Why Every Future Doctor Needs an Engineering Degree (ft. Lev Gonick)

Healthcare providers are going to need to know how to prompt AI. They're gonna need to know how all that works because that's the future of medicine.

That is a mark of great leadership. When everyone else is figuring out how to just survive, you're figuring out actually how to pivot to what comes next. We are the largest public university in the country with almost 194,000 students. We measure our success by how they succeed, not how the institution quote unquote succeeds by being the elite. All of us as CIOs need to find mission, you know, that aligns to our personal values. Our networks, you know, as I say, you know, our net worth is really our network. It's the network of humans, people we try to hopefully support and launch on their careers going forward.

Welcome to Digital Voices, where healthcare and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now your host, Ed Marx.

Hey, it's Ed. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. So excited about this episode because I have a longtime friend, Lev Gonick, joining us. Lev, welcome to Digital Voices.

Ed, great to see you, and thanks for having me on your program.

So, Lev, yeah, I was trying to think back how long we've known each other. So it's the early 2000s, right? What— when did you get to Cleveland?

Uh, 25 years ago. So we're, we're in our quarter century of knowing each other here, Ed.

Yeah, and we look just the same. We're just the most handsome men that has ever lived, and our wives just I know I've told you this before, but I just want my entire audience to know, I became who I was as a CIO in large part to you. I owe a lot, large to you. So I was this, I was this man wet behind the ears. No one mentored me because of how I became a CIO. And I just kind of fell into the position. And then you were like, you know, you had been a CIO for a while, I think someplace else, if not at Case.

California. Yeah, I've been in California.

And so I was just watching you and you were doing these cool things and I just stole from you. I was like, oh, that's cool. I guess you should like partner with vendors, that as one silly example, you know, because a lot of people, right? CIOs, oftentimes it's adversarial, but you were like partnering and doing things and joining. And so I was just taking notes and how you worked with your customers, how you worked with executives. I was like, I just became a sponge. And so you were, You were informally mentoring me. And so I'm always so thankful. And so I want to share you with my audience. Like, this is the CIO who's still super active. And also, you're still leading the way today, Lev. I still copy from you. So it's not like it just happened 25 years ago. I watch you and what you're doing in Arizona and higher education. You're just an amazing person and leader. So anyways, I just want to say thank you.

Thanks, Ed. Very gratifying. As you may not know, but you are one of my CIO heroes and I don't have that many. And so glad to know that somewhere along the way I managed to turn a light bulb on for you. Yeah.

And we'll have all your contact information in the show notes and you also produce a lot of content and just a person full of wisdom. So people should definitely follow you. And so that's sort of how we first met, like way back when, but the most important question that we have, Leb, is what are the songs on your playlist? Like what kind of music do you like to listen to?

I've always been a jazz guy. And so I move between sort of the classics. You know, I'm a Thelonious Monk kind of crazy guy and I love Miles and I love that whole sort of early '50s, '60s genre, that period of Miles and Thelonious and many others, '50s, '60s. And, you know, I love contemporary female jazz vocalists. I love Candace Springs. I was just listening to her playlist this morning. Uh, she's out of Kansas City and, and, uh, you know, she's just one of my favorite female, uh, artists. Uh, it's a great jazz scene here in Phoenix, so I get to see a lot of great, uh, talent.

Oh, that's awesome. Next time I'm there, 'cause I, I, I don't know if you know or not, but my dad lives in Scottsdale. He moved there in the last couple years.

No excuses, Ed. I'll take you out on the town.

Yeah, I need, and I love jazz. I love Female vocal jazz. So like I'm a big Diana Krall fan, so I need to look up this person from Kansas City now.

Yeah. Yes. And so Kandis is with a K, as she used to say when she was young, not with a C, which everyone would kind of guess too. She's Kandis Springs.

Yeah. I'm going to look her up. That's why I love asking that question is because it gives me like new ideas for music as well. What about life message or mantra? Are there words that you sort of live by that guide who you are?

Honestly, I'd lead by example. I mean, that's sort of been my my mantra, trying my best to be ready to be player coach. You know, that's kind of another really important piece of it. Try very much to build community, both at work and more broadly. That's another big part of sort of my DNA and sort of my, you know, my center and north star.

Yeah. So, Lev, now we know a little bit about your background. You know, we talked a little bit about just high level on Cleveland and where we met, a little bit about your music and your mantra, but tell us more, like, who are you? Like, who is Lev Gonick? What's your life story?

