MAY 9, 2011

Change agents: Four med school employees receive awards honoring leadership, spirit

BY ROSANNE SPECTOR and MICHELLE L. BRANDT

Four School of Medicine employees will be recognized at the annual Dean’s Recognition Celebration not just for doing their own jobs well, but also for making their colleagues’ work even better. The honors  include the first-ever Inspiring Change Leadership Awards, as well as the Dean’s Spirit Awards.

The May 20 event at the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge also will honor 412 medical school employees who are marking their five, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 years of service.

The Inspiring Change Leadership Awards, which will be given to Sonia Barragan and Nancy Lonhart, recognize staff members who have helped make “transformative improvements in service, efficiency, value, effectiveness, outcome or satisfaction” for an entire work group or department. The Spirit Awards, now in their 10th year, honor one exempt and one non-exempt employee for their contributions to the school’s mission and vision. The recipients are Chris Shay and Vuong Quoc Vu.

Each of the four award winners will receive a cash prize of $1,500.

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When Sonia Barragan, one of this year’s Inspiring Change Leadership Award recipients, was promoted to her current job, the entire staff was thrilled, said her boss, Kathleen Thompson. “It’s that kind of thing where everyone was, ‘Well, duh! Who else?’”

Barragan, now the associate director of the medical school’s Research Management Group, has been a Stanford employee since 1995, when she started in the Sleep Disorders Center as an administrative assistant, and then served as a data aide and a financial analyst. In 2000 she moved to the RMG, the central resource assisting faculty with research grant proposal submissions and accepting awards on behalf of the university. She came to the department as support staff.

“It took us almost a year before we recognized how terrific she is,” said Thompson. In the RMG, it’s unusual to promote support staff to a manager position, especially after only one year, but that’s what happened in Barragan’s case. As a research process manager, she was a leader, said Thompson. “Others looked to her as a primary resource.”

When the group created an associate director position in 2007, Barragan was the obvious choice.

“I try to lead by example,” said Barragan. “I’m a person who started at the bottom and worked my way up. I’m proof that with hard work, perseverance and dedication, it is possible to move up in the ranks. The RMG staff follow and support me because I can relate to them and I genuinely care about their success and the success of this organization.”

Barragan also credits her colleagues’ support for her success. Her participation last year in the staff leadership program “Managing People@Stanford: Leadership Essentials” boosted her skills and gave her a new resource. “The relationships I created with other participants have been extremely valuable to me as we continue to interact, have quarterly meetings and share ideas,” she said.

One of her big accomplishments to date was helping to expedite the massive and unprecedented application process for the National Institutes of Health stimulus grants in 2009. That year, the office submitted more than 600 proposals for stimulus grants — in addition to 2,000 regular grant proposals. Barragan was Thompson’s right-hand person in this massive effort.

“She very quickly pulled together resources and tools, and made all the difference in the world. We had a command center for the submission. She organized how the command center would work, what the process would be: How grants would be dropped off, how they’d be logged in and get submitted, and how they’d be tracked,” said Thompson.

Most recently, Barragan has been helping design a new online system for managing proposal submission and acceptance. When it’s launched she will train all 50 of the staff. “She’s already become an expert in the system and we haven’t rolled it out yet,” said Thompson.

Thompson noted that RMG does an annual survey of its customers to see how the organization is doing. “Sonia’s survey results are always tremendous,” said Thompson. “The faculty and administrators love her. They really value her and look to her as a leader. She represents RMG at its finest.”

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It was an opportunity for disaster — and a perfect job for Nancy Lonhart.

The research group Stanford Health Policy was making its first foray into “intellectual tourism,” offering an educational program for 22 of England’s leading physicians. That meant planning the logistics of the seminar series, negotiating the financial agreement, coordinating the program with partner Kaiser Permanente and organizing a private dinner, not to mention a tour of Alcatraz.

Lonhart, Stanford Health Policy’s associate director and administrative manager, was on it, deftly orchestrating the three-day April event. “Nancy and her staff figured out everything needed and it went very smoothly — of course!” said Kathryn McDonald, SHP’s executive director. “She makes it look like the tightrope walk is not a tightrope walk. Like it’s no problem.

“She’s really been quite transformative in how she has worked with her staff,” McDonald added.

A winner of an Inspiring Change Leadership Award, Lonhart is responsible for internal operations for the 40 faculty and staff at SHP, which includes the Center for Health Policy, the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research and the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention. She came to SHP in 2007 after working as administrative services manager for the university’s anthropological sciences department. “Their loss was our gain,” laughed McDonald. Since then, Lonhart has developed a great team that fully supports the faculty’s needs.

“Nancy has shown exceptional leadership in improving every aspect of how the centers carry out their missions,” said Alan Garber, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and director of CHP/PCOR.

