UAB CEO Dr. Selwyn Vickers Addresses Rotary
President Brenda Hackney with Rotarian Dr. Ray Watts and Dr. Selwyn Vickers.
On June 22, 2023, the Rotary Club of Birmingham welcomed Dr. Selwyn Vickers, Dean of the UAB Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine, CEO of the UAB Health System and CEO of the UAB/Ascension St. Vincent’s Alliance.
Dr. Vickers shared the successful story of UAB’s restructuring and strategic alignment focused on growth, innovation and collaboration. He encouraged Rotarians to read a recent scholarly article entitled Returning to Growth: One Academic Medical Center's Successful Five-Step Approach to Change Management. He said the article discusses how to rebuild and grow an academic medical center in an organized way without destroying it.
“We had the fortune to both live through that but also to share the knowledge with our peers as a means of encouraging them,” Dr. Vickers said. “Most of our peers are 130, 140, 150 years old. We are the youngest, and yet we are much larger than most of them. We’re very proud of that and it is something that really defines who we are as an institution, and hopefully further defines our city, the state of Alabama, the deep south and in general UAB is a treasure for America because of where it sits and what it means.”
Dr. Vickers explained that the key components of growth in a knowledge-based economy are talent acquisition, innovation, collaboration, and application of shared knowledge.
“The real differential of making a great academic medical center or health system is human capital. It is the key factor in a knowledge-based economy.”
“We serve not only Alabama, but the deep south in America. When you understand the disease burden of the deep south, it affects our entire country. We are the bulwark for helping affect to relieve that burden of disease.”
Dr. Vickers described the changing population of the U.S. explained UAB’s commitment to serving rural and low-income residents.
'“Because we are a state that’s 25-26% of color, those individuals suffered significantly. In almost every major urban area, the death rate for those people who fit into that category of high risk, who often were people of color, who couldn’t stay at home and work, they were essential workers, they had to ride public transportation, and by the way they were living with chronic disease, their death rate was almost twice their population’s existence. We realized that we lived in a world where there was a crisis within a crisis. Why is that important? Because America’s changing. Clearly very soon America will be a minority majority.”
Dr. Vickers noted that 88% of leaders at UAB are not from Alabama and would likely not reside here were it not for UAB. He highlighted the recognition of Children’s of Alabama as the Best Children’s Hospital in the South, largely due to exceptional leadership and UAB faculty.
He discussed the school of medicine’s research priority areas, including precision medicine, informatics, basic science discovery, inflammation, infection and immunity, and population health, health disparities and outcomes effectiveness. He highlighted several UAB leaders and programs, including the Alabama Genomic Health Initiative, the Emerge Network, the new Styslinger Genetics Center, the new UAB Spain Rehabilitation Center and the Live HealthSmart Alabama program.
Dr. Vickers credited Rotarian Ray Watts for launching an environment of growth a decade ago that has led to UAB becoming the eighth best medical school in the country. He also explained that 89% of the National Institutes of Health funding in Alabama goes to UAB.
“What UAB does for our country is that it enriches the diversity of those who participate in almost any clinical trial that’s needed to make the data relevant. It’s been driven by a vision of using UAB’s resources like no other institution can to impact the burden of disease in our state.”
Bio for Dr. Selwyn Vickers
Selwyn M. Vickers, M.D., FACS, was born in Demopolis, Alabama, and grew up in Tuscaloosa and Huntsville. He earned baccalaureate and medical degrees and completed his surgical training (including a chief residency and surgical oncology fellowship) at John Hopkins University. Vickers completed two post-graduate research fellowships with the National Institutes of Health and international surgical training at John Radcliffe Hospital of Oxford University, England.
Vickers is an internationally recognized pancreatic cancer surgeon, pancreatic cancer researcher, and pioneer in health disparities research. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. He has served on the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Board of Trustees and Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees. Additionally, he has served as president of the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract and the Southern Surgical Association. Vickers is currently president of the American Surgical Association, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious surgical organization. He continues to see patients and has had continuous National Institutes of Health (NIH) extramural funding (over $50 million) for more than 25 years.
In 1994, he joined the faculty of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) as an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery, where he was later appointed to professor and the John H. Blue Chair of General Surgery. He was a founder of the UAB Minority Health & Health Disparities Research Center and was PI of UAB’s first pancreatic cancer SPORE.
In 2006, Vickers left UAB to become the Jay Phillips Professor and chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School, one of the oldest and most storied surgery departments in the country. While at Minnesota, the lab of Vickers and Ashok Saluja, Ph.D., was instrumental in the development of an injectable cancer drug, Minnelide, which is licensed and entered phase II trials for the treatment of pancreatic and gastrointestinal cancer in 2019.
In 2013, Vickers became senior vice president of Medicine and dean of the UAB Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine, one of the largest public academic medical centers in the United States. In his role as dean, Vickers leads the medical school’s main campus in Birmingham as well as its regional campuses in Montgomery, Huntsville, and Tuscaloosa.
On January 1, 2022, Vickers assumed the roles of CEO of the UAB Health System and CEO of the UAB/Ascension St. Vincent’s Alliance, while retaining his role as dean of the UAB Heersink School of Medicine. The $5 billion, 11-hospital UAB Health System is anchored by UAB Hospital, the eighth-largest hospital and the fourth-largest public hospital in the U.S., with 1,207 beds. The UAB Health System also includes UAB Hospital-Highlands, UAB Callahan Eye Hospital, and management relationships with Medical West, Baptist Health Montgomery, Russell Medical, John Paul Jones, Whitfield Regional, Northwest Regional Health, and Regional Medical Center of Central Alabama hospitals. The system also has affiliate relationships with Infirmary Health in Mobile and Northeast Regional Hospital in Anniston. The system also includes Cooper Green Mercy Health Services and the UAB Health System/Ascension St. Vincent’s Alliance. In addition to serving as CEO, Vickers serves as chair of the Alliance Joint Leadership Committee and the University of Alabama Health Services Foundation Board.
Vickers and his wife, Janice, who is also from Alabama, have been married since 1988. They have four children: Lauren, Adrienne, Lydia, and Benjamin.