Transcript: HelixTalk #200 - 200 Episodes, One Big Conversation: Dr. Aron Sousa on RFU and Community Impact
Episode ID: 234
Generated: 2026-10-09 16:02:05
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Announcer: Welcome to HelixTalk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers covering real-life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics, and drug therapy discussions. This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosalind Franklin University College of Pharmacy. This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not professional advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified healthcare provider. And now, on to the show.

Dr. Sean Kane: Welcome to HelixTalk episode 200. I'm your co-host, Dr. Kane.

Dr. Khyati Patel: I have to pause here, Dr. Kane, because you just said episode 200.

Dr. Sean Kane: Very special episode today.

Dr. Khyati Patel: It is. I'm Dr. Patel. Welcome.

Dr. Sean Kane: And the title of today's episode is 200 Episodes, One Big Conversation: Dr. Aron Sousa on RFU and Community Impact.

Dr. Khyati Patel: So Dr. Kane, this is our 200th episode. How far we have gotten?

Dr. Sean Kane: It's pretty amazing to think about. So our first technical HelixTalk episode labeled under HelixTalk was released in 2014. We had some previous episodes before we kind of labeled it as HelixTalk. We kind of started as like a top 200 drugs podcast that kind of coincided with our curriculum. And then we got a little bit bored with that and we thought, why don't we expand it to kind of whatever we want to talk about that would be relevant to pharmacy or healthcare professions in general.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Yeah, we've had multiple different topics including drug topics, new studies, guideline changes, professionalism topics, career-related advice and stuff. So we've done a little bit of everything. And we got what, 2 million episode downloads so far?

Dr. Sean Kane: Yeah, we're either at or nearly at 2 million episode downloads, which is just crazy to think about the impact that we've had in terms of who's listening and where they're listening from all over the world. You know, about 20% of our listenership comes from Illinois, Chicago area, which means 80% is coming from elsewhere, which is really crazy to think about.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Yeah, that is exciting. And to make the mark of this 200th episode, we have a very special guest with us.

Dr. Sean Kane: So Dr. Sousa, welcome to HelixTalk.

Dr. Aron Sousa: Oh, thank you so much. I'm honored to be here on your 200th episode.

Dr. Sean Kane: Yeah, very exciting. So we thought, given that it was number 200, we would have, you know, you as a special guest. And we wanted to, you know, get to know you a little bit better during this episode and then also talk about community involvement from a university perspective, which is something we're aware that you are intimately aware of from your time prior to RFU and then also a passion area at RFU as well.

Dr. Aron Sousa: Well, thank you. Like I said, I'm honored. Especially since, you know, you guys did that great episode, you know, things we do for no reason. And like you kind of ran out of time for Dame Judi Dench. I thought you'd bring her back for today. So I really appreciate getting to jump the line in front of Dame Judi. So I appreciate that.

(Laughter)

Dr. Khyati Patel: You are special. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Sean Kane: Well, why don't we kick it off? So you started with us at RFU in November 2025 after a long career at Michigan State University. For those that don't know you as well, could you just share a little bit about your background?

Dr. Aron Sousa: Sure. I didn't expect to be an academic. I decided I wasn't going to be an academic when I went to medical school instead of becoming a chemist. And fell in love with an academic and followed my wife to Michigan State and did residency there. And the best job was with the university and the best mentoring was in education. And I wound up in medical education and had the chance to be the academic dean and then became a dean. And all of a sudden I was an administrator without having ever really decided that was what I was going to do. I just took the best job that was available. And it's been a lot of fun. It's so delightful to be here at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. I wasn't so sure that coming to a place that was private and things like that would fit with my public institution, community-based history. But it turns out to be very much the same attitude, the same kind of dedicated people, the same focus on mission and impact amongst our neighbors who are in need. The people here are just phenomenal. And we have these nuggets of brilliance like HelixTalk that have a real impact across the country and the world. And frankly, let's be honest, the galaxy. Because this is, right, isn't it, this is the best pharmacy podcast in the galaxy. I think, I think as we know it.

Dr. Sean Kane: I love that. Definitely agreed.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Well, we'll have to have a tune mix for somebody traveling to Mars listening to us, right? We'll believe it then.

Dr. Sean Kane: Love that. Well, in terms of your transition, what was it that brought you to RFU? What was main motivators to kind of bring yourself here?

