When Dennis Valenzeno heard about the challenges associated with the first- and second-year curriculum for medical students at KU School of Medicine-Wichita, he wasn't daunted. He'd confronted them before - in Alaska. 

Valenzeno came to Wichita in 2011 after over six years of service at the medical school in Anchorage, which is part of a multistate cooperative known as WWAMI. Under the program, medical students from Wyoming, Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho receive first-year training in their home states, do their second year at the University of Washington, and then complete their clinical training at sites across those states.  

During his time there, Valenzeno was instrumental in the increase of the school's annual class to 20 students, helped lay the foundation for moving second-year training to Alaska and helped the Anchorage campus earn a designation from the National Institutes of Health for research work. "We doubled the size of the class, and we got the NIH Center of Excellence started," he said. "I was really happy with that stint. It's a great place. We just loved it."  

His work there involved some of the same challenges he found attractive when KU School of Medicine-Wichita later asked him to become an associate dean and chair of the Department of Medical Sciences: help implement a first- and second-year curriculum for the Wichita campus' transition to a four-year program and recruit local faculty to help teach those students in the basic sciences.  

A new model of medical education   

Valenzeno, now retiring, reflected on his time on the Wichita campus. "The school of medicine is engaging a new curriculum in the fall of 2017, and it's going to minimize lectures, and be much more active."  

"We're moving away from the time when students sit in large lecture halls and just listen to the sage on the stage talk at them," he said.  

The thread of the shift to a more hands-on, interactive and clinically based medical education can be followed back to his teaching experiences on KU's Kansas City campus, where he served on the faculty for 25 years before venturing to Alaska.

"Even years ago when I was still in Kansas City, I used to tell lecturers, 'Your job isn't to go in there and tell the student everything that they're supposed to know, because students have to learn themselves. Your job is to go in there and motivate them to want to know the material.'"  

Physics, physiology and photobiology

Valenzeno grew up in Cleveland, earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in physics and then a doctorate in physiology, all at Case Western University in his hometown. Interested in the fairly new field of biophysics, he did post-doctoral work at Emory University in Atlanta.  

While at Emory, he conducted research on how electric currents moved through the nervous systems in lobsters - ideal subjects because of their large nerve cells.  

He found the work fulfilling and, on occasion, tasty. "As we said in one of our grant proposals, we always set aside the claws and tail (in a freezer) for appropriate disposal," said Valenzeno, noting the meals were well beyond the pay of a young researcher.  

At Emory he also did something unusual for post-doc fellows - he taught - and discovered that he enjoyed it.  

Two stints at KU School of Medicine  

Valenzeno's first "real job" came when he was hired as an assistant physiology professor at the KU School of Medicine in Kansas City in 1980.  

He continued his research there, including studying the effects of electrical currents flowing across the membranes of cardiac cells. That had implications for cardiac arrhythmias, particularly those caused when patients received life-saving but physically damaging electrical shocks during heart attacks.  

And, he said, "I did a lot of teaching. By the time I left KU in Kansas City, my appointment was as director of medical education in the Department of Physiology, in addition to being a professor."  

Of the contrast offered by the Wichita campus, he says, "Regional campuses are fun because you get to know everybody," Valenzeno said. "You know all the medical students. And it's much harder to slip through the cracks as a student when you're on a smaller campus like this."  

"The most interesting thing I did while I was here was to get the first and second years up and running. The curriculum is delivered via interactive television, and if you haven't done that, it can be daunting. I never really doubted we were going to get it done."  

Then there was finding good faculty to teach the local sessions. "The main concern about the first and second year implementation was, would we be able to get good people? That went much better than I expected. We found really good people by working with Newman University and Wichita State."    

What's next?  

Valenzeno said that he's not worried about finding things to do because he has many interests. His first plan, though, is to not make long-term commitments.  

"I told my wife, 'OK, I'm taking one month off,'" he said. They will be doing a fair amount of traveling the next few months. "We're going to do a river cruise in Europe that we've always wanted to do."  

"About three years ago I started vegetable gardening again, so I'm going to do more of that.  I want to do some woodworking. There are opportunities to take college courses, so I might go back and take some physics," Valenzeno said. "But part of my month off is to not even think about the long-range plans."