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Dr. John Mendelsohn to retire as president of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center inAugust 2011

Dr. John Mendelsohn, the face of Houston's revered University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, will retire as its president next summer, according to an e-mail he sent to employees on Monday.

In its own statement, M.D. Anderson downplayed the "r" word, instead calling Mendelsohn's departure as president a role change.

Mendelsohn will remain a member of the cancer center's faculty as co-director of the new Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy. He will also return his focus to research on targeted cancer therapies, one of the technologies he helped bring to M.D. Anderson and established as an area of great expertise. The IPCT will focus on targeting the abnormal genes and products of genes that cause cancer and tailoring treatment for individual patient needs.

"I'm not hunting for free time," Mendelsohn told CultureMap. "I like building things and working with talented teams. It's a smaller level of responsibly, and maybe I'll have a little more time to look into hobbies and visit with family and things like that, but it's not retirement. It's switching focus."

Mendelsohn has overseen rapid expansion of the cancer center during the nearly 15 years he has served as president. It now employees nearly 18,000 people and occupies 11.5 million square feet in the Texas Medical Center. It serves more than 100,000 patients each year with a budget of more than $3.2 billion. During the last decade, M.D. Anderson has more than doubled its size and number of clinics.

Under Mendelsohn's tutelage, the center has been named the leading cancer hospital in the nation six out of the past eight years in U.S. News and World Report's America's Best Hospitals survey.

The 74-year-old doctor wrote in his e-mail that he viewed his new positon at the IPCT as a return to his roots, and said it was "truly the culmination of my life-long dream."

Mendelsohn said he has high expectations for M.D. Anderson's continued success, and offered some advice to his eventual successor. "The person can expect to be very stimulated and have many challenges, and in addition to addressing the usual things there will be an extra agenda, and that will be helping to figure out how to move M.D. Anderson into the new way healthcare is being delivered and paid for in the U.S. in the next 5 years."

Mendelsohn came to M.D. Anderson from New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in 1996. He is only the third president to head M.D. Anderson since its founding in 1941.

He is expected to retire as president by Aug. 31, 2011. A search committee for his replacement will likely begin their efforts in January.

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Thanks, Queen Bey

Pop icon Beyoncé donates $100,000 to University of Houston Law School

Photo by Erza Shaw Getty Images

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Pop megastar Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has donated $100,000 to the University of Houston Law Center Criminal Justice Clinic through her BeyGOOD Foundation. The gift will allow the clinic to hire fill-time faculty to head it, benefiting the students who study there.

“I am delighted that the BeyGOOD Foundation has made this very generous gift to the UH Law Center,” said Leonard Baynes, dean of the UH Law Center. “Not only will this funding help establish a full-time criminal justice clinic that provides pro bono legal services in our community, but it will also supercharge our already excellent criminal law and justice programming.”

The clinic is one of nine at UHLC. It helps students learn to navigate the criminal justice system, especially on behalf of clients that are underserved by skilled attorneys. People of color are affected disproportionately by a lack of good, ethical representation.

Beyoncé, the most decorated artist in Grammy history and easily the biggest musical star native to Houston, has a long history of advocating for criminal justice reform. She was a staunch supporter of the police reform following the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, asking law enforcement to “stop killing us” in a web post. In 2020, she penned an open letter to the Kentucky attorney general asking for justice in the death of Breonna Taylor.

Through her BeyGOOD Foundation, established in 2013, Beyoncé has focused mostly on expanding the prospects of Black-owned business and offering education opportunities to students. Forwarding the cause of legal representation in Texas while also helping out marginalized communities compliments her other philanthropic work.

“At UH Law, we envision a legal profession where ‘everyone has the opportunity to prosper,’ as BeyGOOD envisions, and we will achieve this vision by providing access to strong and effective legal representation in criminal proceedings,” Baynes said. “And together, through this gift, the BeyGOOD Foundation and UHLC will shepherd the next generation of criminal justice attorneys in the city of Houston, the state of Texas and the nation.”