[05:00]
Dr. Aron Sousa: I had been at Michigan State for 30 years and came to love the institution and the job. But it, you know, in everybody's time, there comes a time for a change. And it was clearly time for me to do something different. And I wasn't actually looking for presidential positions, but this came up. I realized there was no athletic department here, so I could do this job. And it's been a great, like I said, it's been a great transition and a lot of fun. And a great opportunity to continue some of my focus on community impact and being useful because that orients me. It really helps me sort out what we're supposed to be doing. Can we be useful? Can we help our neighbors? How do we do a great job for those people? Which drives excellence, which is wonderful and great for a reputation, but can become kind of disorienting and change people if you're not focused on being useful to somebody.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Um, we want to focus a little bit about your contributions at MSU in terms of the curriculum reshaping that you did and other community projects that you were involved. Just before we dive into the specific project that we are here to discuss, can you give us a little background on what was that curriculum contribution?

Dr. Aron Sousa: Sure. So two big things I worked on at Michigan State were curriculum and the other was community work. And I'll start with the community one and then I can talk curriculum for days if you want. So, um, Michigan State's College of Human Medicine is a community-based medical school. It was the first institution accredited as that, barely beating out New Mexico, probably. So this is in the 1960s. The notion of a medical school not intimately tied to a hospital was not something that the accrediting bodies liked, which is why Chicago Medical School had trouble getting accredited for 40 some years, 60 years practically, right? So in that sense, the two institutions are similar. The College of Human Medicine at Michigan State struggled to get accredited but was being founded on this community medical education basis, which is actually how RFU really sort of became accredited at the end. So my job in academic affairs was to go all across the state. At the time we had six campuses when I started, from the Upper Peninsula to Kalamazoo to Saginaw and Flint. Over time, people started other medical schools and we lost some campuses and I started some campuses. And so my maybe the thing I'm most proud of in my time there was developing our Flint campus into a public health powerhouse. So I there were I worked with the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. There were a whole bunch of grants to develop a public health unit there. That unit turned into the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health. It's home of the faculty, Mona Hanna and Dick Sadler in particular, who were key to figuring out what was going on with lead in the water during the Flint water crisis. Just for people who might not know how the Flint water crisis went down, the people of Flint lost the ballot box. So the state took over their mayor and their city council and replaced it with a state manager. So they no longer could protect themselves. And the state moved their water source from Lake Huron, which is soft water, to the Flint River, which is hard water. And they didn't treat the water correctly, so it was highly corrosive going through the pipes. I know a lot of pharmacists are actually toxicologists. So just imagine the stuff that caustic water can pull out of pipes on its way to your house. General Motors stopped using it to wash auto parts because it was corroding them. Wow. So the people of Flint all knew this was bad. It looked bad, it smelled bad, it tasted bad, it felt bad. But nobody listened to them. Right? A majority minority city, primarily African Americans, sort of a poster child for the Rust Belt and deindustrialization. And Dr. Hanna in particular, as a pediatrician, did the math to figure out that there was lead in the kids. That completely changed the calculation for the whole media conversation. And we'll come back to Mona and what came of the sort of influence she had for that. But that group turned into a public health unit. We brought some people in, Jennifer Johnson and a variety of others who did spectacular work around suicide, maternal mortality, other public health questions. And it became a thriving part of downtown Flint. We built a second building in addition to a first. They are now up to $500 million in external funding over 10 years. So just and the number one NIH department at Michigan State. I mean, just a spectacular group of people. So it was wonderful to be a part of that.

Dr. Khyati Patel: What a great community impact without having to be tied with a teaching hospital. Um, this is a great example.

[10:00]
Dr. Aron Sousa: Yeah, and it it is true. Hospitals are wonderful and horrible, right? I mean, they they are great engines of activity and we need them and all the rest, but they can be a financial source of support and they can be a drain. Um, and they they can be the tail that wags the dog of a university. So it it's a anyway, it was a great opportunity and a way that a community institution can be useful and academically successful and have a great influence on neighbors and actually for the rest of the country. So the infrastructure bill that came out a few years later under Biden that removed all the lead service pipes, that's Mona and that whole team of people. That impact for the whole country.

Dr. Sean Kane: One thing that we've talked about prior to recording today's episode was Hull House. And this is actually something that I looked up because I'd never heard of it. And I know you've mentioned it multiple times. For the audience, can you give a little context or background to Hull House, settlement houses, things like that, and kind of the role of the university in the community, especially as you see it?

