Message from the Dean

A Season of Change . . . Coming Together

This is a unique moment for our campus and our university.  With a solid foundation as a top 10 percent primary care teaching medical school for many years, we have moved over the last decade to the highest echelon of research universities as demonstrated by the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Prize for  Medicine to Dr. Craig Mello, for discoveries made right here on the Worcester campus. 

We now have the commitment to take those discoveries and others like them to the bedside, translating them into treatments for patients with diseases that would otherwise be untreatable. Manifestations of this commitment include the Governor’s Life Sciences Initiative, through which we will seek to advance the science and technology of Dr. Mello’s discovery, RNAi, as well as stem cell therapy and gene therapy for the benefit of our patients and those around the Commonwealth. We anticipate that this will ultimately take the form of a new research building, to house all of these translational research initiatives and core facilities, such as the Massachusetts Stem Cell Bank. 

Other key initiatives include our commitments to develop a Center for Clinical and Translational Science and a new Department of Quantitative Health Sciences.  These new elements will provide the foundation for the second phase of translation, from the clinical research setting out into our community. The recent awarding of a National Children’s Study grant to our Children’s Medical Center and the build-up of our UMass Cancer Center provide even more evidence of the comprehensive nature of this outreach into our community.

We are also in the process of building a new Advanced Center for Clinical Education and Sciences, or ACCES, which will greatly enhance the access of our community and the Central New England region to receive benefit from the cutting edge science through clinical care, clinical research and the training of Massachusetts physicians. This building will be a unique interdigitation of clinical care and research on every floor, as one example of how we are all aligning around the centers of emphasis in cardiovascular disease, cancer, musculoskeletal diseases and diabetes.

The core of what we do as a school is to train the physicians and biomedical researchers of tomorrow.  As we come together across the clinical and research missions to make our science relevant to our patients, we are also challenging our faculty to create a curriculum for our students that is more integrated between basic and clinical sciences, and more longitudinal in its approach.

In order to inform and align all of these outstanding new initiatives, we have embarked on an ambitious campus-wide strategic planning process, working jointly with UMass Memorial Healthcare as a single academic health center.  This initiative, which was initiated under Chancellor Collins’ leadership, will map the course for the next 5 years of our shared future.