**Jon Williamson, PhD, FASAHP**
Dean, UT Southwestern School of Health Professions, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Part 1

ASAHP: How long have you been involved with ASAHP?

Jon Williamson (JW): I’ve been connected to ASAHP for almost 25 years! I first attended an ASAHP conference as an Assistant Dean in the early 2000's. Over the years, I’ve had various roles on research committees, as an abstract reviewer, and as a reviewer for the Journal of Allied Health. I’ve always found merit in the mission to advance the health professions.

ASAHP: How long have you worked in health professions?

JW: I started my career as a PhD researcher and was hired as a tenure track faculty in the UT Southwestern Department of Physical Therapy in 1995. My research focus aligned well with local rehabilitation research programs which led to my appointment as Assistant Dean for Research for the UT Southwestern School of Health Professions in 2001. I enjoyed the challenge of finding successful strategies to help each program increase research productivity. I began to inherit additional administrative roles and responsibilities and by 2015, I became Dean.

ASAHP: What drew you to the role of President?

JW: Serving as ASAHP president presents an opportunity to help further advance the health professions which are not always in the spotlight. The majority of the healthcare workforce are health professionals. Doctors and nurses represent only about a third of the healthcare workforce. The other two thirds are health professionals. My hope is that ASAHP can continue to be a "high tide, raising all health professions programs." The challenge of developing shared goals and successful strategies that benefit all health professions with diverse perspectives and needs is very appealing to me. I also believe that the true core of good leadership is trust. I’m fortunate to have an excellent team at UT Southwestern that I can rely on in order to give adequate time needed to the ASAHP presidency.

ASAHP: What have been some of your most significant achievements at UT Southwestern School of Health Professions?

JW: One of my most significant contributions was the facilitation of a culture change to help promote collaboration and excellence. I believe that before you can implement a vision or build something, you need a culture that will support it. Even though our school is relatively small, the disciplines were very siloed. My goal was to break down the walls and get people to interact and think more broadly. I used a behavioral assessment tool called DISC that identifies four basic behavior styles. People were intrigued and once they understood their own style, they could appreciate that others had different styles and that everyone adds value to the team. It became an incredibly valuable communication tool that helped facilitate more open conversations and comprehensive problem solving.

ASAHP: Are there skills you acquired in that position that you will bring to your new role as President?

JW: Years of problem solving in complex academic medical center environments have helped me to appreciate numerous perspectives, think critically, employ innovation, and move expeditiously to develop optimal solutions and outcomes. Not everything is going to be a home run, so you’ve got to keep swinging. When things don’t work out, I believe persistence is critical to building resilience and accelerated learning.

ASAHP: Anything you want to share with ASAHP membership about your personal life, family?

JW: I tend to be more private but will share that I have been married to my much better half for over 35 years with three grown children. My wife also works in academia as an administrator at UT Southwestern Medical Center and my older son is in the healthcare arena as a dosimetrist.

ASAHP: What’s a little known fact about you?

JW: As part of my research development, I was trained in hypnosis. I was trying to study cardiovascular control centers in the brain, and because the system is so redundant, it's difficult to tease out which influences what. So for example, when you exercise, your heart rate and blood pressure respond based on how hard you're working. But there's also how hard you think you're working, especially if you’re perceiving it to be very difficult. I wanted to study how perceived workload impacts the cardiovascular response versus the actual workload and what areas of the brain were involved? We put people on a bicycle, hypnotized them and told them they're going up a hill or down a hill with no change in the workload. We then mapped the brain when they thought they were going up or down a hill. Our research was significant in that we were really the first to identify the parts of the brain that were involved in the perceptual component of cardiovascular regulation.

One of our key takeaways was that you can't trick the body to deliver less blood and oxygen than required by local metabolic demand by the working muscles, but you can trick it to produce an exaggerated cardiovascular response. The brain areas involved in this response may also be involved in stress-related hypertension.