You know, not to go back to the beginning of time, but I'd sort of say, you know, I grew up in an academic family. And for me, you know, it was all, I was always, and I still am always amazed at this incredible institution that humans have created called universities. It's gotta be the most marvelous sort of creation in terms of the opportunities to set people off on a journey to discover who they are, to help them change the world in whatever way they want to change the world, to open doors. I mean, just that journey of discovery for me has always been amazing. So I grew up in that environment and for me, it was kind of a natural thing to Uh, once I finally decided to go to college, which I was a couple of years late because I did grow up in an academic family. And I thought initially like, uh, the world's not big enough for 2, 2 Ganeks or 3 Ganeks in, in academic life. But, you know, after I, uh, after I decided to, to get into academic life, I was a faculty member. Uh, you know, I did a lot of work. My PhD is actually on the introduction of new technologies into traditional mining communities. And I did fieldwork in Africa and fieldwork in India and fieldwork back in Canada, which is my home country. After a while, one of those great luxuries of being an academic, and you know it because at least in part you were in academic medicine for a while, you get these amazing things called sabbaticals. Like, what a brilliant human creation. Unfortunately, only academics, at least as best as I know, I guess I think in corporate IT, you get these short sabbaticals. But anyway, I had a sabbatical in 1993, Ed, and I have— I had and have a special needs daughter. And so we were trying at the time to figure out how best to get some intervention for my daughter who's on the autism spectrum. And it turns out that in sabbatical land, you go to try to find like an institution that might have you. And you bring a chunk of your salary with you and some ideas on what you might do. Anyway, I found myself in the fall of 1993 when my daughter was 5 years old at Arizona State University. The fall of 1993, Ed, like you and I remember this, so hopefully some of your viewers and listeners will as well. That's when the commercial internet browser was born in the fall of 1993. So here I was on sabbatical. Time on my hands, kind of a nerd, but not, you know, I was doing international affairs. I mean, and technology. I mean, that was kind of my thing. And I started teaching online and like nobody had actually really taught online with a browser. I'd been teaching online with things before browsers. These were tools like Archie was one of the tools. These were all before we actually had hypertext markup language. that was available. And anyway, when the browser became available, I was teaching online and I kind of went, wow, this is so cool. Why would I ever want to go back to the traditional classroom? And I started consulting to schools all over the world who were interested in this, you know, internet thing that had just shown up. And I was teaching online in a global seminar, actually online. And That changed my life and I decided to stay the course with trying to do innovation and impacting students' lives around the world, leveraging technology as my space and helped, you know, to pioneer some of that work in that earlier era. And then, you know, then progressed through the ranks, you know, and have really been on this CIO journey. which I know, you know, is the core of your listenership and viewership, you know, for, you know, the better part now of 25 years as a sitting CIO that you and I have known, and before that, about 10 years in academic technology, which is kind of a specialty inside the higher education space.

Yeah, no, that's a great synopsis of your career and some of the sort of the pivotal moments that helped shape Who you are. What are one or two high points along the way? And then I want to talk about ASU and higher education.

Well, I mean, to be honest, like, you don't get that many chances to be a pioneer in one's professional life. And so having serendipitously found myself with the time and a little bit of the story that I shared, that was a remarkable moment for me in realizing just what kind of impact one could have leveraging technology. And I began to sort of talk about, write about, and then try to sort of instantiate in my own classroom delivery that, again, online classroom delivery, the art of the possible. And so I've done, I've had a lot of opportunities to innovate. Before there was streaming online, I was trying to do streaming online. Before there was serious work with multimedia online, I was doing multimedia online. So I I've always been trying to unlock curiosity in students. And I guess the only other thing I'd share with you, Ed, is I've always been committed, and this goes all the way back to my doctoral research, on how technology impacts community. And that was some of the work that you and I did together in Cleveland. You know, we created this project about ways in which our anchor institutions, whether they were hospitals, or whether they were universities could actually be a better service to the communities around them. And together we created this project that started off as One Cleveland and then became One Community and later still became DigitalC. In fact, to this day, well after you and I have left Cleveland, remarkably DigitalC is alive and well. In fact, under fantastic leadership of a young man called Josh Edmonds. Providing internet connectivity to provide schools, education, and training opportunities, health and wellness opportunities for the inner city of Cleveland. Today, the better part of 8,000 Clevelanders' households actually having that internet connectivity. So that's always been really important to me, and I continue to do that, to do my best here in Phoenix and in the broader metro area. To advance ways in which we can use technology to advance the priorities of the communities around us.

