After over 6 years as chancellor, Dan Jones is returning to a leadership postion in the medical field.
Jones will join the University of Mississippi Medical Center as director of clinical and population sciences at the Mississippi Center for Obesity Research this September.
This position will be the first installation of the Mr. and Mrs. Joe F. Sanderson Jr. Endowed Chair of Obesity Metabolic Diseases and Nutrition.
Dr. John Hall, professor and chair of physiology and biophysics director at the obesity center, announced Jones’ acceptance of the position last week. Hall said when he heard Jones’ term as chancellor would end in September, he immediately thought of him for the director’s position.
“Everyone here is excited,” Hall said. “We know the people at the university are excited he’s going to stick with us here.”
Jones said he has contemplated the type of position he would like to fill when he leaves the chancellor’s office this fall.
“I made the decision that I wanted to stay in Mississippi and I really have more passion at this stage of my life for dealing with the science and providing leadership through science as opposed to leading a university or leading a health science center,” Jones said. “I have so much passion for Mississippi. I could generate passion for some other place, I’m sure, but it would have been hard work.”
Hall said he has been looking for over two years for someone to take this position.
“Fortunately, we didn’t fill the position earlier,” Hall said. “I don’t think we could have found anyone that met those requirements as well as Dr. Jones does.”
Hall said the standards for this position were incredibly high because the director would be the first holder of the endowment chair.
Jones actually proposed the chair to Joe F. Sanderson, chief executive officer and chairman of the board at Sanderson Farms, over eight years ago.
Sanderson said though it would have been impossible to know Jones would eventually take that chair, he is pleased with how it turned out.
“We could not be happier that he’s going to be the first person to assume the head of this chair,” Sanderson said. “We are thrilled about the work they’ve already done and we’re looking forward to the progress that will be made in the future.”
Sanderson said this issue was important to him and to Sanderson Farms.
“We have more than 5,000 employees in Mississippi,” Sanderson said. “If there are ways to improve obesity rates and metabolic diseases – hypertension, heart disease, all the things that result from obesity – that will only help our employees and other citizens of our state.”
Hall said this position will play more to Jones’ background as a clinical scientist and researcher.
“I think a major thing is a lot of people are not as familiar with Dr. Jones’ scientific and clinical skills as they are with his leadership skills,” Hall said. “Prior to his becoming the chancellor at University of Mississippi, he had a strong record of research and clinical responsibilities here at the medical center.”
Jones said though this was not how he planned to leave the university, he is looking forward to returning to this type of work.
“When I started steering towards research and a career as a physician scientist as opposed to a physician, it was a pretty big surprise to me,” Jones said. “I really did fall in love with that combination of patient care and using science as a tool to try to understand societal issues related to health.”
As director, Hall said Jones will coordinate clinical treatment and prevention programs as well as population research.
“One of our major goals is to reduce obesity and prevent obesity in Mississippi, but also one of our goals is to generate new knowledge that will be translatable not just to Mississippi but to other populations across the country,” Hall said.
Hall said though Mississippi has the highest rates for obesity in this country, there are other countries with higher rates.
“We think that if we can pull the needle here in Mississippi, that will certainly help the others to reduce obesity,” Hall said.
This will not be Jones’s first time working with population research. Jones first ventured into this specific area during his duration as a medical missionary in Korea. There, Jones studied the prevalence of high blood pressure. This study included nearly 25,000 people and was later used on the first collaboration between Jones and Hall.
“We met in 1992. He was a world-famous researcher. I was a nobody,” Jones said. “In our earliest days of working together, we both became much more interested in the relationship of hypertension and obesity.”
Jones said the first paper he and Hall collaborated on was “probably the most important” he has written in his career. Jones and Hall collaborated on more than 20 other works since 1992.
Jones said he would continue this work at the obesity center, specifically, focusing on the correlation between education deficiencies and obesity.
“The evidence that there is a relationship between education and health is very strong,” Jones said. “I want to move that from ‘We’re pretty sure,’ to ‘We’re real sure,’ and to take that evidence and to convince policy makers that, if they want better health in Mississippi, if they want to spend less money on Medicaid, the best way is through early childhood education and continuing education.”
Hall and Jones agree that this problem is specifically relevant to Mississippi – where the obesity rate is the highest in the country – but will be used internationally in research on this worldwide epidemic.
Joe Sanderson said he looks forward to seeing Jones’ work in his new position.
“We are so fortunate that the state of Mississippi is not going to lose Dr. Jones and his wife,” Sanderson said. “They could have gone anywhere. We are so pleased they are going to stay in Mississippi and be involved at UMMC.”