Dr. Aron Sousa: Yeah, so Jane Addams is a, I don't know if she's a heroine to me or a example or what, but Jane Addams is the founder of social work, great activist, and intensely local. So she was inspired by settlement houses in London on a European tour when she was young, came back, started one in the 19th Ward in Chicago called Hull House. It was then staffed mostly with women academics. And one of whom ironically was Alice Hamilton, who figured out what lead did in the community and fought a huge battle with General Motors over tetraethyl lead, which was the great lead poisoning of America. Anyway, they were spectacular women in and almost all women in in this settlement house. That's the source of after-school programs in this country. The first ones to do that. They kind of founded the people will lots of people can take credit for English as a second language sort of concepts. But they taught English to immigrants because that was the neighborhood, mostly from Central and Southern Europe, using the activities that they were going to be doing in their new country. Whether it was shopping or running a house because they were mostly women or running a loom, which women were able to do in that part of Chicago. So it's a whole different way of thinking about education. And they settlement houses across the country and the world had academics in them and invited the community into their home, into their academic home, and would go out in the community and do their work. That started in England, that's what she brought back. And it inspired my concept for Flint. That was what I wanted. Academics in the community. Academics have been parachuting into Flint forever, taking the data and leaving. I wanted community-based participatory research, academics in the community who worked with the community. Again, I could talk forever about that because it was so amazing to watch it come to fruition. But in my segue to curriculum, uh, John Dewey from University of Chicago would come up to Hull House and a lot of his educational philosophy actually comes from the work that was done at Hull House educating kids and in language. And his concept of the importance of active learning, engaging in language in that way, tying it to practical things that people were doing is part and parcel of John Dewey's educational philosophy. Back in an era when he was a natural philosopher, right? We didn't have some of the same distinctions between philosophy and science that we have today when he was doing this. He was trying to do physiology, trying to figure out how long a thought took. And they were having arguments about whether reflexes were thoughts. And that was a philosophical and a scientific question. So it all got tied together for him in a way that was highly integrated and I loved. So I loved reading, I don't love reading John Dewey because he's kind of a convoluted writer, but I I love that work. And so when it was time for the College of Human Medicine to do a new curriculum, I was really inspired by the work of Dewey and Addams. And Addams deserves a lot of credit for Dewey's insights, I think in a lot of ways. So we tried to unify this as much as possible. We wanted students in clinic as soon as possible. We got them in in eight or nine weeks. The idea being that they would be learning more theoretical stuff while they were doing the practical implication and that they would be building the infrastructure of their education on those things.

[15:00]
Dr. Aron Sousa: Interestingly, pharmacology and pharmacy were key to this because there is no better way to integrate patient to biochemistry and physiology than pharmacology. It is the great link. It explains everything except diagnosis. And even a lot of diagnosis shows up in pharmacy and pharmacology. So we would talk in the first, ah, you know, eight weeks we would talk about weight and blood pressure and pulse and respiratory rate, temperature. The vital signs because that's what they would be doing in clinic. And when we taught them to do shots, we would teach them the anatomy of where you give a shot and then the pharmacology of vaccines and some of the common things that they'd be doing, the immunology behind that, and then maybe some of the microbiology. All as one fell swoop. And then that turned into a chief complaints curriculum, which is not, we're not the first to do a chief complaints curriculum. And in some ways it's sort of a return to the past, right, before systems-based thought kind of came in. But the philosophical educational part is to integrate the work as tightly as possible so that they are continually building on it. And then my people came up with progress testing as a way of assessing, hoping to decrease uh anxiety and things like that. Turns out medical students are wound up.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Really?

Dr. Aron Sousa: Yeah. Isn't that shocking?

Dr. Khyati Patel: Isn't that shocking?

Dr. Aron Sousa: Isn't that shocking? So when we surveyed them before and after the curriculum, they were just as wound up. They had fewer tests, we weren't actually working them as hard, but in their heads, they were just as wound up.

Dr. Sean Kane: It's all relative.

