Deans
The deans in academic leadership at UT Southwestern.
Dr. Capers is an interventional cardiologist, professor of medicine, and transformational leader in academic medicine. He has been widely decorated as an educator, clinician, and champion of diversity enhancement in medicine.

He introduced the trans-radial artery technique of coronary stenting to The Ohio State University (OSU) cardiac catheterization laboratory and led its transformation to a “radial first” lab. Physician peers have named him one of America’s “Best Doctors” annually from 2009 to 2020, and his patient satisfaction scores placed in the 90th percentile nationally for six of the last seven years. In 2019 he was elected into the OSU Society of Master Clinicians.

Capers has written several articles discussing strategies to diversify cardiology programs and is considered a national authority on the topic.

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I am a biochemist studying the biological interactions of sugars. Raised and educated in New York City, I received a B.S. in Biochemistry from nearby Stony Brook University in 1977. I then began a fruitful southerly migration, entering graduate school at Duke, where I worked with Robert Hill and obtained a Ph.D. in Biochemistry 1982.

I continued southward to UT Southwestern in Dallas for a postdoctoral fellowship with Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein in 1983. This experience was highly rewarding for me, and I decided to stay at UT Southwestern, where I am currently a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology.

My training at Duke and UT Southwestern led me to an interest in glycobiology. This is an emerging field that studies essential roles of sugars, in all domains of life, but roles ...

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Dr. Matulevicius received her B.S.E. (Biomedical and Electrical Engineering) degree from Duke University in 1998. There she was on the Deans List and Dean List with Distinction for graduate studies from 1994-1998. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with distinction in biomedical engineering. She then received her M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine where she was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha National Medical Honor Society. From 2002-2005 she served as an Intern and Resident in Internal Medicine at the Hospital University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (ABIM Certified 2005). She completed her Cardiology Fellowship at UT Southwestern (ABIM Certified 2010). She completed an additional year of Advanced Cardiac Imaging fellowship concentrating on MRI in 2009. She currently is the medical director of the UT Southwestern Noninvasive Cardiac Imaging laboratories as ...

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Shawna D. (Smith) Nesbitt, M.D., M.S., is an Associate Professor in Internal Medicine-Hypertension at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. She serves as the Medical Director of the Parkland Hypertension Clinic. Her research interests include clinical trials and epidemiology of hypertension and cardiovascular risk. Her area of research is hypertension in African Americans, insulin resistance, and hyperlipidemia. Dr. Nesbitt is the National Coordinator for the TROPHY Study (Trial of Prevention Hypertension). The study is a 4-year trial which includes over 71 sites and more than 800 patients. She is funded by the National Institutes of Health to study the relationship of oxidative stress and genetics in the development of hypertension. She is the secretary treasurer for the International Society of Hypertension in Blacks (ISHIB). She is also Chairperson of the "Children Are Our ...

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Dr. Scott attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas and studied biomedical engineering on a full tuition scholarship. He completed medical school at Louisiana State University School of Medicine, and graduated as a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society. He then pursued residency training in general surgery and completed a 2-year fellowship in advanced laparoscopic surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Upon completion of his training in 2002, he accepted a faculty position at Tulane University School of Medicine. During his 3-year stay at Tulane, he established the school’s first center focusing on laparoscopic surgery, created a state-of-the-art simulation and training laboratory, established a 2-year laparoscopic fellowship program, hosted 19 continuing education courses, developed a multi-disciplinary bariatric surgical program, and initiated a robotic general surgery program. ...

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Robert Toto, M.D., is the Mary M. Conroy Professor of Kidney Disease in UT Southwestern’s Department of Internal Medicine. He specializes in kidney disease treatment and research.

Dr. Toto also is the Associate Dean of Clinical and Translational Research in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the Director of the Center for Translational Medicine; and the Medical Director of UT Southwestern’s Multi-Specialty Clinic.

Dr. Toto earned his medical degree at the University of Illinois Medical School. He completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of Michigan and Baylor College of Medicine and then received advanced training in nephrology through fellowships at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital and UT Southwestern Medical Center. He joined the UT Southwestern faculty in 1983. ...

