When Stuart Klein’s neighbors ask what he does for a living, he tells them he’s opening a new cancer center for the University of Florida.
“If I get more clinical or technical than that, I start getting blank stares,” he said. “Even my mother doesn’t have a clue what I do!”
Klein, the director of UF’s $110 million Florida Proton Therapy Institute, which is slated to open this summer, admits that he, too, didn’t have a clue about proton therapy when he first heard about it. It was 1993 and Klein had been administrator of radiation oncology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1990.
“At Penn we recruited a physician who originally was supposed to head up the clinical side of the super collider project at the University of Southwest Texas, but their funding was pulled, so he joined our faculty,” Klein said.
As a result of the new physician on board, a company that wanted to get involved in proton therapy contacted Penn. Klein said it wasn’t until he toured Loma Linda University’s proton therapy center in 1994 that he really understood the technique.
“It was phenomenal,” he said. “Proton therapy is at a whole different level,” he said. “I had a strong background in radiation therapy in general. So proton therapy was the next logical area I became involved in.”
For the next 11 years Klein worked on bringing proton therapy to Penn. He visited proton therapy centers all over the world – from Cape Town, South Africa, to Japan – and attended international meetings to learn more about the technique. He served as Penn’s representative to the Proton Consortium, a group of institutions interested in or actually doing proton therapy.
Heading up a proton therapy facility became his goal. When he heard UF was considering one, he jumped at the opportunity.
“Nancy Mendenhall, UF’s chair of radiation oncology, was very good friends with my boss at Penn and communicated regularly with him and other vice chairs in the department – remember, the community of proton therapy centers worldwide is very small,” Klein said. “I actually met her at a proton conference in England two or three years ago and became very interested in UF’s plans then.”
From the start, Klein’s been impressed with the commitment of UF’s project leaders, C. Craig Tisher, M.D., and Mendenhall.
“I know from a firsthand basis how difficult it is to pull these projects off, and clearly Dr. Tisher and Dr. Mendenhall have had the vision, despite all the stumbling blocks and odds against them, to pull it off,” he said. “There are literally only a handful of places that have done that, so UF is one of the exceptions and not the rule.”
Klein says such a complex project requires big-picture leaders to champion the cause from an institutional standpoint.
“You need someone on Dr. Tisher’s level to spearhead this type of project,” he said. “At Penn our department was continually pushing this forward, but there was nobody at a higher, institutional level to promote it, and that’s why it basically never happened.”
When offered the FPTI directorship, Klein says no hard sell was needed. UF’s foresight and leadership brought him here. “This is something that I’ve been trying to do for years at Penn, and now I have the opportunity to do it and work with the most respected leaders in the field.”
As director, Klein said his workday activities span the entire spectrum.
“Within a one-day period I could be working on anything from marketing to putting together a contract on housekeeping services to dealing with managed-care issues and payers, and I really enjoy that variety,” he said. “For example, I was putting together a description for a social worker this morning, going over to the building to do a tour, having pictures taken and then dealing with some personnel issues, so it really does go all over the place, but it’s fun.”
Personally, the move has been challenging. Klein left Penn in last January and started at UF Feb. 7. Because of work and school commitments, his family – wife Catherine, daughters, Hannah, 15, and Haley, 13, and son, David – couldn’t move to Jacksonville until July. Until then Klein had a three-city commute each week, working three days in Gainesville, two days in Jacksonville and traveling home to Philadelphia every weekend to be with his family.
Slowly everyone’s starting to settle in.
“It’s still challenging to explain to my kids what I do,” said Klein. “My oldest daughter has really caught on now, but when I try to explain what I do to the other two I get an ‘uh, okay’ and the blank stare.”