A big part of Lonhart’s work is assisting faculty in submitting grant applications: 18 new and 20 continuing grants in 2010. The applications are long and complex, typically requiring input from several faculty members. Lonhart coordinates the process, helps develop the budgets and sees that the data is current. Stanford has strict regulations that must be followed. All material has to be properly formatted and filed.

“Over the past two years or so we had to process an exceptionally large number of grant applications,” said Garber. “They’re always done under tight time constraints and the details have to be right. Nancy makes it look easy — and she has to deal with a large group of people, including some who are not always good with deadlines,” said Garber. (That would be the faculty, in case that’s not obvious.) “She’s friendly and diplomatic even when dealing with frazzled investigators,” he added.

What’s Lonhart’s secret? “I am not driven to be a leader, but I do believe it is my responsibility to improve what I can, if I can,” she said. Those she works with steer the direction that commitment takes, she said. “The power rests in the staff, because without them, without their commitment, successful change is impossible.”

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Chris Shay is, according to people who know him well, almost always smiling. But the reason he is so deserving of one of this year’s Spirit Awards is not just that he’s a nice guy. Instead, said his supervisor, Niraj Dangoria, it’s because Shay helps the school’s Office of Facilities Planning and Management to achieve its mission.

“We are the physical manifestation of the dean’s vision,” said Dangoria, the assistant dean who oversees the office. “And Chris understands this.”

As a project manager/planner, Shay played a key role in the construction of the school’s most recent additions: the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge and the Lorry I. Lokey Stem Cell Research Building — which both opened last year. Shay, who worked in the planning office in the early 2000s before leaving for a three-year stint with the State Department in Hanoi, Vietnam, was brought back specifically to lead these major capital projects.

According to Dangoria, Shay excelled early on — not only at overseeing all aspects of the projects but in ensuring that they would be user-friendly. “He understands our researchers’ needs and desires, and he enables the great work that happens here,” said Dangoria.

Shay doesn’t have an easy job — among his many duties are developing programs, hiring architects and contractors, budgeting, staffing, scheduling, serving as liaison for all involved parties, and leading lots and lots of building tours. But co-workers say he has no problem juggling the various balls while maintaining a sunny outlook. “He was able to infuse his passion for the projects into those around him in a way that made the entire transformation very positive,” wrote one colleague in a nomination letter.

“He puts his heart and soul in the work he does, and it really shows,” agreed Reese Zasio, facilities operation manager for the school’s veterinary services center, who has worked with Shay on numerous projects.

Shay expects to be busier in the years to come. He said his workload is larger now than it was during construction of the Lokey building and the Li Ka Shing Center, and he’s working on five major initiatives that he said would “substantially change the School of Medicine.” And while his focus until this year was on major capital projects, he’s now managing all of the school’s remodeling and new-construction projects.

“It can be stressful, but it’s exciting,” Shay said — with, of course, a smile.

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Several years before Spirit Award winner Vuong Quoc Vu came to Stanford, he found himself in a job in the mental health field that, he said, “drove me crazy.” It was a training position where “people were just numbers and cases,” he explained. He knew it wasn’t right for him. “I lost track of what I was supposed to do — which is to help people,” he said.

Now Vu gets to do just that — as course coordinator for the medical school’s Human Health & Disease Course. It’s the school’s second-largest course, and it’s required for all medical and master’s of medicine students.

As course coordinator, a job he’s been doing since 2008, Vu has a slew of responsibilities — among them, assisting with the planning, scheduling and coordinating of all instructors, lectures, labs, course evaluations and course materials; and assisting in the planning, administering and scoring of exams. It sounds like a lot of work (instructors for the course number around 115), and when it was suggested that Vu was the glue that holds the course together, he laughed and said, “Correct.”

“It’s a big job,” said Robert Krochak, the Pathology Department’s director of finance and administration. “And it needs somebody who isn’t overwhelmed easily and someone who has a very high spirit and good sense of humor.”

Vu fits the part. “He’s always trying to lift the spirits of students,” said Donald Regula, MD, professor of pathology, and the lead co-course director. “He’s a kind of stabilizing factor for them.”

Vu is very much a constant for the students: attending every lecture, lab and test, and offering help to students outside of the classroom. He obviously takes pride in being there for the students and getting to know them: One of the first things he does with new batches of students, he said, is to learn their names.  And he’s known for bringing in edible treats for the students on exam days.

These gestures obviously make an impression: Colleagues and students used words like “thoughtful,” “dedicated” and “helpful” when discussing him. And one letter of nomination described him as embodying “much more than his title as HHD Course Coordinator — he is our class cheerleader, organizer extraordinaire and an always positive support figure.”

The positive feelings go both ways for Vu. When asked about his job, he commented, “You get to work with high-achieving faculty, people who have done amazing things with their career. And then you work with ambitious, hard-working, diligent students who are going to be winners in life.

“You can’t help but feel elevated somehow.”

Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions - Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. For more information, please visit the Office of Communication & Public Affairs site at https://mednews.stanford.edu/.