Biography

Dr. German was appointed Founding Dean of the University of Central Florida College of Medicine in December 2006. She also serves as UCF’s Vice President for Health Affairs, leading an emerging UCF Academic Health Sciences Center that includes the Colleges of Health Professions and Sciences, Medicine and Nursing and Student Health Services.

Under Dr. German’s leadership, the College of Medicine has become the academic foundation of the emerging Medical City at Lake Nona, five minutes from one of the world’s most visited airports. During her tenure, she:

• Achieved full accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education
• Raised funds to provide full four-year scholarships for the entire charter class, the first such gift in U.S. medical school history
• Built a team of over 900 faculty and staff
• Appointed over 2,000 volunteer and affiliated faculty
• Oversaw construction of 375,000 square feet of medical school space in the Health Sciences Campus at Lake Nona
• Created a medical school that is gaining a national reputation for its innovation and pioneering spirit and produces students who score in the top quartile nationally on all levels of performance and have a match placement rate significantly higher than the national average
• Opened UCF Lake Nona Hospital, a partnership academic hospital with HCA Healthcare,  adjacent to the medical school
• Opened UCF Lake Nona Cancer Center, which provides the community with a new era of cancer research and treatment under the same roof
• Led creation of one of the fastest-growing graduate medical education programs in Florida to address the physician shortage
• Opened two locations of UCF Health, a multispecialty clinical practice of faculty physicians what cares for patients across the Orlando community

Deborah German earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry at Boston University and gained her M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School.

She was a Resident in Medicine at the University of Rochester in New York and after residency became a Fellow in Rheumatic and Genetic Diseases at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She was appointed to the faculty at Duke University Medical School and worked in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, studying adenosine metabolism.

She was also Director of the Duke Gout Clinics and Associate Dean of Medical Education while maintaining her own private practice of Internal Medicine and Rheumatology.

In 1988, Dr. German joined Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, as Associate Dean for Students and later Senior Associate Dean of Medical Education. She was also the National Chair for the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Group on Student Affairs.

While in Nashville, Dr. German served on the Board of Trustees of the Tennessee Medical Association. She also chaired the Tennessee Board of Directors for the Arthritis Foundation.

After 13 years at Vanderbilt, Dr. German next served as President and Chief Executive Officer at Saint Thomas Hospital in Nashville. She was also Senior Vice President and Chief Academic Officer for Saint Thomas Health Services. Dr. German led a successful hospital turnaround and initiated service excellence and quality programs at the hospital that received national recognition. Throughout this time she continued to practice medicine.

In 2005, Dr. German spent a year at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C. as a Petersdorf Scholar in Residence. She studied the leadership of academic health centers framed in the concepts of chaos theory and complex adaptive system science.

Dr. German has received numerous awards for leadership, community service and teaching, including the Local Legend of Medicine in the National Library of Medicine, the American Medical Women’s Association Presidential Award, the Renaissance Woman in Medicine Award and the AAMC Women in Medicine Leadership Development Award. Most recently she was awarded the University of Rochester’s Hutchison Medal, the university’s highest recognition of personal achievement by an alumnus. She is a secretarial appointee to the National Academics Affiliations Council for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, chairs the President’s Council on Learning Health System for the Association of Academic Health Centers and also on the association’s board of directors.

In Florida, Dr. German was awarded both the 2008 Business Executive of the Year and 2008 Businesswoman of the Year by co-sponsors Orlando Business Journal and Orlando Health. In addition, Dr. German was recognized by the Orlando Sentinel’s Editorial Board as 2008 Central Floridian of the Year.

Dr. German is the mother of two daughters and has one grandson.