphases included the enhancement of medical student grants and scholarships, which quadrupled during this period; restructuring of financial aid procedures and reduction of student debt; the promotion of diversity, more than doubling the proportion of both medical students and residents from groups underrepresented in medicine; and the renewal of the MD curriculum, with a completely redesigned structure and content debuting in 2012.
Dr. Curry’s interests in medical education include the study and teaching of doctor-patient communication and the role of learner-centered educational methods in promoting patient-centered care. The curricular model for teaching these professional skills and perspectives he and others at Northwestern developed in the early 1990s has been widely emulated.
He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, served on the ACP Governor’s Council for Illinois from 1996-2008, and is also an active member of the Society of General Internal Medicine. He is a charter member of the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare and presently a member of its board of directors. He has been a regular accreditation site reviewer for the Liaison Committee on Medical Education for over twenty years, and is currently a member of the Committee for the Evaluation of Medical Study Programs for the Council on Higher Education in Israel. Locally, he serves on two non-profit organization boards, for the Provident Foundation and the Chicago Area Albert Schweitzer Fellowships.
In 1991 Dr. Curry was named the first Augusta Webster Faculty Fellow in Medical Education at Northwestern, and in 1995 he received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. In 1998 he was presented with the Distinguished Service Award of the Department of Medicine, and he was the 2003 Laureate of the Illinois Chapter of the American College of Physicians.
The College of medicine is very pleased to announce the recruitment of our new Senior Associate Dean for Educational Affairs, Dr Raymond H. Curry.
