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UTHSCSA
DEAN’S MESSAGE
By Francisco González-Scarano, MD
On any given day, there are scores of active-duty, reserve and tapped to be part
retired military personnel at the campus of the School of Medicine
— attending classes and grand rounds, conducting research, of the team testing
teaching and seeing patients. Besides a large number of former
military on our faculty, the School of Medicine has joint training the Boeing C-17
programs with the military in psychiatry and nephrology. This
scene plays out over the other Health Science Center schools: den- transport plane for
tistry, nursing, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and
School of Health Professions. An estimated 12 percent of the total the medical evacu-
Health Science Center faculty and staff have military back-
grounds. There are also many students (including 64 active duty) ation mission
attending on military scholarships or via the Hazelwood Act,
which confers certain tuition benefits to Texans. when it was first
Seeing an opportunity to strengthen the programs and relation- introduced in the
ships with the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Veterans
Administration – as well as look for other opportunities – Dr. 1990s. The C-17
William Henrich, president of the Health Science Center, created
the Military Health Institute (MHI) in collaboration with the Globemaster is the
School of Medicine, and named Byron Hepburn, MD, Major
General, U.S. Air Force retired, to lead the effort. Officially begun very large plane
October 2014, the MHI is founded on the long-standing pro-
grams we already have with the Navy, Army, Air Force and the often seen in the
Defense Health Agency. Dr. Hepburn, who recently retired from
the Air Force after 38 years of service, began his career as a pilot southwest skies
flying the C-9, which is the military version of the McDonnell
Douglas DC-9, the first jet to see wide commercial use on a global over San Antonio
scale. The C-9 was the Air Force’s main transport vehicle for mil-
itary medical evacuation for two decades. making landing
PILOT-PHYSICIAN approaches. Hep-
Graduation from the U.S. Air Force Academy and a career as a
burn eventually
military pilot would have been an impressive resume for the offi-
cer, but Hepburn also went to the Uniformed Services University served as the first U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. (ret.) Byron Hepburn,
of the Health Sciences where he received his MD. He undertook director of the San MD, leads the Military Health Institute.
a residency in family medicine at Andrews Air Force Base, and Antonio Military
then returned to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs to
serve as a physician. Health System and as the commander of the 59th Medical Wing
As one of the few pilot-physicians in the Air Force, he was at Lackland, which is the Air Force’s largest. He also served as
deputy surgeon general of the Air Force, directing all operations
of the Air Force Medical Service, which includes 2.4 million cov-
ered lives and 75 military treatment centers. He also will hold the
title of Assistant Dean for Military Health in the School of Med-
icine and a faculty appointment in the department of family and
community medicine.
All the schools at the Health Science Center – Medicine,
Dentistry, Nursing and Health Professions – have educational
programs that include a military component and most also have
research sponsored by, or in collaboration with, the DoD. In
the many examples of our collaborations, the largest is
STRONG STAR, which is an acronym for the South Texas Re-
search Organizational Network Guiding Studies on Trauma and
Resilience – a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional research
consortium funded by the DoD and VA to develop and evalu-
ate the most effective early interventions possible for the detec-
32 San Antonio Medicine • March 2015