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Preston Wiles is the Drs. Anne and George Race Professor of Student Psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Director of Student Wellness and Counseling program there. Dr. Wiles is also Medical Director of the UT Southwestern/Children's Medical Autism Center. He completed his residency is Psychiatry at Harvard and Yale Medical Schools. After residency, he served as chief resident in the department of Psychiatry at Yale. Dr. Wiles went on to train in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the internationally renowned Yale Child Study Center where he also served as chief resident. Dr. Wiles served on the clinical faculty at Yale Medical School since 1992, teaching medical students, residents, and fellows in the areas of child development, psychopharmacology, and children and the law. He was a guest lecturer at Yale Law School and was elected Fellow at Branford College at Yale, where he served as a freshman advisor ...

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Holder of the:

Peter and Jean D. Dehlinger Professorship in Biomedical Science

Margaret Yin Chair for the Advancement of Women Faculty

Helen Yin, Ph.D., has been Associate Dean, Office of Women’s Careers since the Office’s founding in 2012. She collaborates with the Office of Faculty Diversity and Development to develop training and resources, focusing particularly on career advancement of female faculty members. Dr. Yin co-created a leadership development program for junior faculty and also established a grantsmanship program and writing workshop focused on research grants.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Mount Holyoke College and her Ph.D. ...

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As Dean of the UT Southwestern Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Andrew R. Zinn, M.D., Ph.D., oversees the education needs of more than 600 doctoral students and 500 postdoctoral fellows and supervises the graduate program chairs.

A noted human geneticist, Dr. Zinn began his research career working in protein synthesis before earning his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from UT Southwestern. He later completed postdoctoral training in human and mouse genetics as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He returned to UT Southwestern in 1993 as an independent postdoctoral fellow and joined the faculty in 1996.

Dr. Zinn, who is also a Professor with the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development, and his laboratory discovered the genetic basis of an inherited form ...

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Dr. Deirdre Brekken received her Bachelor of Engineering degree from Vanderbilt University and her Ph.D. degree from UT Southwestern Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Her graduate research was focused on the characterization of trypanosoma brucei gamma-glutamylcysteine synthetase, an essential enzyme in the biosynthesis of trypanothione. She completed her postdoctoral training at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute in Seattle, Washington where she studied the protein kinase CK2 from T. brucei. She returned to UT Southwestern in 2002 as a faculty member and Lead Scientist in the Alliance for Cell Signaling to study phosphoproteins and their phosphorylation sites using proteomic techniques.

Dr. Brekken has now stepped away from the bench and is the Assistant Dean for Postdoctoral Affairs. She directs the Postdoctoral Certificate Training Program ...

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Dr. Lisa Gardner received her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Rochester and her Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University. Her graduate research focused on the early stages of transcription by T7 RNA Polymerase. She pursued a career away from the bench beginning in 1996 with a position as a project manager and editor at a biomedical art house in Toronto now operating as Imagineering Design Services.

Dr. Gardner began working at UT Southwestern in the Dean’s Office of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in 2006 creating a grant support office for all basic science institutional training grants, writing and providing institutional information and data to faculty who have chosen to apply for or renew NIH T32 grants. At the same time, Dr. Gardner joined the efforts that were underway to recruit the top outstanding ...

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My research has focused on the control of different aspects of the meiotic cell cycle and control of meiosis in general. We have primarily used mouse spermatogenesis as a model; however, different lines of research have been done using yeast and Drosophila meiosis models. Currently, my interests are in graduate education and training and scientific outreach to undergraduate students and the broader scientific and public community.

At the graduate level, I am involved in promoting scientific excellence and integrity, graduate student recruitment, and student affairs. In the undergraduate realm, my goals are to increase awareness of science as a career opportunity and help prepare undergrads for their graduate school careers.

Concerning science outreach and communication, I am interested in increasing ...

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Dr. Barker completed his Internal Medicine residency training at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois in 2010. He served there an additional year as a teaching hospitalist, supervising inpatient internal medicine teams of residents and medical students where he received a teaching award. He subsequently joined the faculty at UT Southwestern in the Department of Medicine in the fall of 2011. He maintains a busy general internal medicine primary care practice and also frequently supervises inpatient teaching teams at both Parkland Memorial Hospital and Clements University Hospital throughout the year. In addition to patient care, he quickly identified a passion for medical education and became Co-Director of the Internal Medicine Clerkship in 2014. He was honored to be selected as a Graduation Marshal by the UT Southwestern Medical School graduating class of 2016. He then ...

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Dr. Bloom is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. A 1990 graduate of Southwestern Medical School, he is proud and humbled to follow in the footsteps of his distinguished predecessors and lead the department which owes so much to them.

