Larry D. Alexander shakes his head, closes his eyes for a moment, and then smiles as he stands outside his office at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV. “No,” he says, “I never thought, never even dreamed as a boy that I would have this kind of opportunity in life.”
The assistant dean for biomedical science education at the medical school since November is also an associate professor of family and community medicine.
Alexander grew up in a large family whose patriarch, a butcher, died of a heart attack at the age of 42. His story, with apologies to Charles Dickens, reflects the worst of times, the best of times.
“I am one of six children, three boys and three girls, raised in the East End of Little Rock, Arkansas, where Black people lived. I vividly remember our small three-bedroom, one-bath single-family home – it was about the size of most modern day garages.”
In the early 1970s, his family moved to the downtown area of Little Rock. “After my father died, my mother worked in cafeterias and in manufacturing to help keep food on the table and pay the mortgage. As children, we all worked odd jobs to help out with the finances. My first job was cleaning up trash at a drive-in theater every day.”
For a while, Alexander also lived with his grandmother, who only had a third-grade education. Just as with his mother, who had an eighth-grade education, they never talked about college, or doing well in school to get a good job. “We were trying to survive.”
Still, the boy whose family qualified for all U.S. Department of Health and Human Services low-income government programs, did well in school. Math in particular. School music classes turned him into a talented percussionist. He made the honor society. Yet only because a friend decided to go to college did he apply. “I was thinking basically of working with guys to build houses. College didn’t seem possible financially.”
Learning about grants and scholarships and student loans helped make college a reality – which is, says Alexander, America at its best: helping people help themselves.
A music scholarship and working at the movie theater on weekends provided most of the resources he needed to pay for Hendrix College, a private liberal arts school in Conway, Arkansas, where his love for chemistry and biology joined mathematics as areas of keen interest.
It was also a place in the 1980s where he had to grit his teeth and take it. A science professor, whose suggestion to one of his classes was devoid of science, claimed that Blacks were genetically intellectually inferior.
“I had to let it go. I couldn’t go off,” the assistant dean and associate professor says. “I had worked hard to get a degree and didn’t want to jeopardize that.”
Shortly after graduation, he took a job as a high school biology teacher in the Little Rock Public School System. Several days a week he’d see then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who’d later become the 42nd president of the United States, jogging near his apartment on an exercise outing from the Governor’s Mansion. “We’d wave and sometimes talk about the weather and schools. He liked to talk a lot. His daughter (Chelsea) went to a public school just down the street, and he’d always be going down there. He took a real interest in how she was doing. He seemed like a real nice guy.”
When, at a summer internship for public school biology teachers, Alexander says he was approached by the head of the physiology department at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), who suggested he apply to medical school. Deciding it wouldn’t be a bad idea, he applied, and was accepted. He was doing OK there but after two years he came to the conclusion that it wasn’t for him. “Too much sickness,” he says.
But research fascinated him, and he went to Meharry College School of Graduate Studies and Research in Nashville, Tennessee, where he earned his Ph.D. in physiology. Now he’s the kind of guy who loves teaching students about, among many other things, the magnificent utilitarian workings of the human organs.
Prior to joining the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine three months ago, he taught at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso's Paul L. Foster School of Medicine; Midwestern University; the University of Michigan-Dearborn; and Meharry, where he won the top teaching award and served as associate dean for curriculum and innovation.
This spring term at UNLV, he started teaching respiratory physiology as part of the school of medicine’s MED 806 Cardiovascular, Pulmonary, and Renal Systems course. He also serves as the course director for the pulmonary block.
“We are integrating anatomy, histology, embryology, physiology, pathology, microbiology/immunology and pharmacology into two clinical themes, respiratory distress/dyspnea and cough.”
In his role as an assistant dean, Alexander already is thinking about integrating additional clinical themes into the school of medicine curriculum during the 2024 academic school year. For years, faculty-physicians and administration-researchers like Alexander have been debating how best to integrate medical school curriculums for the benefit not only of medical students, but also, of course, for the benefit of future patients.
In addition, he will be serving as facilitator for the school’s MED 821: Analytics in Medicine – Bioethics course, which is taught to first-year students in an active engagement small-group session format.
Teaching is a passion for Alexander.
“I rarely do a formal didactic lecture. My presentation is a flipped-classroom model. Students are introduced to new topics outside the classroom. So students direct their own acquisition of knowledge, rather than the instructor. It is based on the idea of changing the role of the instructor from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side.’”
“I post the lectures to Canvas (a web-based learning management system) and then the students do problem-solving during class time. To prepare, I read the textbook on the subject, making sure it coincides with my notes. Also, I compare my notes with ‘Up-to-Date,’ which offers a number of subscriptions and add-on products, allowing you to have the most up-to-date information. The subject is kept fresh, fascinating, and interesting, because more time can be spent in class on high-yield thinking skills and problem solving as students tackle difficult problems, working in groups, with the help of their peers.”
You’ll find Alexander listening to the blues, hip-hop, or R&B as he drives his black Toyota Highlander SUV – he has four children at home – to school.
Sometimes it’s Bobby “Blue” Bland or Tupac or Rihanna or The Temptations that help get him ready to share some energetic, positive intellectual substance and style with students.
“It is not that I view each meeting with students as a kind of performance, but rather as an opportunity to motivate … I celebrate victory by the students’ performance on my exam questions, as well as their exceptional performances on national exams.”