Dr. Aron Sousa: It is all relative, right? It's all what you've seen or not seen. It was an amazing project. I've never seen so many people in love with a project. And that was maybe one of the most inspiring things. And hands down my best teaching experience was working in one of these small groups after clinic. Uh, it was educational jazz. So the students would present a case, we would try to put together what the on the fly put together what the basic science and clinical relevance was for them as we were talking about it and link that to the unit. It was so much fun. It was work and it was something you really needed clinicians for because we were the only ones that brought it all together. Um, but it was a blast. And that was in the first year was 2016, so 10 years on, they're on to Shared Discovery Curriculum 2.0, modifying some of that to make it easier for everybody, but yeah, it was a blast. And Diane Wagner was my the person who implemented this and what a trooper, what an amazing leader she she is.

Dr. Khyati Patel: That seems like a very good marriage of both didactic and experiential education where you take a little bit of everything and then mix it together and then things kind of click, you know, we have that in pharmacy curriculum here as well. Early introductions to patient care and, um, you know, I'm going to segue to ICC in a little bit as well, but it's a it's the best thing for our students learning.

Dr. Aron Sousa: ICC is a great example of that, right? I mean, like not to step on whatever this wherever this your script is taking us, but but 400 students at this university volunteer there each year. That's about half of the folks who are on campus, which is an astonishing opportunity. And and it's it's got to be the most interprofessional, biggest, strongest uh university free clinic in the country. Like I'll go up against anybody for that thing.

Dr. Khyati Patel: And to our listeners, we have done uh an episode uh on Interprofessional Community Clinic, ICC, we dearly call it. It's a free student clinic initiative. So do listen to that uh for the background. But similar to the model of integrating university work in the community, ICC is one of the examples. Do you want to share some of the RFU accomplishments in the same line that you're proud of?

Dr. Aron Sousa: We do amazing work in the community, especially when you consider our size and and uh and infrastructure and things like that. So but the ICC provides, you know, medical care and opportunity for care for people who wouldn't get it otherwise and wouldn't go elsewhere. So this is a complicated time in the world, right? And so having a place where you're safe and have the opportunity to get care and get referrals to where you need to be. Not to mention, like how many places can you get PT and pharmacy counseling and your vaccines and a diagnosis and podiatry and psychology. I mean, it's amazing. So that's that's spectacular.

[20:00]
Dr. Aron Sousa: And then sort of building on that, the Community Care Connection, which call the Care Coach. I don't know why it has two names, but it does, so be it. But it goes to 11 sites around the county providing care and and opportunity for people once again, particularly, you know, for vaccines and actually sports physicals are a big need for kids and and a great opportunity. Anyway, so that.

Dr. Aron Sousa: And then we've figured out how to have a clinic in the child advocacy centers of Lake of Lake County. That's where kids go uh after they survive physical violence, sexual violence, and that's where they get justice. And also care. And it used to be they sent them off 30 minutes down the road to an emergency department that may or may not really be able to take care of them. That meant a lot of kids didn't go. And that not only meant that they didn't get care, but they didn't get an opportunity at justice because it is in those visits that evidence is collected. And our team at at the RFU Health Clinics have figured out how to be there for those kids and when other institutions weren't able to figure that out. Great support from Julie Morrison, uh the local senator made that possible. And now we're talking to other CACs in the area about maybe expanding that opportunity.

Dr. Sean Kane: I want to transition a little bit going back to your MSU days of a program called Rx Kids. And on many weekly town halls which you have, I believe you typically say, I'll talk about Rx Kids any chance I get. So that's what we're doing today.

Dr. Aron Sousa: Well, thank you very much. You know I can't stop myself, right?

Dr. Sean Kane: Could you could you tell us a little bit more about what is the program for the audience that may not have heard of it or your weekly town halls?

Dr. Aron Sousa: Sure. So Rx Kids is the creation of Dr. Mona Hanna, the pediatrician that I talked about. And as she tells the story, right, she was tired of taking care of kids where the main ailment was poverty. She was seeing medical and health concerns, but the cause was poverty. And she could only kind of make a difference around the edges, right? A medicine can be great, but it doesn't actually change the underlying problem often. So she was trying to figure out how to treat poverty. And she got to know a professor at University of Michigan named Luke Shaefer and who wrote an amazing book called $2 a Day, which was sort of about how people survive extreme poverty in this country and and understood the policy and tax issues intimately. And came up with a cash prescription. $1,500 to the mom during pregnancy and then $500 a month to the kid for the first year of life, uh in most versions of the program, six months in some. And the Mott Foundation, which I'd had that great relationship with, uh came up with $15 million to do the program for three years in Flint. And the governor, who was elected after the Flint water crisis, came up with $16 million of a particular kind of welfare money called TANF. And they started the program to see what would happen. Soon after, other communities in Michigan wanted to do that, particularly Kalamazoo.