Yeah, no, I love that mission. You've always been a missional type of leader, so that's super. And last thing on the career, because I know a lot of people always have questions about this as well. You're able to carve out a little bit of time to serve on some advisory boards or boards. What would be your rec— like, tell us the positive attributes of doing that. Like, why should someone serve on some other boards?

To be honest with you, Ed, it's incredibly selfish. I mean, I am, I have an insatiable appetite for learning. And, you know, even though I've been in this space for as long as I have, in fact, maybe because I have, I know a lot of things that I don't know are outside of the things that I'm very comfortable and familiar with. So serving as an advisor, having an opportunity to hear especially entrepreneurs who are interested in the educational technology space, share their passions, their commitments, their visions. It gives me insight. I used to, when I started this in Cleveland, I used to have a personal coach who was a first-year student, a freshman. And I love this idea of staying like day one oriented. And that's, you know, again, I serve as advisor. I'm on A number of boards, mostly to learn, hopefully to share a little bit of my journey, my experience, some insights on technology choices. Those are the kinds of things that are really special.

Yeah, I'm just smiling because, you know, when you give some of those examples, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, that's where I learned that. I was copying you this whole time. I was serious. Like, some of it was subliminal. Some of it was definitely highly intentional, but But a lot of it was just subliminal. I just think watching you operate. So yeah, let's pivot now to ASU. But before we do, one last thing just for our audience is that Lev was with Case Western Reserve University, one of the highest-rated universities in our country. They have medical school, engineering for engineering, not too much on the sports side. And it was affiliated, is affiliated with University Hospitals where I became the CIO, and that was the academic medical center. And so the two of us had a chance to work together. A lot of things. And so, it was so much fun. All right. So, now we pivot. Now, we know why, or one of the reasons you went back to ASU because you had this experience there previously. So, yeah, tell us about ASU and what drew you there and what makes you stay.

Well, it turns out, even in these short couple of minutes that we spent, you know, you know this well, but hopefully now your viewers and listeners will know, I am driven by mission. It always matters to me. In fact, it's a first principle. And ASU is a mission-driven institution committed in a radical way to democratic access to education and to learning outcomes in a way that, you know, I'm a bit of a student of the history of universities, in a way that sort of is grounded in the initial sort of American ideal of creating public universities for people to be able to participate in, learn, discover, and unlock, you know, their own passions and their own commitments, and hopefully the right skills to achieve them along the way. And so, you know, ASU is mission-driven. It has a remarkable CEO. And again, again, you know this because we've talked about this a lot over the years, You know, working with and for a CEO who gets technology is a gift for a CIO. In our careers, I know this, you know this, sometimes you're bringing the whole enterprise along with you, dragging, sometimes kicking and screaming. This is a very different situation. Our CEO, President Michael Crow, is a remarkable leader in our space. a unicorn in many ways, very special. And he and I have known each other for well over 25 years. And I've followed him when he was in Columbia. He's been now 23 years at Arizona State University. And when the opportunity knocked, as I was looking to pivot to new opportunities and he and his team reached out, it was a great opportunity for me to to join Michael, and I've been doing this work here for 9 years. We measure our success as an institution, and we are the largest public university in the country with almost 194,000 students, Ed. We measure our success by who we include, not who we exclude. And we measure our success by how they succeed, not how the institution, quote unquote, succeeds by being the elite. in that kind of sort of way in which public higher education in our country has evolved. And again, there's room for all those great, great public universities in the Midwest, of which, of course, you know, I'm a graduate of Ohio State and, you know, I'm still going to be cheering for the Buckeyes, you know, this year for repeat. But, you know, they've evolved and I love the mission of ASU as committed to that public purpose. And I think that all of us as CIOs need to find mission, you know, that aligns to our personal values. And, you know, I've landed good here at ASU that way.

Oh, that's awesome. I didn't realize it was the largest institution, higher ed institution, 194,000 students. That's amazing.