Born in California, Dr. Bloom received his bachelor of arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1985. After graduating from medical school, he completed his internship and residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Parkland Memorial Hospital and then pursued a fellowship in maternal-fetal medicine in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology here. In 1995, he was awarded the Jack and Signe Pritchard Fellowship in Maternal-Fetal Medicine.

Following the path of mentors like Drs. Paul MacDonald, Norman Gant, F. Gary Cunningham, and Kenneth Leveno, Dr. Bloom joined the faculty at UT Southwestern following ...

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William Gary Reed, M.D., is a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He serves as the Associate Dean of Quality, Safety, and Outcomes Education. A specialist in internal medicine, he holds both the S.T. Harris Family Distinguished Chair in Internal Medicine and the Eva A. Rosenthal Professorship in Internal Medicine.

Dr. Reed earned his medical degree at UT Southwestern, where he also completed his residency in internal medicine.

Certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine, Dr. Reed joined the UT Southwestern faculty in 1980. He has held a variety of leadership positions at the Medical Center, including serving as Chief of General Internal Medicine ...

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Dr. Rege received a BS of Chemical Engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA in 1971 and his MD from The Milton S. Hershey Medical School, Pennsylvania State University in Hershey, PA in 1975. Following medical school, he remained at The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center for his first year of residency in General Surgery, and then served 2-years as a general medical officer in the US Navy. He returned to Hershey in 1978 and completed his Residency in Surgery in 1982. After an additional year of training in gastrointestinal research at Northwestern University Medical School, he remained on the faculty at Northwestern. During 15-years at Northwestern, he rose through the academic ranks to the level of Tenured Professor of Surgery, assumed the position of Chief of Surgical Services at the VA Chicago Medical Center, Lakeside Division, and established a busy general surgery practice with an emphasis on ...

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Dr. Sendelbach received her BS in Biomedical Engineering from Rutgers University and her MD from New Jersey Medical School-Rutgers University. She completed a residency in Pediatrics at Children’s Medical Center Dallas, and worked in a community clinic for refugees and the underserved prior to joining the faculty in 1993 as a general pediatrician in the Newborn Nursery. She is currently a Professor in the General Pediatrics Education division and sees patients in ambulatory general pediatrics.

Dr. Sendelbach serves as Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Medical Education at UT Southwestern. She is a member of the UT Southwestern Academy of Teachers and the SHINE Academy of Health Science Education. She has been a student mentor in the Fashena College since its inception. Her interests include curriculum design, faculty ...

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Dr. Towler obtained his medical degree and Ph.D. in biochemistry from Washington University, St. Louis, where his thesis work focused upon protein modification by covalent fatty acid acylation (N-myristoylation). He completed his medical residency and endocrine/metabolism fellowship at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, and is a board-certified internist and endocrinologist.

Dr. Towler brings to UTSW expertise in the endocrine physiology of bone and vascular disease that synergizes with our Institution’s strengths in patient-oriented, bench-to-bedside translational research. Before joining UT Southwestern, Towler was the Lang Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Lipid Research at Washington University and also served as Chief, Division of Bone and Mineral Diseases for a decade. ...

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Dr. Velez obtained a Bachelor degree in Sciences from the University of Puerto Rico. She finished Medical School in 1996 and went on to pursue training in Emergency Medicine, also at the University of Puerto Rico. She moved to Dallas in 1999 in order to train in Toxicology. After finishing her fellowship training, she stayed to work full time as faculty at Parkland Memorial Hospital and UT Southwestern, Dallas.

During her fellowship, she also completed the coursework for a Masters Degree in Public Health from UT Houston. Currently, Dr. Velez is involved with the EM Training Program as the Program Director. She also is a clinical toxicology staff at the North Texas Poison Center. ...

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Dr. Smith earned his bachelor’s degree in biology/chemistry from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas and his master’s and doctoral degrees in biomedical science from the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Internal Medicine/Cardiology at UT Southwestern in 2002 and joined the faculty shortly thereafter. He is an active member of the American Heart Association, American Physiological Society and American College of Sports Medicine. He has served as the Director of the David M. Crowley Research and Rehabilitation Laboratory within the School of Health Professions. In addition, he is a former member of the University of Texas System Faculty Advisory Council in which he served on the Executive Sub-Committee on Health Affairs.

Dr. Smith's laboratory has been studying autonomic regulation of the cardiovascular system ...

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