After 24 years of service at Penn State Hershey, Dr. James Herman, Hershey Company Professor and chair, Department of Family and Community Medicine, associate dean for primary care and primary care research, and director of the Center for Primary Care, will be leaving on May 29. Herman has accepted the position of dean of the School of Community Medicine at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa.
Herman arrived at the College of Medicine in 1991. Under his leadership the Department of Family and Community Medicine has grown from seven faculty members to 80. The number of outpatient practice sites in family medicine has grown from one to 12. The department now features two family medicine residency programs -- in Hershey and State College -- and a Family Medicine-Sports Medicine Fellowship Program in collaboration with the Department of Orthopaedics.
Also under his leadership, extramurally-funded research has grown significantly in the department and center, including funding from the National Institutes of Health, The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and other sources.
Herman served as the founding director of the Pennsylvania AHEC program, which helps recruit and retain health professionals to underserved communities in Pennsylvania. He was named Exceptional Teacher and Outstanding Role Model by the College of Medicine medical students. Herman has been named among the Best Doctors in America since 2002.
He is the author of numerous publications in the fields of epidemiology, women’s health, rural health and medical decision-making.
Herman earned his doctor of medicine from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completed his family medicine residency at the University of Rochester/Highland Hospital. He completed a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellowship in Academic Family Medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and was an American Council on Education Fellow.
Details regarding the interim leadership of the Department of Family and Community Medicine, and the search for a new chair, will be announced soon.