Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Dr. Cynda Johnson, who was hired to help develop a medical school planned by Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech, peeks in on a baby at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital . Johnson’s mantra is "inquiry, research and discovery."

Dr. Cynda Johnson

• Position: Founding dean of the planned Virginia Tech-Carilion Clinic medical school.
• Former positions: Senior associate vice chancellor for clinic and translational research and dean of the Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University; chairwoman of the department of family medicine, Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa; various teaching posts, University of Kansas Medical Center.
• Education: B.A., Stanford University, 1973; M.D., University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, 1977; M.B.A., University of Missouri, Kansas City, 1999.
• Family: Married to Dr. Bruce Johnson. They have two sons: Kevin, 28, and Andrew, 26.

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In a dimly lit room on the 14th floor of Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, Dr. Cynda Johnson peers into a shallow crib at a tiny head poking through the blankets.

Trained as a family physician, Johnson has come a long way from making the rounds on the maternity floors. On this particular day, she is touring the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit in a different role -- as new dean of a proposed medical school in Roanoke.

Having begun her job a month ago, Johnson is charged with developing the school planned by Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech, an endeavor she finds thrilling and time-consuming.

"I've been so busy, I haven't had time to unpack," said Johnson, sitting in her Roanoke Memorial office with a cardboard box brimming with bubble-wrapped belongings by her side.

Over the next couple of years, she will have a hand in setting the medical school's direction, crafting its curriculum and recruiting the student body.

Her mantra, so far, in defining the school's mission has been "inquiry, research and discovery."

But in many ways, those words can be used to describe her own approach to life -- an approach that values inquisitiveness and self-discovery.

"I didn't just have one direction," Johnson said. "I had interests, but then I let my life carry me in different directions."

At 56, she stands to become one of only 16 female deans at the nation's 126 accredited medical schools.

She comes to Roanoke by way of East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., where she served as dean of the Brody School of Medicine for three years before leading the university's medicine-based research efforts as a senior associate vice chancellor.

"She clearly has the right personality to start bringing groups and disparate people together to forge a common vision of what the school ought to be," said Dr. Ed Murphy, Carilion's chief executive officer.

Born in Girard, Kan., a farming community with a population of fewer than 2,800, Johnson said her upbringing set the stage for her interest in rural medicine and increasing access for patients in underserved areas.

"I remember when I was young and I would try to learn things, I would never do them the way they were taught," Johnson recalled. "From the time I was young, I sort of recognized different ways to getting to the end I wanted."

Johnson struck out on her own, being the first in her extended family to go to college -- a route that was peppered with science fair projects and encouragement from teachers.

As an undergraduate at Stanford University, she skipped the traditional premedical track, opting instead to study German, and more specifically German expressionist drama, focusing on theatrical interpretations of the French Revolution.

"That was my little avocation," Johnson said of the unusual course work.

But at the same time, she finished her biology requirements to be "on the safe side."

During her college years, she sought scholarship outside the classroom, traveling to a village in Germany, where she cataloged teas and herbal remedies and interviewed community elders about their views on health.

After her third year at Stanford, she married Bruce Johnson, who was a year ahead of her, and graduated early in her senior year. The couple attended medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Upon graduation, Cynda Johnson decided to pursue a medical specialty that was relatively new at the time -- family medicine.

The branch, which focuses on more generalized treatment for all age groups, had become board-certified less than a decade earlier -- and is still considered a young specialty.

Her medical residency took her back to Kansas, where she stayed for the next 22 years. During that time, she raised two sons, ran an active practice, held various teaching posts at the University of Kansas Medical Center, and traveled with her husband to Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic in central Asia, to help revamp its medical system and train primary care doctors.

Johnson returned to school at 48 to earn her master's degree in business administration -- an experience, she said, that put a new spin on how she viewed medical education.

"That's where I really experienced the team concept of teaching because MBA schools are very much taught in teams," Johnson said.

In medicine, the idea of teaching physicians alongside other health care professionals, such as nurses and therapists, was still novel. But she added: "When you train that way, it's much easier to move into practice that way."