Right. You know, and we were first, we were among the first to dive in during the 2008, 2009 implosion of the economy. into online learning. So one of the other things just to sort of share it, when I said that when you get a CEO who gets it, 2008, 2009, at least in my industry, folks were like heads under the table just hoping this thing would, you know, kind of the wave would somehow kind of move over us. But President Crow, along with, you know, a fantastic leader whose name is Phil Regeer, Created the, uh, created ASU Online at the very moment that there was this incredible, uh, you know, disruption in the economy. Uh, and again, as technology people, we know that is a mark of great leadership when you're able to pivot at that exact moment when everyone else is figuring out how to just survive, you're figuring out actually how to pivot to what comes next. And again, uh, Michael Crow and Phil Regeer are fabulous. visionaries, and more importantly, in many ways, visionaries who know how to actually make it happen.

Yeah, I love that. And I could definitely see that. I think my only claim to fame, Lev, and I hope it's ASU, otherwise I'll have to delete this whole segment, but I remember doing Ironman in Tempe. Isn't ASU part of the campus along the river there?

It is. It is indeed. Keep this in your podcast here, Ed. Yes, Ironman. And I know that, you know, you've been an inspiration to many, many of us, not only because of your Ironman, Because of the circumstances and your Ironman work. So, you know, you are a remarkable human and inspiration to us. And yes, you run literally right across the campus. Now, the Tempe campus is one of our campuses, but the Metro Phoenix area is the 5th largest metro area in the entire country. And as a result, you would've had to have traveled more than 50 miles From the West Valley campus, which is near Glendale, which is, you know, where our professional football team plays. This year, not so good. Next year, like we Browns fans say, next year is our year here as well. All the way out to the east side, which is actually on the redevelopment of a military base, which we call our Polytechnic campus. out in Mesa. And so, and we have a downtown campus as well. So that is sort of the body of the on-campus community here. And in that downtown campus, we actually have our professional programs, including several of our health-related professional programs. We have a College of Health Solutions, we have a nursing school, and we're just announced— we just announced this year 2 new schools under the ASU Health Initiative, one that is UniqueEd, which is a school of medicine that will be admitting its first class this upcoming fall, in which every doc will also get an engineering degree. And the second school, which I'm happy to go into, but the second school is a school of public health technology. I mean, you just gotta love, as a technology guy, you just gotta love the fact that as we design what healthcare needs in the future, we're saying, yeah, I mean, we need a lot of traditional docs to be sure, but the doctors who can innovate in the AI economy of the future, devices, software, I mean, this is going to be hugely important. And also obviously health, you know, public health, not just public health in the traditional sense, but public health that's focused in on how to leverage technology. Again, great opportunity for a technology guy like me.

Well, Lev, your team's probably going to hate me, but I'm going to be reaching out afterwards because I think we need to do an entire episode on that whole concept of the engineering and tech— engineering, tech, and medicine. Because you're right, the future healthcare providers are going to need to know how to prompt AI. They're going to need to know how all that works because that's the future of medicine. I'm convinced of that.

Yeah, and let's do that. And I don't know if you do threesomes or foursomes here. But the deans, I mean, we've recruited just remarkable talent. And, you know, we've recruited out of Cornell, you know, our Dean of Public Health Technologies, Joe T., is, you know, he's an AI data guy. He's fantastic. And, you know, we just, we were lucky. We stole out of the NIH, you know, one of the great data analysts and data scientists, Holly, is, she's fantastic. And she's leading this, you know, again, medical school with an embedded engineering program. Not so much jointly, but fused with the largest engineering school in the country. We have 32,000 engineering students at ASU, which is like 3x the size of all of Case Western Reserve University. Everybody included is just in our engineering program, all taking on some of the most important issues of the day, which include our health outcomes, especially, to be honest with you, our health outcomes here in the Southwest, in Arizona. For which, you know, we really have a responsibility as, you know, again, a mission-driven institution.

Yeah, I'm inviting myself out, but if you do invite me, if I'm able to come out, I want to be in that car. Is that your podcast where you're in a Waymo?

That's right. Yeah. In fact, let's do that. You come out for your Ironman. We will do a great carpool convo, we call it. Your viewers and listeners could see we've done 3 seasons, 4 seasons now. We're just about to craft the 5th season. In fact, we're taking it somewhat on the road. I know you're based in Dallas, but we're going to do some production in Austin because they have Waymos. We're going to do that coming up. We're going to do that in San Francisco as well. And this is a chance for me to get technology innovators, thought leaders, to talk about the future at the intersection of technology and learning. And we'd love to have you in that program, and I'll look forward to that.

