College of Health Sciences Dean Michael Ciolfi has lived many lives and has the accomplishments (and the degrees) to show for it. His wide, interesting array of experiences makes him a unique and formidable leader in healthcare education. He has been an administrator, a professor, and a small business owner. He competed in hockey, football, soccer, wrestling, rowing, track, cross country skiing, and badminton throughout high school and college. He raced bikes on short track Velodromes around North America for the Canadian National Cycling Team; earned multiple degrees in physical education, nutrition, chiropractic, and business, including doctorates in Chiropractic and Business Administration; and he even has a degree from the Canadian Land Forces Military Command and Staff College.
“[Ciolfi] has so many skills that it is easy to forget he is a chiropractor by trade,” says Provost Manyul Im. “His background in business has certainly helped him administer the College of Health Sciences. He brings a lot to the table here at UB.”
After earning degrees in healthcare and business, Ciolfi joined the Canadian Armed Forces as a light infantry officer at the unusually late age of 30. “I thought I could contribute,” he says, elaborating, “It was about being able to serve to free people who were oppressed.” He became a captain and qualified to lieutenant colonel, and as company commander had leadership responsibilities for a 120-140-man unit. Ciolfi trained officers, including non-commissioned officers and soldiers, and organized personnel and materials. As a combat officer, he learned discipline, logistics, operations, and planning. From those experiences, he developed the flexibility and adaptability required to address challenging situations as they develop and change. These skills have lent well to Ciolfi’s role as a program leader — both in the military and, eventually, in higher education.
“In combat situations, as soon as the enemy fires the first shot, there goes your plan,” Ciolfi explains. “You better be ready to adapt and be flexible in a moment — you have to make a decision on the spot.”
During the twelve years he served as an active-duty reserve officer, Ciolfi continued working as a chiropractor in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Then, after twelve years of service, he left the army and moved to Florida, planning to work full-time as a practicing chiropractor at an integrated chiropractic and medical clinic. Although he applied to the nearby Palmer School of Chiropractic as a clinician, he was quickly promoted to assistant director. That was how Michael Ciolfi began his full-time career in higher education.
“I was basically running the clinic for three years and then moved back to Canada to take a position at Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College (CMCC) as Director of Education and chair of the Chiropractic Principles and Practice department,” Ciolfi recalls.
He worked at CMCC for seven years, until the former Dean of University of Bridgeport’s College of Chiropractic arrived at CMCC as a new faculty member. Ciolfi realized that the dean position at UB must be open, and seeing an opportunity to step up as a leader in chiropractic education, he applied. When he got the job, he and the former dean had a good laugh about the fact that they had switched universities.
Ciolfi arrived at UB in 2015 as the dean of the College of Chiropractic, and when it was consolidated into the College of Health Sciences, he became the associate dean and then dean, a position he has held since 2020. “He has a very collaborative approach,” says Janice Faye, the clinical services and operations administrator in the Health Sciences Center. “I don’t feel that I work ‘for’ him, rather, I work with him.”
That collaborative approach to teamwork mirrors the way that Ciolfi believes healthcare is changing. “In the time since I went to school, the healthcare world has changed from being very practitioner-focused and patient-passive,” says Ciolfi. “In my opinion, it is changing now to evidence-based and patient-focused, where the patient needs to become more active and collaborative with their healthcare practitioners. You can’t just wait until your car is broken to get it fixed. You have to do maintenance all the time, and your body is very similar, right?”
Ciolfi practices what he preaches, maintaining his own health through a variety of athletic pursuits. You might catch a glimpse of him swimming at the Wheeler Recreation Center on campus or running along Seaside Park. But for Ciolfi, making a positive impact isn’t only about empowering patients to lead healthier lives — he points to the high costs of healthcare as an issue modern practitioners must be prepared to address. “It’s not sustainable and no one is going to be able to afford healthcare if skyrocketing costs continue,” he says. “So, the way we organize education has to be more evidence-based and patient-centered to take into consideration the needs and wants of the patient and the needs and wants of the community as a whole.”
This public health mission is at the heart of Dean Ciolfi’s practice at University of Bridgeport. He has reworked the College of Health Sciences’ strategic plan and established a set of values that the staff and faculty work from. He collected data from accreditation visits, tracked outcomes, and worked on increasing enrollment in selected programs. “We always need to use data to make decisions about how to change the curriculum and clinic experiences,” he says. “That’s especially important for the health sciences. Are the graduates meeting outcome competencies? We triangulate student exit interviews, career information, alumni surveys, and licensure exam scores to make informed programmatic decisions.”
It’s a dean’s job to make those tough decisions and to coordinate between programs and other stakeholders. Luckily, Ciolfi has the skills — learned through a background of diverse academic pursuits and a broad range of professional experiences — in collaboration, strategic planning, and on-the-spot decision making to make sure the students in UB’s College of Health Sciences have all the necessary tools to succeed.
“I like strategic planning,” says Ciolfi. “I like the entire planning process to involve and motivate my team to get things done.”