5 questions: Pizzo on priorities of Li Ka Shing Center

Philip Pizzo, MD, has been the driving force behind the planning and building of the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge, or LKSC, since he became dean of the School of Medicine in 2001. He recently discussed the project for the “1:2:1” podcast series with Paul Costello, the medical school communications office executive director. What follows is a short, edited excerpt adapted from that program. For the complete interview, visit http://med.stanford.edu/121/2010/pizzo-lksc.html.

Q: A lot of people said this building would never be built. What made you persevere?

Pizzo: I think the view that this building would never happen is one based in the fact that raising money or creating funds for a building purely for educational purposes is a hard sell in many people’s mind. But I felt, from the very beginning, that something that is potentially transformative — that can recalibrate the way medical education is conducted and delivered — would be enormously attractive to our community locally, nationally, globally, and that it had a chance at really being successful.

Q: What makes it transformative educationally?

Pizzo: On the ground floor, the Goodman Immersive Learning Center is a remarkable facility, where we can use new techniques and technologies that can simulate the experience of working in an operating room or intensive care facility or in a doctor’s office or an inpatient facility with regulated observation and feedback loops. It will allow for students and trainees to learn individually or in teams using robotics and other virtual reality approaches. It will afford an opportunity for teams of nurses and doctors to work together, and it will permit continuing learners, including those in continuing medical education, to learn about quality and related issues.

Classrooms in the building are fully powered with the highest cables available for networking, transmission of images and interactions. In fact, the whole LKSC is really a sound stage in many ways. There’s video capture in every classroom, large and small, which has been worked on collaboratively with Apple, that allows lectures or didactic discussions or sessions to be transmitted throughout the building, campus or world, at the touch of a switch, no intermediaries. It’s really very novel technology.

We also wanted to create a presence, not just for education, but for gatherings, so there’s a conference center. After all, this was built on the site of the former Fairchild Auditorium. It has the possibility of being used as three separate rooms or one grand room. That grand room can be used as seating for some 350 people, with auditorium-type seating that comes out from the wall and connects to the front of the conference facility. So you could run three sessions at once, or one for 350 all together. And then everything could be moved back, to allow it to be a place where you could hold banquets, and serve meals, or have a convention. The highest definition technology is also available in that room.

Q: Chief executives usually take the nicest space for their offices, but you didn’t do that. Why didn’t you want the top floor with its stunning view of the foothills?

Pizzo: The Office of the Dean is on the third floor, and we have views of the roofs of both the Fairchild Science Building and the old medical school and the hospitals — absolutely. Of course, I feel that our space is beautiful, and that it is elegant. But I also do feel strongly that if we’re going to be true to our mission, we shouldn’t follow the usual corporate model of having the corner office for the CEO. Rather, make the back room for the CEO and the corner office for the students, because that’s whom we want to honor.

Q: How does the new building change the medical school campus and its connection to the main campus?

Pizzo: When I was coming here for my initial interviews, I would ask the drivers from the hotel to take me to the School of Medicine: Nobody knew where it was. There was no presence, nothing that said, “This is where you enter. This is the School of Medicine.”

Part of our planning effort was to say, “What should the medical school look like as we go forward?” The centering of it was really critical. The location of the LKSC was really thought through carefully in terms of trying to create the right cross currents. We wanted it to be facing outward toward the university, but also have a door that would eventually face to the hospitals. We wanted it to bring together, along its paths, those who would be communicating from the School of Engineering and the new Science and Engineering Quad as well as the Clark Center, the new biology building and our new Stanford Institutes of Medicine.

In essence, we wanted the LKSC to be a place that our research community, our clinical community, our medical students, graduate students, residents, postdocs, those coming for continuing education, would all walk through.

Q: You were involved with details down to the color of the paint on the walls. Why did you take such ahands-on approach?

Pizzo: Well, I don’t know that that approach is unique to this facility. I think my style in leadership is always to try and craft the big vision and stay focused on the vision. But I also do think about the details that bring that vision together. I tried very hard not to micromanage this project, and we had very wonderful groups of faculty and students who thought deeply about how this building can come together to meet their respective and shared needs.

But, when it came time to making categorical decisions — where things should be placed, whether the students should have the views of the foothills — there was no one else who could make those decisions ultimately than myself. And I was not reticent to do that.When I saw things that I didn’t feel spoke well to the building, including the colors of the walls, I addressed that, because I want this to be a really special place.