Ingram’s February 2023

When UMKC turned to Mary Anne Jackson to take the reins of its medical-school program on an interim basis in 2018, it wasn’t just getting a nationally-known figure in pediatric infectious diseases. It wasn’t just getting someone ide ally suited to help lead the pub lic-health response to the global pandemic yet to come. It was getting one of its own: Jackson was among the first cohorts of students to enroll in a novel ap proach to medical training back in 1972, a year after UMKC’s

50-year history, and as someone who had been engaged as a fac ulty member for more than three decades, I saw the opportunity to make a difference. I saw great people who had a willingness to work together with a collaborative spirit.” She enacted a series of town-hall meetings that have become monthly affairs, and set goals for her tenure: “To be visible, accessible and engaged, to fos ter diversity and inclusion as core values, to build our preclinical resources, to improve the physical infrastructure, to build talent and team, a vibrant research discovery enterprise, engage and strengthen ties with our alums and promote our national reputa tion—and to ensure that words and action aligned.” She says she didn’t anticipate a global health crisis, “but I hope my expertise and experience allowed us to move forward on many of the med ical-education challenges amplified by the pandemic.” Her peers in medical schools nationwide faced similar challenges with their own programs, she says, so she tapped into their collective wisdom with weekly meetings to compare notes, programs, suc cesses and challenges—a process that continues today. Academic leadership, though, came with a price: “Here at UMKC, we have made great progress and I am excited about our future. I did have to give up my direct patient-care roles, but I continue to be en gaged in our weekly patient-care conference at Children’s Mercy,” she says. She also speaks nationally on pediatric infectious-dis ease topics and within national societies, continues to serve as a mentor for young faculty, and stays engaged in research. “The average life span of a dean is three years,” she says, “and at five years-plus, I recently had the opportunity to take on a new role.” collaborates with, among other academic units, the Bloch School of Management, a business school that has a national reputation for de veloping new cohorts of startup-minded graduates. After about seven years as an adjunct professor while still in private practice, he joined the regular faculty full-time in 2001, and today is a professor and di rector of entrepreneurship programs. Over the years, thousands of stu dents aspiring to become lawyers, and hundreds of students in other UMKC programs, have been drawn into his orbit. He enjoys the in terdisciplinary nature of entrepreneurial ventures—bringing together people trained in business, engineering, and law, for example—and op portunities presented at UMKC for the Law School to collaborate with other academic units and programs in entrepreneurship education and facilitation. More than two decades of engaging in the start-up culture here has shown him that Kansas City may not have the capital to match Boston’s massive ecosystem dollar for dollar, but we hold our own for a region this size. “Kansas City has been and is a fertile and productive area for creativity and entrepreneurship,” he says, “and it seems that more sources of capital are coming here as well.” Within the student cohort, he says, “I have seen, and have been very glad to see, increased student interest in what I would call social and civic entrepreneur ship—in other words, interest in innovative venture proposals based on business models that include one or more social or civic purposes/ missions in addition to and perhaps as a priority over financial profit.” It’s part of what he perceives as steady and increasing interest in entre preneurship among law-school students that expresses itself in various ways—acquiring skills to counsel entrepreneurial clients, learning to operate their own firms as entrepreneurs, and in some cases, looking to start an entrepreneurial business of their own, apart from law practice.

MARY ANNE JACKSON UMKC SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

School of Medicine rolled out a six-year program for high school graduates. This St. Louis native earned her degree in 1978, and began charting a course in both pediatric medicine at Children’s Mercy, and the instruction of future physicians who would prac tice it as a professor at UMKC. In 2020, with the COVID crisis still unfolding, she came full circle with her alma mater by drop ping the “interim” on her role as dean, fully embracing the task of leading more than 500 enrolled students. “When the then-acting chancellor, Dr. Barb Bichelmeyer, approached me, there were several factors I considered,” Jackson recalls. “There had nev er been a graduate of the school in the UMKC medical school’s

When he was growing up in Hartford, Conn., his family and friends provided Tony Luppino with an early exposure to the le gal profession through their own interactions and connections with lawyers. So, he came to view it as an important profession, he says. He notes that crouching behind home plate at Fenway Park in catcher’s regalia would have been an important profession too, but the Red Sox recruiters, alas, nev er called. He headed off to Dart mouth College and became an American Studies major, which he

TONY LUPPINO UMKC SCHOOL OF LAW

says “allowed me to take courses relating to history and government, in addition to literature and other courses, and kept me on a path toward law school” at Stanford University. There would be more to a career in law than just a paycheck; Luppino saw in it something far nobler. “Law in general is fundamentally important in our society,” he says. “I believe that is well-captured in the following part of a speech by JFK: ‘Law is the adhesive force in the cement of society, creating order out of chaos and coherence in place of anarchy.’ ” For some 19 years, Luppino was engaged in private practice in law firms—approximately four in Boston and 15 in the Kansas City area, primarily focused on business and tax planning, especially with entrepreneurial ventures. Those ex periences created an ideal pathway to UMKC’s School of Law, which

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February 2023

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