COLLEGE STATION, Texas (November 24, 2008) - Paul C. Brandt, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Experimental Therapeutics at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, was recently named the Assistant Dean for Academic Technology, effective November 1.

A member of the faculty since June 1999, Dr. Brandt was recruited to the College of Medicine by George C.Y. Chiou, Ph.D., department head of Medical Pharmacology & Toxicology at the time. Dr. Brandt's current research focuses on dry eye diseases and Sjögren's syndrome, a T-cell mediated auto-immune disease.

In addition to his research and teaching responsibilities, Dr. Brandt has been an active member of the college's curriculum committee for several years. As the pharmacology course coordinator on the second-year curriculum subcommittee in 2004, Dr. Brandt was a major proponent of moving to a paperless curriculum. The committee's first attempt saw students receiving compact discs for each block, loaded with syllabi, lectures, notes and review materials, with mixed results.

Dr. Ben Green, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Medical Education at the time, asked Dr. Brandt to form an advisory committee that same year, the Educational Technology Advisory Group (ETAG), which began researching the academic technology needs of the College. Dr. Brandt served on the committee, which traveled to other medical schools with advanced academic technology to review the potential for implementation at the college.

Soon after, the committee, in conjunction with the Office of Information Technology, also started requiring students to purchase tablet PCs with certain specifications and talking to Instructional Technology Services at Texas A&M about getting the first and second-year curriculum on Blackboard Vista. Dr. Brandt and his colleagues saw these actions as major steps toward keeping the college up with the times.

"The biggest testament to us having made the technology switch came when a professor brought in paper handouts to a lecture," Dr. Brandt recalls. "The students were completely taken back and didn't know what to do with them. That's when I knew we had arrived."

More recently, Dr. Brandt has also served as the chair of the Curriculum Committee's educational curriculum technology subcommittee, a faculty-driven organization that took the place of the ETAG. Additionally, Dr. Brandt and his colleagues shepherded in another major change this year, by moving the college completely to online testing. The current second-year class participated in several trials of the system last year, and Dr. Brandt says the committee couldn't have done it without them.

"We really appreciate the students' pioneering spirit with all the changes we started making last year," Dr. Brandt says. "They really helped us work through the bugs and were great about giving us suggestions. I won't say it wasn't painful at times, but we worked through our issues and I am confident we'll be better for it going forward."

When the college's Vice Dean for Academic Affairs, Dr. Robert Hash, saw the need for the creation of a more formal academic technology leadership position this fall, it was clear Dr. Brandt was the man for the job. Now, just a few weeks into his new role, Dr. Brandt is already in the process of forming a small working committee to manage all college-related technology projects and monitor the status of existing systems. Another of his first tasks is to select and implement a curriculum management tool that will help Academic Affairs define curricular objectives, measure competencies and assess student outcomes.

"I'm hoping to help facilitate development of a better reporting system for IT problems," Dr. Brandt says. "There are a lot of exciting things we'll be working on in the coming months. My job is to not only promote the best academic technology within the college, but to establish improved communications with the existing technology professionals we have working with us."