Dr. Aron Sousa: The key things about that program are one, it leads with a sense of love for moms and babies. And too much of our language, too much of our political language, there's not enough love. There's and certainly not support for moms, babies, and women. I there are, you know, there are leaders in this country who don't want us to use the word woman in a grant application. So the notion that we are going to be about uh love and dignity of moms and babies is important. So that's the first thing, right? And it's universal. Everybody's in. No income testing, no work testing, no drug testing, no testing. Just everybody's in. You're pregnant, you're in. Within these communities, right?

Dr. Aron Sousa: So the other thing is that it is very much place-based. It's everybody in that place. Starting in Flint was important. 40% of the women who entered the program and 99% of people are in the program. Like everybody joins. 40% of those people have uh an annual income under $10,000 a year. Which is crazy. It's like how you make that work is not clear. But that means that $7,500 is a big deal in that year. And you can see that in the outcomes. Evictions dropped practically to zero. Reports to Child Protective Services dropped by 30%. Moms report less stress. They report feeling better about their community and actually their ability as a parent. So creating that financial space creates some head space also for for people to be parents.

[25:00]
Dr. Aron Sousa: And then there's some really interesting biological outcomes. Key among those, there was a decrease in smoking in the third trimester, which may be the mechanism and undoubtedly undoubtedly there are other mechanisms also. But premature birth dropped by uh 18% and low birth weight dropped by 25 to 28% depending on when you pick the data from, but it's a lot, like a quarter. Which is huge. It's huge financially. If you applied that across the whole state of Michigan, just reducing premature birth by that much would save the state $200 million. Or decreasing low birth weight by that amount would decrease uh costs by $280 million across the state of Michigan. We'll see, right, what that means for Flint and for the rest of the state as it's expanded. And then maybe most excitingly, neonatal death rate, so death in the first 30 days, dropped by half. Which is amazing. It's no doubt comes out of that prematurity and low birth weight impact. The interesting sort of piece under that data is it took Flint from twice the state's neonatal death rate to the state's neonatal death rate. So fascinatingly, so it got rid of the disparity between Flint and the rest of the state. It's been so successful and so desired across the state. It's now in all of Detroit. It's now in nearly all of Wayne County, which is the county that holds Detroit. It's in all of the Upper Peninsula, uh which is incredibly rural, incredibly poor, incredibly beautiful, but it's it's not an easy place to be poor. Uh and the poorest county in Michigan is interestingly Lake County. But it is not on the lake, right? So it has no tourist work, it's anyway. And so that county is in. The Republican House and the Democratic Senate of Michigan voted a $270 million general fund allotment to the program. So it's going not quite statewide, but nearly statewide. It's now in parts of Cleveland. Mississippi is close. I think it should be in Illinois.

Dr. Khyati Patel: That is such an amazing story and I I feel like you glossed over how hard it was a little bit to go from A to Z, but I would imagine that was a lot of effort to get to where you are now.

Dr. Aron Sousa: Yeah, Mona's pretty special. Like the combination of her political position after the water crisis, her talent, right, she's just smart and hardworking and talented, and understands the question and why love and dignity are an important underpinning to this. It's not taking care of poor people, right? It's giving people the opportunity to take care of themselves. Which is why interestingly libertarians love this. The Mackinac Center in Michigan is a fairly conservative libertarian think tank. They came out with an editorial in support of Rx Kids. It's the only editorial I've ever seen that said the program would be supported both by Milton Friedman and Jesus of Nazareth.

(Laughter)

Dr. Aron Sousa: I mean it's isn't that great? Isn't that great?

Dr. Khyati Patel: Isn't that great?

Dr. Aron Sousa: No, I mean the women use the money as you would expect. They buy diapers and food and pay rent and insurance. And for the people who have a little bit more capacity, they stay in school, they go to school, they, you know, get a chair at a hair cutting salon so they can cut hair. I mean like it's what you would imagine. They use it to make their life better.

