As envisioned by UB 2020, the university’s long-term strategic plan, the school is a key player in an effort to build a new Academic Health Center in downtown Buffalo.

Under this plan, the medical school and the university’s four other health sciences schools will relocate to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC) close to key hospital and research affiliates.

As part of Phase 1 of the plan, the university is partnering with Kaleida Health System to construct the Global Vascular Institute and Clinical Translational Research Center, the centerpiece of a campus where world-class medical treatments, education and research will take place.

Under Phase 2, the medical school will move to the BNMC, followed by the School of Nursing and UB’s three other health sciences schools (dentistry, public health and health professions, and pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences).

Each of the schools will be within walking distance of UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Hauptman Woodward Medical Research Institute and our hospital partners, as well as other UB biomedical facilities.

This is an exciting time in our school’s history as we plan for a future that builds upon its proud legacy of teaching, patient care and scientific discovery.

The plan has identified eight cross-disciplinary areas of strength indigenous to UB.

Each strength serves as an infrastructure for pulling together researchers from across the university to work cooperatively in pursuit of solutions to wide-ranging problems through a nontraditional collaborative approach.

Our school is involved in five of the strengths: 

• Molecular Recognition in Biological Systems and Bioinformatics
  
• Health and Wellness Across the Lifespan
• Integrated Nanostructured Systems
• Extreme Events: Mitigation and Response
• Civic Engagement and Public Policy

Efforts to develop these strengths involve strategic faculty recruitment and the planning of facilities to support their research and teaching activities. This includes our partnering with Kaleida Health to build a $291 million combined facility on our Downtown Campus, set to be completed in fall 2011.

The new institute and center will bring together physicians and researchers in a collaborative effort to deliver state-of-the-art clinical care, produce major breakthroughs on the causes and treatment of vascular disease and spin-off new biotechnology businesses.