Yeah, that's awesome. So let's talk about— yeah, this is amazing. My head's just kind of exploding. Let me ask you this question because, again, I've always seen you and you've already explained how this has been your whole life mission focus and your whole trajectory. How do you stay How do you stay connected and understand all the tech innovation that's happening and able to grasp it and then, you know, lead with it?

Well, I gave you one of my secrets, which is that I try to hire personal coaches who are first-year students. And at ASU, with such a great large student body, right now I'm super lucky. We have about 350 students who work for us in the enterprise technology organization. What a great privilege to have these Again, smart students who don't even know what the answer of it can't be done means. Like, that doesn't compute, doesn't translate. And so, we're constantly learning that way directly from students. I also, again, being at an institution with such interesting interdisciplinary research, I'm always talking to faculty members and visiting their labs. Again, we have great partnerships with companies like AWS. They hire Our students now, while we actually have a, you know, what we call an AI Cloud Innovation Center, and the premise is like, we're going to create solutions together that are going to be open source and available for anyone out there to take. They're not higher education specific at all. In fact, several of them are public purposes serving the needs for cities, whether that is on transportation issues or on water management and things of that sort. They're developed by our students who they hire. And actually then they also bring on their own PMs and machine learning specialists and the like. So those are some of the ways. And then as you know, and my team unfortunately knows too well, like I read, I write, I'm always giving them things to read and encouraging them to write and to find out more. And to, you know, and to open up the, you know, basically our biggest job as CIOs, I think, is to open the aperture of the teams that we get a chance to work with. And that, you know, because it's all about the people. I mean, it's all about our people. And the biggest challenges we face as professionals is actually finding ways of inspiring our own teams. And in doing that, trying to open up the aperture so that they find themselves curious and inquisitive and wanting to Uh, be of service to the mission of the organizations we work with.

Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Where or what do you do, Lev, when you feel a little bit drained, maybe your creativity drained, or, you know, you're so, you're doing so much, you've got a great family. And because we've been Facebook friends for a long time as well, so I get to see that part. And, you know, what, where, where do you go? Is there a place that you go, whether it's internal, external? What, what do you do, Lev? Just fill up.

I do have a, I do have a Zen experience. It's not necessarily what folks would experience, especially you, Ed, because I know, I know a little bit about what you do to remain grounded and centered. I love to cook. And so I'm a, I'm an amateur wannabe chef. I was a sous chef in another life. And I love to get lost in it because it is total focus of things outside. Uh, of the, of the tyranny of the urgent that we deal with. I also love to travel and I do my level best. Uh, my wife is incredibly forgiving, but I, we, when we do travel, I try my very best not to be online all the time. Um, I, I used to be able to get off the grid. Uh, I now work, as I say, for, uh, you know, a unicorn of a president who doesn't actually understand what that means because that's not how he lives. And so, you know, we do definitely live with a bit of a digital leash on that. But for me, travel, you know, going to markets, poking around in the spice markets that are available, learning, trying. I love to, when we do travel, to go to cooking schools and have a chance to, again, combine that, you know, travel and food, which are certainly part of my My way of staying grounded.

Lem, I was just wondering why I haven't had you on Digital Voices sooner and why I haven't like stayed even more connected with you than I have. You're an amazing leader, but more importantly, an amazing human. We talked quite a bit about when we first met, we talked about jazz a little bit, you know, leading by example, being a player-coach model in terms of some of your philosophies. We talked about your life growing up and Canadian, but doing fieldwork in Africa and India and how that informed you and being part of academic family and then how you got into into tech and then how this pivotal moment with your daughter sabbatical in 1993 really changed things and grounded you for ASU for the future. Then we talk a lot about higher ed and all the different cool things that you're doing. There's so much more. We're just running out of time. So much more I want to unpack and get into, but like I said, we're definitely going to talk again. And then we talk a little bit about leadership, but what you do to unplug, which is really important. What did I miss or anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

Well, again, thanks, Ed, for the opportunity just to have a conversation with you. I have to say that I relished those opportunities back when we were working together in Cleveland. And again, if I have the last word, it's just really how important relationships are, the human relationships are, our networks. You know, as I say, you know, our net worth is really our network. It's the network of humans, technology leaders, people we try to hopefully support and launch on their careers going forward. I think that's our role and responsibility, and it's, it's really great for me to reconnect with you, Ed. Thanks for having me on.

Lev Gonik, thank you.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection, and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify Podcasts so you don't miss an episode.