Dr. Khyati Patel: You know, this conversation reminds me of a graph and conversations that I hear all the time, how maternal outcomes in the United States are the lowest compared to some of the, you know, developed countries that we compare ourselves with. Not in size, but, you know, in in economy and whatnot. And what you said earlier that this uh program was universal, that didn't matter what the income was as long as they were in those defined county limits. We do talk about making things universal in the United States. And how incredible this would be to apply and replicate such programs across the country because the data and the impact that you described is phenomenal. And that's just coming from small subset of, you know, this one state. Imagine the impact we can make on those charts when we are compared with other developed countries where it shows poor maternal outcome. What is your take on that?

[30:00]
Dr. Aron Sousa: Well, uh this is not a discovery. Right? This happens in other parts of the world. It happens all over Europe. It happens in many parts of the world that there is an allowance when you're pregnant. Because it poverty peaks in the first year of life. You know, in two-income families, it's a one-income family. In one-income families, it's a no-income family. Like it's a big deal. So it's not shocking that people have figured this out. And maybe to your point, some time ago this country decided it was not going to put up with poverty in the elderly, so we created Social Security. Which is the greatest anti-poverty program in this country. We don't means test that. And we don't test how they spend the money. And we don't follow them around. We give them the money. And it had a huge impact on poverty in the elderly. We should do the same thing for kids and moms. It's not that shocking or complicated. To your point, other countries have figured this out. We came really close. During COVID was the there was a tax uh credit. And philanthropy and states cannot afford to do this forever. Right? It's going to have to be a federal program uh eventually. But it's really important to create the conditions and the political will to do it. But it is absolutely the sort of thing that we should do.

Dr. Khyati Patel: And it's one thing to have the expertise like Dr. Hanna and and the will to do it, but it's the other thing to convince our lawmaker and the legislators, right? So this medical advocacy is such a thing. And what is your take on or your input on how universities and medical, you know, professionals, uh what's the importance of advocacy that could make such impact in the community um that you described through Rx Kids?

Dr. Aron Sousa: So universities haven't gotten the best press over the last little while, right? Uh and I think people forget that not only do we educate people, which is the backbone of our economy, but innovation comes out of universities. And people usually point to cancer treatments and things like that. But the truth is, this is a university program. This is Michigan State University, the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health, and University of Michigan's Poverty Solutions, which is where Luke Shaefer was. Came together to create an innovation for the state of Michigan and the rest of us. And that's universities being in the world, trying to help their neighbors, trying to help the people around them and make the world a better place. And then their faculty being active in the world and, you know, talking about problems that need to be solved in a way that the world can understand. Uh which is how the politics worked out for this program. It it turns out that being poor in rural communities is not particularly different than being poor in urban communities, right? The people's children can't get a job and they leave. They themselves struggle to get work. They struggle to get to schools that they, you know, maybe feel comfortable with or want. Substance use is a big problem. It may be different substances, but it's substance abuse. Gun violence is a big issue. There's actually more gun violence in rural America than urban America. There are very similar sort of phenotypes of poverty, right? Add to that, you can't get to a world-renowned national center. If you are sick and poor in our communities, there are amazing resources around here that are just a train ride away if you can get to them. If you're in the Upper Peninsula, that's not happening. Right? You cannot get there. The ability to apply this to rural communities and to do that early was politically important. It's really, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt's coalition.

Dr. Khyati Patel: You also alluded earlier that we should bring some similar program to Illinois community. And I also we also want to give some, you know, shout out and spotlight to Rx Kids. So if other communities are looking to develop certain programs um similar to Rx Kids, where can they go?

Dr. Aron Sousa: So they can go to rxkids.org. It actually has a how to do it in your community page. There is work in Illinois on a program called Nest, which would only be in Medicaid populations. It would be a great start. I think it should be universal. But you can go to rxkids.org and they'll tell you how to do it.

Dr. Sean Kane: I think it's worth mentioning even in our neighborhood at RFU, we have communities that have high poverty that would be great communities for programs to start in. So North Chicago, Waukegan, Zion, these are definitely underserved communities. And North Chicago, where we literally have a university, definitely stands out. Not to the extent of Flint, Michigan, but definitely stands out.

[35:00]
Dr. Aron Sousa: Yeah, absolutely. I I think that Lake County uh which is our county, there's incredible wealth in the south, right? And then there are a whole range of majority minority communities in the northern part. And you can tell that they've lost industry and, you know, and they have that sort of Midwestern look and feel of places that, you know, lost their factories and the manufacturing base. There are great employers here, but it's a different employment and it's a different set of economics uh than when you go farther to the south. Without a doubt.

