Tim William Grennan
Professor
University of California/Davis School of Medicine
c/o Oncology Clinic, Kaiser Permanente Medical Center 2025 Morse Ave.
Sacramento, California USA
Phone: 916-973-5950
Fax: 916-973-6017
Email: tim.grennan@kp.org
Education and Professional Experience:
As a Clinical Professor of Medicine at University of California, Davis, I have served as the medicine residency program director and director of student clerkship programs for the past two decades at Kaiser Permanente, Sacramento. As the nation’s first fully integrated managed care program hospital with a university residency program (UC Davis), our institution provides a unique learning opportunity for medical education.
Jesuit trained at Loyola University, Chicago, I graduated from the University of Nebraska College of Medicine in 1976. After active duty as a flight surgeon in the Air Force, I completed my residency in medicine and fellowship in oncology at the University of Michigan. It was there that I found my education mentor: Faith Fitzgerald, MD.
In 1992, I returned to US Air Force as a reserve flight surgeon. In this capacity, I have held a number of leadership positions: Chief, Hospital Services, 349th MDS, and Chief, Aerospace Medicine, 349th AMDS. With the rank of colonel, I have also served as an Air Force reserve liaison between the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine and the Division of Space Biosciences at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Currently, I am in an inactive reserve status.
Scholarly Interest:
My main scholarly interests over the last quarter century have to do with teaching. I am passionate about teaching clinical medicine and have been fortunate to receive several teaching awards from the UCD housestaff: “Outstanding Clinical Instructor Award” and “Distinguished Faculty Award” as well as Kaiser Permanente, Northern California’s, first “Award of Excellence for Graduate Medical Education.”
As a clinician, I have also been one of the three founding MDs for our “Kaiser Permanente Oncology Clinical Trials Program,” which now has over 100 physicians, with over 40 active protocols and enrolling over 500 patients per year in one of the premier clinical trials programs on the west coast. In 2006 our clinical trials program won a national award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology and our program was the 2007 recipient of the Morris F. Collen Award for Research. Since 2008, I have been fortunate to serve as a board member for the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute's Biomedical Institutional Review Board.
Personal Background:
From the Latin verb servire, meaning to serve or be a servant, I feel fortunate to be able to serve my patients, physicians in training, and my country.
Growing up in a small town in Nebraska, starting my career as a 4th generation “rail” working as a carman on the Union Pacific Railroad after high school, if someone had told me then that I would someday be a physician taking care of cancer patients, teaching other physicians, be a professor of medicine, doing research in clinical medicine, and working on a NASA space program: I would have thought they were nuts.
My wife and I have four adult children who are extremely well educated, well mannered, gainfully employed, passionate about their work and studies, and, as far as I know, free of tattoos and non-traditional body piercings. I love being with them and their children whenever I can.
The reason I am here today is because of mentors. From my family to a handful of teachers and mentors in our profession, I have learned the importance of servire. The concept of “mentor” flows from leadership. Leadership to me comes down to basic tenets: service, relationships and influence.