Office of the DeanAnn Bonham, Ph.D.
Executive Associate Dean for Academic Affairs,
UC Davis School of Medicine
Q&A with Ann
What do you do?
My role is to ensure we have the resources, support and opportunities so that we can provide an excellent education for future physicians, conduct outstanding research and build successful academic careers. At the end of the day, if I can move us forward in that direction, then I feel like I've given our students, faculty, and institution the support they truly deserve.
What do you enjoy about your work?
I enjoy making a difference in the professional lives of our medical students, faculty, graduate students and staff. I feel like I am doing my job when a medical student tells me “this is what I dreamed medical school would be like…” or when a faculty member gets promoted to full professor… or when a researcher says he or she made a new discovery that could have an impact on human health. I enjoy the challenge of making things happen. It’s a pleasure and privilege to be a part of our faculty's and students' successes.
Ann Bonham, executive associate dean for Academic Affairs and professor of Pharmacology and Internal Medicine, is a national leader in the field of central neural regulation of cardiovascular and respiratory functions and how gender, environmental pollutants, physiological changes and disease alter this regulation.
A member of the faculty since 1989, she exemplifies the School of Medicine's emphasis on combining research, education and mentoring as interwoven missions. As executive associate dean, Bonham oversees the institution's research programs, focusing on high-impact discoveries, translational research, and interdisciplinary, collaborative research with public, private and industry partners. The education programs include undergraduate medical education; graduate student and postdoctoral training programs; and faculty academic programs. She is the program director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Integrating Medicine into Basic Science initiative.
An eminent scientist with a strong history of federal funding, Bonham has served on various National Institutes of Health advisory councils and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Physiology. She has played a major role in the UC Davis' expansion of basic biomedical sciences in pharmacogenomics, neurosciences, and membrane and vascular biology.
She has served as chair of the Department of Pharmacology where, over a two-year period, she rebuilt the department and increased NIH funding by six-fold. She also has served as vice chair of research for the Department of Internal Medicine, associate chief of research for and acting chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine. She was twice awarded the UC Davis Kaiser Award for Excellence in Teaching Science Basic to Medicine and was honored with the American Medical Women’s Association Gender Equity Award for providing a gender-fair environment for the education and training of women physicians.
Bonham earned a doctoral degree in pharmacology from the University of Iowa College of Medicine, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University School of Medicine.