Dr. Khyati Patel: That was a great discussion on Rx Kids and the impact you and MSU and the other collaborators like Dr. Hanna and Dr. Shaefer has had in the community. And we can't wait to see how it can be replicated around us or maybe at RFU. But I want to turn back to RFU in specific and, you know, your impact at RFU. We've known you to be a connector. Um it's refreshing. I've been here, and Dr. Kane too, have been here since 2012. And you are very approachable. I could be sitting in a cafeteria and find you eating lunch, you know, and talking to other folks behind you. And you do that by having this weekly town halls and we were featured uh on one of the town halls too.

Dr. Aron Sousa: One of our best. I mean absolutely one of the best.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Thank you, thank you. But I'll be really honest, like some of the topics we've had at these town halls are things that people are doing wonderful things and you're just giving them platform and limelight and connecting people, giving opportunities to learn but also collaborate. How where does this idea come from and, you know, how did you decide to be the person you are who is a connector?

Dr. Aron Sousa: I love the idea that I decided who I was going to be. The town halls come out of COVID. I was dean when COVID came to Michigan and I was rounding early in it, you know, the full get up and patients in the hallway, tubes coming out of the rooms and you know all kinds of stuff going on. I wore I hadn't worn scrubs in like a decade, but my wife wouldn't let me in the house in my civilian, you know, in the clothes. So that whole business. People were scared and confused and I would go to a meeting and they would just ask me questions. And I decided that the thing to do was to have a town hall. In part because we needed to communicate quickly. We moved everything online and all these kinds of things. So we had a town hall. And I had an ID doc and we answered questions for 90 minutes. Like it was a short little here's what's going on and then we just answered questions for 90 minutes. Same format that I use now, you can ask an anonymous question. And then we did that in other colleges at the university. I added a veterinarian because she was a great partner and the dean of the vet school. And we did these town halls. And then I did one the next week. And the next week. There was always something to explain about what was practically happening educationally or in terms of research. My associate dean for research, who RFU will know well soon, Dr. Nara Parameswaran came on because we were trying to figure out how we were going to do research. Like all kinds of folks from the college administration came on to talk about how we were managing things. And then we would answer questions. And the answering questions was the most important thing that we did in so many ways. And people liked it. And it's on Friday at lunch. You're you don't have to be in the room. You can be shopping for shoes or your next Airbnb. And we're just prattling on in the background occasionally saying something interesting. And so from those COVID ones then I realized, oh well we need a I need to talk about the budget. So let's do that.

Dr. Aron Sousa: I had already started writing weekly updates. And the first time I was interim I didn't quite have the weekly update thing down, but the second time I was an interim dean, I looked back and I had written three a month. Because there was something, somebody died, there was some change, there was something I wanted to tell people. And I realized, oh I should just do this every week. And so then the town hall every week became a thing. And when we did a 360 evaluation of me later on, the weekly update and the town hall were the two things that people knew and liked. And your question, how did you decide who to be, was not a decision. And the perception of me is very much based on what I write and what you see on the town hall.

Dr. Aron Sousa: I am a pretty good introvert. Right? Like I show up. I'm game for showing up, but I'm tired afterwards. Like you and I hate galas. Like I will go to a gala because it's my job. But then I'm done. My wife, who's an extrovert, we go to a meeting or something like that, she wants to talk about it and go over it and I am done, right? So the town hall is, you know, a great opportunity for me to talk to people and people to listen and get a sense of who I am, right? But it you can ask an anonymous question. I don't care what you ask. I will do my best to answer it.

[40:00]
Dr. Aron Sousa: That's real. And that understanding of transparency and opportunity and accessibility turns out to be really, really useful when I need it. Right? So we just went through questions of what we could do with healthcare coverage at the university. We had a 28% increase in our costs. So that cost everybody something, right? And you know, we did a town hall on that. And talked about what our choices were and and things like that. If you don't talk to people about that, right, they're like it happened in a mysterious back room somewhere. So every time I have to do something difficult, right, this is great practice for me. It's a great opportunity for me to be authentic. Even though I just said, you know, like all you know of me is what you see, right? But that's who I want to be as a leader and it's actually how I get stuff done.

Dr. Sean Kane: Love that.

Dr. Khyati Patel: It is a refreshing change and we really, really appreciate and welcome it. So thank you.

