What's a pediatrician doing as dean of engineering and technology? If it's Dr. Doris Merritt, professor emerita of the IU School of Medicine, she's simply wearing another hat - one of many she has donned during nearly 40 years of service. Her achievements have garnered honors from IUSM, IU School of Nursing, Purdue University, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the State of Indiana.
But to hear her tell it, she was just in the right place at the right time. An only child, young Doris Honig had a taste for independence and an innate dislike for the accepted feminine role of the time. An avid reader, she spent her free time browsing her father's books at the family's New York City home and wandering the city's museums. Yet for young women during the '30s and '40s there were few opportunities for independence "with respectability."
Clearly, an education was essential to her goal so she attended Hunter College, doubling up on credits to graduate early (Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude) in 1944. A two-and-a-half-year hitch as a Naval officer followed. Then, as WWII wound down, she once more weighed her options. "The women who had joined up were teachers or in merchandising, with a few in broadcasting," she says. "But it was clear they were there because they weren't getting anywhere in their jobs. My roommate had been premed, and I urged her to finish. Finally she said, if this is such a great thing, why don't you do it?"
So, with only two science courses to her credit, she got the catalogue from George Washington University School of Medicine and called on the chairman of the admissions committee. "I said I would like to go to medical school," she recalls with a laugh. "He was very polite and asked if I had any idea how many people shared that desire. I knew it was difficult, I said, but what was bothering me was - did I really have to take all that science to get into medical school? Poor man. He said, yes, I really did."
Two years later, prerequisites complete, she was admitted as one of three women in a class of 80. She earned her MD in 1952, and together with husband Dr. Donald Merritt (IUSM's first chairman of the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics) completed their residencies at Duke, she in pediatrics, he in internal medicine.
The couple's next move, to NIH, would shape her future. With no position available in pediatrics, she joined the Division of Research Grants, and there she found her niche. "It was marvelous," she recalls. "I worked with people famous in physiology and medicine. I loved listening as they critiqued studies from young investigators and advised how to improve their work. I couldn't have done any of that, but I could be a great facilitator and that's what I discovered I loved to do - to move things along!"
She got the opportunity in spades when the Merritts, now with two children, made the move to IUSM in 1961. Donald joined the Department of Medicine; Doris was named director of medical research grants and contracts.
It was an exciting time on a growing campus. Over the course of her career, Dr. Merritt would have a hand in changes that took the School from a quiet training ground for the state's physicians to a bustling medical research center on an intercollegiate campus. Between 1961 and 1978, she was instrumental in bringing $55 million in grants for new construction to the campus. As research joined education and service as a vital component of the School's mission, she provided administrative support as IUSM research dollars grew from $1.8 million in 1961 to nearly $105 million today. (Two program project grants written by medical researchers her first year at IUSM are still ongoing.)
These changes didn't happen overnight. "In 1961, you understand, we were in the dark ages," she says. "NIH grant applications were ten snap-out flimsies with carbon paper - try that on a manual typewriter! Well, I was the one signing off on these and I couldn't read them or make clear corrections. So I asked the assistant dean of finance if I could have an electric typewriter. He said absolutely not! If I get you an electric typewriter, the Dean's secretary Wilma will want a one and my secretary Judy will want one. So I wrote to Herman Wells, who was president of the IU Foundation, requesting an electric typewriter for my business dealing with grants, which were made to the IU Foundation at that time. What I didn't know was that the assistant dean served on the committee reviewing those foundation requests. So the first time he saw that request was in committee meeting, and they teased him unmercifully. He was rather provoked. I said, well you told me you wouldn't buy it, but you didn't say I couldn't try someplace else!"
She got the typewriter. (So did Judy and Wilma.) And although Dr. Merritt says her effectiveness comes from knowing how to move through channels and around them without arousing antagonism, her determination once led Dean Emeritus Walter Daly, MD, to call her "my dean who gets things done."
By her own account, the perfect assignment for Dr. Merritt was where someone had an imaginative new program but little idea of how to implement it. She became the first physician ever to be made an honorary member of the international nursing society Sigma Theta Tau, in recognition of her service as first acting director of the National Center for Nursing Research, NIH, when its establishment was mandated by Congress. As a Presidential appointee to the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine and its chair, she was a strong supporter of the efforts that created the infrastructure for the medical library electronic information systems used by all students and health professionals today. And as dean for research and sponsored programs, IUPUI, her entrepreneurial approach helped launch several ongoing community health and education programs such as the Consortium for Urban Education.
In 1995, when the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, IUPUI, faced an emergency search for a new dean, its faculty asked Chancellor Bepko to draft Dr. Merritt to take the helm during the interim; Purdue later awarded her an honorary doctor of science degree. She became professor emerita in 1996 but recently returned briefly to help both IUPUI and IU develop a new framework for the continued strengthening of research and graduate studies in Indianapolis.
"I lived in an era that was absolutely parallel to the NIH's growth and the country's support of health research," she says. "Coming in at the beginning, I learned the players and the intricacies of the NIH review process, and how to fit them into the university world. This was an absolutely vital insight in helping people get things done.
"It turns out that all you really have to do is listen for the best ideas, help people articulate what they want to do, and plot how to make it happen. That's the fun of it! When what they're doing is worthwhile, they can take it all the way to the top."