The University of Michigan Board of Regents today (June 16) approved two interim leadership appointments in the Medical School.
Professor of Microbiology and Immunology Michele S. Swanson, Ph.D., M.S., will become interim associate dean for graduate and postdoctoral studies, effective July 1. Assistant Professor of Family Medicine Margaret L. Dobson, M.D., has been appointed interim chair of the Department of Family Medicine, effective June 1.
Swanson, left, has a substantial record of service contributions to the institution and her field. Since 2012, she has served as director of the Office of Postdoctoral Studies for the Medical School. She also sits on the Medical School Executive Committee and has been a mentor in the Office of Faculty Development “Mentor-Mentee” program. She has served on 47 dissertation committees and five mentoring committees for postdoctoral fellows at the University of Michigan, and she has provided individual mentoring to dozens of doctoral and postdoctoral fellows. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she has served as president of the American Society for Microbiology, chair of the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Microbiology, and councilor for the Society for Leukocyte Biology.
After earning a B.S. in biology from Yale University, she received her M.S. in genetics from Columbia University, and completed her Ph.D. in genetics at Harvard Medical School. After a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes and Tufts Medical School in Boston, she joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1996 as an assistant professor. She earned promotion to associate professor in 2002 and professor in 2008.
Dobson, right, has made significant contributions to the Medical School through her education and administrative leadership roles, and her outstanding clinical service. She served on the Family Medicine executive committee, and as the department’s residency program director, from 2013-18, and she has been an assistant course director for the medical student longitudinal “Doctoring” course. She is co-director for the resident wellness program in the Department of Family Medicine and serves as the lead for faculty development within the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Access, and Justice team for the Office of Medical Student Education.
She obtained her medical degree from Michigan State University in the Upper Peninsula rural health training track. She completed a residency in family medicine, serving as chief resident during her third year, and then completed a fellowship in academic family medicine at the Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University and Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island. Upon completion of her training, she joined the University of Michigan faculty as a clinical lecturer. She has served as inpatient teaching faculty at Chelsea Community Hospital, and she has a continuity practice in the Chelsea Family Medicine Clinic, seeing patients in clinic and at home since 2011. In 2015, she was appointed clinical assistant professor.