UTMB Faculty Senate Minutes
Monday, May 13, 2024
Teams Virtual Meeting
4:30 PM-6:00 PM 

Open Senate Meeting:

Call to Order – Shannan Rossi, PhD, MBA, Faculty Senate Chair

  • Attendance “Roll Call” & Establishing Quorum
    1. GSBS – Dr. Ananth Kumar Kammala
    2. JSSOM – Dr. Sreeram Parupudi
    3. SHP – Dr. Rajkumar Rajendran
    4. SPPH – Dr. Monique Pappadis
    5. SON – Dr. Christen Sadler
  • Agenda Adoption
    1. Consent Agenda Adoption – Approved
  • Review & Approval of Minutes– April minutes are approved and uploaded to Faculty Senate website.

  • Guest Speakers
  • Philesha Evans, MBA, SPHR, Interim Chief Human Resources Officer
    Topic: PTO
    • The institution is making a conceited effort to encourage employees to take their paid time off.
    • Employees benefit in overall wellness when taking time off.
      1. Policy Compliance and Time Keeping
        • The Audit Services department conducted an internal audit to identify areas of improvement.
        • Findings include:
          • Unused PTO
          • Time off requests not being approved.
  • Jody Thomas, Associate Vice President for Total Reward
    • Questions provided:
    • What is the process for having plans reviewed?
      1. The coverage plans are taken to market and assessed to determine which is the better deal.
    • GLP 1 drugs (solely prescribed for weight loss) are not covered. Ex. Mounjaro and Ozempic
  • Dr. Susan Chubinskaya, PhD, MS, FIORVP and Executive Vice Provost, The Office of Faculty Affairs
    Topic: Key highlights of the proposed cross-schools alignment in the APT process/guidelines (pending final approval)

    1. Task Force created to establish an equitable promotion & tenure process for all schools.
    2. Proposed Changes:
      • Tenure should be given only to faculty at the Associate Professor and Full Professor levels.
      • Minimum of 5 years at each rank. Faculty demonstrating exceptional outstanding achievements could be expedited.
        • Current bylaws indicate there are 4 mission areas: Research, education, clinical and service. The task force suggested legitimizing service due to the current guidelines only focus on teaching, research and clinical with service being a secondary mission.
        • Task force suggested making service the fourth area of excellence.
        • Service could be defined as membership to different committees, service to society (public service), global service.
        Requirements for promotion to Associate Professor
        • Excellence in 2 of the following areas: Teaching, Research, Clinical, Service. Faculty choose which areas.
        • 3 letters of evaluation from external evaluators.
        • Letters of endorsement, no more than 5.
        • Scholarly Productivity
        • Regional Recognition/Reputation
        Requirements for promotion to Professor
        • Excellence in 3 of the following areas: Teaching, Research, Clinical, Service.
        • 5 letters of evaluation from external evaluators.
        • Letters of endorsement, no more than 5.
      • Faculty should show accomplishments in current appointment for promotion to the next rank.
      • For lateral appointments, no letters of support are required.
      • Faculty with joint appointments in multiple UTMB departments or schools cannot hold different ranks.
      • Research: continuous extramural funding (NIH, NSF, DoD, HRSA, CDC, ACE, NASA, foundations/philanthropy, industry, etc.) is required; internal funding does not have a similar weight and should not be a sole reason for promotion.
      • Add professionalism and adherence to CORE values to reflect in the chair letters.
      • Expanded definition of scholarship.
        • Scholarship to include mentorship, IPE, Peer-education, Media Interviews, and other enduring products.
        • Recognize Multiple-PI’s, Recognition of multi-disciplinary work, team science.
        • Innovation
        • Impact
        • Recognition of key contributors (statisticians, co-investigators, etc.)
  • Updates
    • Updates on Faculty Advisory Council Meeting
      1. Health care costs discussed. GLP 1 referenced as example.
      2. Met with Joan Benavente (Associate Vice – Chancellor for Academic Affairs).
        • We at UTMB have our own cost reduction through a discount APC.
      3. Met with Rebecca Karoff (Associate Vice – Chancellor for Academic Affairs)
        • Discussed Open Access Educational Resources.
    • Senate Updates
      1. Working on bylaws updates.
      2. Will have a new chair-elect coming from the JSSOM.
      3. IHOP policies reviewed monthly.
      4. Focus on communication and marketing aspects of Faculty Senate to make more faculty members aware of the Senate’s existence.
      5. Dr. Shinu Joy motioned to move to executive session, Dr. Claudia Hilton provided a second motion.
  • New Business
    • None Currently.
  • Committee Reports
    1. The Faculty Senate has many policies to review and there needs to be a determination of what the best plan of action is moving forward to process the policy reviews.
      • The current procedure is  as follows:
        1. The senate chair distributes the IHOP Policy needing revisions to the Faculty Senate. Deadline is provided in the email to the Senate.
        2. Senators provide revisions to the IHOP Policy.
        3. Revisions are submitted to the Compliance Department.
        4. Feedback is provided to the Faculty Senate’s input.
    2. University: Dr. Svoboda-The committee discussed the bylaws revisions.
    3. Research: Dr. Laura Dickson- The research committee discussed the development of their survey intended for the Research community assessing people’s overall views about both the pre and post award processes at UTMB.
    4. Education: Dr. Shinu Joy- The committee is continuing work on AI data collection for the development of a policy for UTMB.
    5. Clinical: Dr. Karren Lewis-Clinical data review, more information will be provided next month.
  • Announcements: The election for the Faculty Senate Chair- Elect will occur in June, the email will be distributed in early June.
  • Adjournment