Baldwin Chosen for Head Texas Tech Health Job

John C. Baldwin ’71, the president and CEO of the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Immune Disease Institute and a professor of surgery at the medical school, has been named the new president of the Texas Tech University system’s Health Sciences Center, Texas Tech Chancellor Kent R. Hance announced last week.

Baldwin, who has headed the non-profit, independent research immune institution since February of 2005, will take over at Texas Tech sometime next month, he confirmed this week.

A self-described “old-time Texan,” Baldwin will return to his home state to preside over 7,000 staff members at the Health Sciences Center’s five schools. Texas Tech is home to a Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in addition to schools of pharmacy, allied health sciences, nursing and medicine.

The flagship of the university’s Health Sciences Center is its medical school, the main campus of which is located in Lubbock. Hance said that a second Texas Tech medical school in El Paso is set for substantial expansion in the coming years, which will provide a unique opportunity for overlapping research regarding health service and immigration, something Baldwin said he’s excited to better understand.

According to Baldwin, the El Paso campus is “the only border medical school in the country, and therefore it deals with many of the complicated sociopolitical aspects of border medicine, which has become a discipline unto itself.”

“Dealing with undocumented patients, how we interact with patients and medical professionals in Mexico has a sharp focus there because the medical school is 1,500 feet from the Mexican border,” he said.

He also said that he planned to increase funding for basic science programs during his tenure as the president of a university system, a position that he said he has sought “for several years.”

“I’m very familiar with and appreciative of the impact the funding has on the discovery of knowledge but also the emblematic effect of funding on the university,” Baldwin said.

A native Spanish speaker and a fifth-generation Texan, Baldwin said that the chance to return to his Texas roots played a significant role in his acceptance of the university’s offer.

According to Chancellor Hance, it was a sentiment he detected upon their first meeting.

“I knew I had a shot at him when I first met him at the hotel in Washington, because he had on a pair of cowboy boots,” Hance said. “I said, ‘this guy might want to come back to Texas.’”

Baldwin was recommended to Hance by O. Wayne Isom, a member of the Texas Tech search committee looking to fill the Health Sciences Center's presidential vacancy. Isom, who is also a Texas native, is the chairman of the department of cardiothoracic surgery at Cornell's medical school.

Isom said that while he never knew Baldwin when they both lived in Texas, he had gained a strong reputation among medical academic circles as one of the leaders in his field.

"You know who has good reputations, and who's a good teacher," Isom said. "I think Texas Tech is very fortunate, because he's someone who's got the experience to run a big Health Sciences Center."

The move will be Baldwin’s first extended stay back in his home state since he left for college. At Harvard, Baldwin was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and following graduation, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

Baldwin then attended Stanford Medical School and he joined the school’s faculty soon after becoming a doctor. He then taught undergraduates at Yale beginning in the late 1980s, before joining the Baylor University staff in 1994.

Baldwin also served as dean of Dartmouth Medical School from 1998 to 2005 before returning to Harvard. He also had a six-year stint on the University’s Board of Overseers.

“On paper, on a scale of one to 10, he’s a 15,” Hance said. “He was by and far the best candidate that we looked at. With what he’s done, I felt like he’d have stature and standing and he’d be able to help us with raising funds for research.”

But despite his numerous university stops and his impending home at Texas Tech, Baldwin said that Harvard will always stand out from the rest.

“I don’t think I’ll ever feel like I’ve left Harvard,” Baldwin said. “From standing in front of the John Harvard statue and wondering if I’d ever survive in such a place to standing in front of the John Harvard statue with Neil Rudenstine as an overseer of the university, I’ve developed a very strong commitment to the place.”

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.