Dr. Jon Solberg to step down as Chair of UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences Department of Emergency Medicine

The UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences Department of Emergency Medicine (EM) is looking to recruit its next Chair after Jon Solberg, M.D., announced plans to step down as chair.

“This is an incredibly exciting time for the next Chair to build upon what we’ve accomplished,” said Solberg, who has served as the department’s chair since its founding in 2019. “Departmental highlights over the past several years include establishing a state-wide EM Journal Club, a recurring Grand Rounds program with local and internationally recognized speakers, and a case report poster contest at the State Trauma Conference, which gives students the experience of presenting a poster at a large conference without incurring the cost and time commitment required to travel out of state.”

And that’s not all.

As Solberg put it, before the SMHS invested in a full department dedicated to emergency medicine, students interested in specializing in the care of patients with acute or emergent medical conditions were mentored by faculty in the School’s Department of Family & Community Medicine.

That model meant that family medicine faculty had to work extra hard to generate graduates competitive enough for the limited number of EM residency programs across the U.S.

“We owe a debt of gratitude to our family medicine colleagues – they were the ones who mentored me and others into the field when I chose EM as a specialty nearly 20 years ago,” added Solberg, who graduated from the SMHS in 2006. “Today, the EM match has become competitive enough that having a department tailored to identify, motivate, and mentor students interested in emergency medicine is now better accomplished by EM residency-trained and board-certified physicians who specialize in this type of medicine.”

To Solberg’s point, before UND’s Department of Emergency Medicine was official, the SMHS typically matched only one or two students annually – and sometimes zero – into EM residencies, which are three-year post-graduate programs.

Since 2020, though, that number has grown to an average of more than five students matching into EM residencies each year.

“This success puts North Dakota emergency departments in a favorable position for recruiting local talent in the coming years,” said Solberg. “By July of this year, North Dakota will have 18 UND alumni enrolled in emergency medicine residency programs. These students are more likely to return to North Dakota and stay for an entire career, raising their families, participating in hospital administration and student education, and contributing to the local economy when compared to physicians raised and trained elsewhere.”

Solberg attributes this success to a core group of EM faculty who make a special effort to reach out to students earlier in their medical school training, building a relationship with them over their classroom and clinical years.

This relationship often extends into residency and beyond, Solberg said, highlighting the department’s “Wild Med Weekend,” a wilderness medicine training event which brings together faculty with expertise in high altitude mountaineering, frostbite, human endurance racing, SCUBA diving, and survival medicine.

“These faculty have put on an amazing three-day workshop four years in a row, and have trained nearly 100 students in wilderness medicine,” Solberg remarked. “The event is targeted at first- and second-year students, and it puts them in a wilderness scenario, like on the side of a mountain or responding to a medical emergency on a commercial airline flight – anywhere outside the hospital.

As Solberg explained, the emergent scenarios force students to make clinical decisions based on a patient’s history and physical exam alone, away from x-ray machines, laboratory tests, and physician consults.

“This forces them to make difficult decisions and take immediate action,” Solberg said enthusiastically. “It takes basic biomedical science – things like body temperature, pulse, tissue oxygenation, and organ perfusion – and shows students how these are not just topics in a textbook or lab. They are important physiologic parameters that play a minute by minute role in the body’s ability to stay alive.”

The Department also partnered with the UND Alumni Association & Foundation to honor one of Dr. Solberg’s most influential mentors by establishing the Dr. Mike Schlosser Memorial Emergency Medicine Scholarship.

“Our School — and the state of North Dakota — owes Dr. Solberg, our inaugural Department of Emergency Medicine chair, a huge debt of gratitude,” said Dr. Marjorie Jenkins, dean of the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences. “He moved mountains to help train UND medical students for emergency health conditions, increasing the number of medical students choosing emergency medicine as a specialty by more than 100% in just a few years.”

And not only medical students, continued Jenkins, but Solberg’s interest in interprofessional education helped prepare students in other colleges, for example UND’s John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences, for a variety of emergency scenarios.

“Dr. Solberg will be missed in this role,” said Jenkins. “We look forward to working with Dr. Solberg as a trusted advisor on Emergency Medicine training.”

Applications are currently being accepted for the role of Chair, Department of Emergency Medicine. Emergency Medicine faculty who are interested may submit a Letter of Interest and current CV to Linda Anderson (linda.m.anderson@UND.edu) in the SMHS Office of Education & Faculty Affairs by April 21, 2025.