Dr. Aron Sousa: I also actually enjoy it. I mean like as you can I I am a teacher. Every teacher has performance in them somewhere. We like, you know, talking to people and and engaging them and hopefully making them giggle occasionally, right? Like we all like that. And what teachers do. And it comes out of that.

Dr. Sean Kane: Yeah. I would just echo what Dr. Patel said that it is a way to kind of get to know you and it's really refreshing to have that transparency of what's going on and to showcase all of the amazing things that are happening at RFU.

Dr. Aron Sousa: Oh, that is a whole thing, right? Like having the same thing when I started this. All of a sudden people sort of had a sense of what was going on. And nobody feels that more intensely than staff. Because they often are not in meetings, they're not at faculty meetings, they're not in department meetings. They have they only find out snippets of things. So having deans and great faculty up in front of them talking about their work opens up a whole world for a whole bunch of people at the university. And if you couldn't see it, you can find it on YouTube and watch it there. So uh which is where my mom watches it.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Which actually parents watch this.

Dr. Aron Sousa: Students send it to their families when they've been on. And I try to get students on as often as I can. Like the people who are most convinced that the town hall is useful are people who have been on it.

Dr. Sean Kane: Sure.

Dr. Aron Sousa: I mean it is they love having a previously dean or a president invite them on. It's one of the great things about it. It's I love being invited onto this, right? People like that. It's the academic gift exchange.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Absolutely. I did share it with my family, the town hall link.

Dr. Aron Sousa: Exactly, right? People do that. Yeah.

Dr. Sean Kane: Well, Dr. Sousa, we're going to wrap up with kind of a crystal ball future forward thought question here. So just in general, like what is your vision for RFU's role in the community? We've talked about Rx Kids and MSU's involvement with that, but from an RFU standpoint, like what is your vision as the president and CEO of RFU for what the next five to 10 years might look like for us specifically with community engagement and then what do you think we need to prioritize or shift to kind of get to that vision or goal?

Dr. Aron Sousa: You know, the thing that's delighted me in so many ways is that we have wonderful people doing great work. Those are the kinds of things that we want to grow. Much of that great work is education. Our students are amazing. Our alumni are amazing. Our impact comes mostly through our alumni. So focusing on and doing great work in education is the core thing that we do for the world.

Dr. Aron Sousa: But the life of faculty and staff and students is not just in the classroom, right? It's out in the world. And we have great things to offer to our neighbors. And our neighbors are in need, right? Neighbors writ large. And so the more useful we can be, the more useful our academic work can be, the more engaged we are with the people around us, the first of all, that's more useful and to me that just makes me happy, right? I mean like I think it's our love going out into the world which creates an important impact. And it's our love of our work, right? That is what you want in an institution. People who love to do their work. Not people who love the idea of themselves as the people who do the work, but actually, you know, loving the work. It's the difference between uh having an ego and being a narcissist, right? It's like the business that I have something useful to give to the world and and you appreciate the what you do in the world, not who you are as the person doing something in the world.

[45:00]
Dr. Aron Sousa: Making it possible for our people to do more of that is where, you know, we spread the greatness that is here, which is what I want us to do. There's a lot of work that goes into that, but mostly you have to hire and keep faculty and staff who love what they're doing and make it possible for them to keep doing that. In that sense, right, it's not very dramatic, right? It's, you know, we have to we have to find and support excellent people. We have excellent people and we have to support them.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Sometimes the simpler solution is the best one, right?

Dr. Aron Sousa: Absolutely. Yeah.

Dr. Sean Kane: Dr. Sousa, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it and helping us celebrate episode 200 of HelixTalk.

Dr. Aron Sousa: I appreciate that, Sean. Let me challenge you to call me Aron.

Dr. Sean Kane: Not on HelixTalk.

Dr. Aron Sousa: Not on HelixTalk.

(Laughter)

Dr. Aron Sousa: My mom will be very disappointed. She picked out that name on purpose.

Dr. Sean Kane: Well, Aron, thank you so much for your time. We really do appreciate it.

Dr. Aron Sousa: Thank you so much.

Dr. Khyati Patel: That was wonderful having you. It was a great conversation and got to learn so much about you. So thank you.

Dr. Aron Sousa: I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Dr. Khyati Patel: Well with that, to our listeners, thank you for 200 episode long support. We are nothing without your support and your listening and your continuous feedback on what you want to listen. So please continue that partnership and as always, listen hard, study hard.

(Music)

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