Still, it wasn't until 1999, when Johnson became head of the family medicine department at the Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa, that she really began to think about becoming a dean.

In fact, she described herself as being "intentionally mentored" to do so by colleagues.

"They said, 'Cynda, we think you should be a dean,' and I said, 'Ha-ha, ha-ha.' And they said, 'No really,' " she recalled.

"Which is how I became a dean," she added.

School thrived under her leadership

Johnson is energetic and effusive -- as eager to talk about her plans for the medical school as to trail off about her two sons, Kevin, 28, and Andrew, 26, who have careers outside medicine.

Having blazed her own path in life, she has encouraged her children to do the same.

Kevin is a professional dancer and computer engineer living in New York City, where he occasionally works "dancing on the big piano at FAO Schwarz," she noted.

Andrew is married and lives with his wife in Moldova, a small eastern European country, where they are Peace Corps volunteers.

In 2004, Johnson became dean of East Carolina's Brody School of Medicine, a college 80 miles east of Raleigh, with roughly 290 students and a faculty of about 400.

While the job presented some challenges -- walking into the position, Johnson inherited what she called some "crashing financials" -- the school had some attractive features, most notably its mission of educating minority medical students as primary care physicians and providing medical care for eastern North Carolina, which has a high poverty rate.

"It was a clear mission-based school, which by the way, was part of the reason its financials were so bad," she added.

Despite having to wrestle a multimillion-dollar budget deficit in clinical operations, Johnson worked to recruit faculty, streamline patient billing and implement new business strategies in an effort to improve its financial standing, said Dr. Nicholas Benson, a former colleague who is now a vice dean for ECU's medical school.

"She placed a high emphasis on customer service," he added.

Under Johnson's leadership, the school's reputation thrived.

In her three years at the helm, U.S. World News & Report ranked ECU's medical school in the nation's top 10 for three specialty areas -- primary care, rural medicine and family medicine.

In 2006, the school tied with Duke University in nearby Durham for sixth place in top primary care schools in those same rankings.

After three years as dean, however, Johnson sought out a new position helping to foster collaborations between the medical school and scientific research taking place on campus -- an experience that officials at Carilion and Tech say will be valuable in creating a school with a similar research-focused relationship.

"There tends to be a wide gulf between the medical school and graduate Ph.D. programs of the main university," said Mark Werner, Carilion's chief medical officer, who was on the hiring team.

"She was very successful at ECU in building a bridge."

Tech-Carilion school not 'ordinary'

When Carilion and Tech started their search for a new dean in June, Johnson's name quickly rose to the top and stayed there.

The two institutions chose from a pool of about 25 candidates, and Murphy said there was no "close second."

In fact, the hiring committee had originally sought to bring in three finalists for a second interview, Werner said.

But after meeting with Johnson, they found she "was such a good fit, we needed to look no further, so we didn't finish the second visits with the other finalists," Werner said.

They were struck by her familiarity with prepping a school for accreditation -- a grueling administrative process that includes the development of a curriculum and budget -- and her experience linking medical education with scientific research.

"When you talked to her, she inspired confidence that we could achieve what we wanted to do," said Tech Provost Mark McNamee. "She knew where to begin and how to get things going."

While the school doesn't expect to enroll its first class in 2010, Johnson has not wasted any time getting to work.

The Johnsons have already bought a loft in downtown Roanoke -- "I wanted to support the emphasis on downtown," she said -- and Bruce Johnson has taken a job with Carilion as vice chairman for education in the internal medicine department.

Meanwhile, Johnson said she envisions the school's emphasizing academic research and having an inquiry-based teaching style "meaning we won't feed it to the student. The student will explore to learn the material."

"We don't want to be just on the list of every other medical school. We want it to have a special character," she said.

Having begun her job in mid-January, Johnson has already prepared the school proposal for presentation to the accrediting committee in Washington, D.C.

It's a point she was almost giddy about.

"Now we're an applicant school candidate," she announced proudly.

While many in the region have high hopes for the new medical school, Johnson doesn't sound like she's going to be overwhelmed.

"I can picture the steps and how it can be done, and that doesn't make it feel as daunting," she said.