Dr. George Mejicano has been selected to serve as the next associate dean for academic affairs at Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Mejicano is a three-degree alumnus of the University of Illinois including degrees from the university system’s prestigious medical and engineering programs.
Dr. Mejicano arrives at Carle Illinois after ten years at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) where he has overseen the entire educational portfolio at the School of Medicine, including the M.D. program, numerous master’s and Ph.D. programs, 87 accredited graduate medical education programs, and continuing professional development. Under his leadership at OHSU, educational scholarship flourished, high-profile grants were obtained, learners became more diverse, new programs were launched, and legacy programs grew in size, stature and reputation.
“I am thrilled to return to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,” Mejicano said. “Carle Illinois College of Medicine was created to produce physician innovators by infusing engineering concepts into a modern medical education curriculum. I simply could not pass up the opportunity to work with a dynamic team and meaningfully contribute to the future of medicine at my alma mater. Now that the curricular foundations are in place, we are poised to implement novel teaching and assessment systems that will enable competency-based, time-variable medical education.”
In his new role at Carle Illinois, Mejicano will provide overall leadership of all aspects of the college’s academic programs, including curriculum development and implementation, assessment of students’ progress within the case-driven, problem-based, active-learning curriculum, as well as faculty effectiveness and curriculum evaluation.
Mejicano completed both his residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. His clinical interests include travel medicine, antibiotic resistance, and emerging infectious diseases.
Mejicano is a national thought-leader in competency-based medical education. He has nearly 50 publications in the peer-reviewed literature, and he has given over 350 presentations on a wide variety of topics related to medical education. Mejicano has held numerous leadership positions in national organizations, currently serves on the Liaison Committee for Medical Education (LCME), and was the national co-chair of the Undergraduate Medical Education-to-Graduate Medical Education Review Committee sponsored by the Coalition for Physician Accountability.
Mejicano was the principal investigator of a $1 million grant to transform the MD curriculum at OHSU and is currently the principal investigator for an innovative research project that was awarded $1.8 million from the American Medical Association through its Reimagining Residency initiative. The COMPADRE project – a partnership between medical schools in Oregon and California — was designed to address physician shortagesin underserved urban, rural, and tribal communities that result in health disparities.
Mejicano earned his M.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, after receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He holds an additional master’s in adult education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Mejicano was chosen after a nationwide search initiated in 2021. Dr. Mejicano’s tenure at Carle Illinois College of Medicine begins July 18, 2022.