As a medical student, Christie Seibert, MD, looked past the high-tech specialists and toward the teachers.

“The teachers, to me, ruled the roost,” she said. “It looked like so much fun to help people see the light bulb go off.”

That pull shaped a 31-year career at the School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health. Seibert stepped down as associate dean for medical student education and services at the end of August after nearly 20 years in the dean’s office, the longest tenure of anyone in leadership there. She continues as a professor of medicine, teaching and caring for patients.

An unexpected path

No one in Seibert’s family practiced medicine. Her parents immigrated from Czechoslovakia, and the family rarely saw doctors.

“In high school, I was smart and I was a people person, and someone suggested I should be a doctor,” she said. “I thought, ‘That sounds good.’”

She joined the UW–Madison faculty in academic internal medicine in 1995. Within a year, she helped design a four-semester doctoring course that taught students how to deliver bad news, conduct a patient-centered exam, draw out a patient’s story and work through ethical questions.

“It was the art of doctoring rather than the science,” she said. “That was pretty novel at the time.”

She directed the course for a decade before she joined the dean’s office in 2007.

The guide on the side

Seibert has taught on inpatient wards, in clerkship small groups and in elective courses, reaching thousands of learners. Shobhi Chheda, MD, associate dean for medical education, called her “a consummate teacher” who asks not only what learners need to learn, but how they should learn it.

Seibert adopted team-based learning early. She then helped faculty design sessions and co-facilitated with them until they could lead on their own.

“The whole point of team-based learning is that the group is always smarter than the individual,” said Amy Stickford-Becker, director of curriculum and instruction. “Christie really embodies that.”

Stickford-Becker said Seibert perfected the role of “guide on the side” rather than “sage on the stage,” both in the classroom and in encouraging others to lead complex projects.

A legacy of transformation

Seibert pushed for innovation in and out of the classroom. In the years before the school became the School of Medicine and Public Health in 2005, she championed efforts to bring public health into the MD program and bridge the biomedical and population health sciences.

She also led the design of the ForWard Curriculum, which integrates basic and clinical sciences, public health and other threads into thematic blocks — an approach Stickford-Becker said “is still innovative a decade later.”

Stickford-Becker said she expects Seibert’s most lasting mark to be “the high bar Christie set for what good teaching looks like at SMPH.”

Seibert’s honors include the UW–Madison Chancellor’s Hilldale Award for Excellence in Teaching and the SMPH Dean’s Teaching Award.

Playing the long game

When Seibert joined the dean’s office around age 40, she said, many senior faculty members taught the same way they had for decades and resisted her ideas at first. So she learned to plant seeds of ideas and inspiration and give them time to grow. It worked.

“Who gets the credit? Who cares? It’s about the product at the end,” she said. “You have to play the long game. It’s about lifting people up, giving them confidence and helping them experience the joy in a job well done.”

Chheda said that patient style made Seibert “one of the kindest leaders I have ever known.”

Elizabeth Tuschen, administrator for medical student education and services, worked with Seibert for 27 years — through two curriculum transformations, three reaccreditation reviews, three deans and a pandemic.

“She was an outstanding mentor and exemplar leader who helped me grow both professionally and personally,” Tuschen said. “We have shared both laughter and tears (mostly laughter) working together.”

Stories at the heart of medicine

Seibert now spends more time in clinic and has added urgent care and home visits for homebound patients. She teaches narrative medicine, and this fall she launched a collective on humanities and storytelling in medicine.

“Physicians hear stories all day, and we tell stories,” she said. “Other storytelling helps us process what happened: how that patient affects you, who you are as a healer.”

Colleagues have seen that skill at work. Stickford-Becker recalled a ForWard Curriculum presentation that Seibert opened with a story about a cocoon her children tried to hatch.

“It was so relatable and engaging, putting everyone at ease despite the challenging topic,” she said.

Family ties

Seibert and her husband, Larry, a pharmacist, raised two daughters in Madison. Larry stayed home with the girls, who loved to practice medicine on him.

“Mommy, we fixed Daddy,” they would announce.

Maggie Seibert Caldwell chose accounting and lives in Los Angeles with her twin daughters, Ruth and Josephine. Her sister, Grace Seibert, never wavered from medicine. The family keeps a drawing Grace made as a preschooler of herself with a stethoscope, labeled “Dokter.” She graduated from SMPH in 2024 and is now a third-year obstetrics and gynecology resident in Chicago.

A lifelong friend

For many colleagues, Seibert’s influence reaches beyond the dean’s office.

“Not only would my career not be as fruitful as it has been, but I can also honestly say that my life wouldn’t be as meaningful as it is without Christie being a part of it,” Chheda said.

Tuschen agreed.

“Christie may not be my boss anymore, but she remains a lifelong friend,” she said.