Brashear: Jacobs School is Rooted, Resilient and Growing

By Dirk Hoffman

“The Jacobs School is the founding school of the University at Buffalo, having been established in 1846 and UB grew up around it,” said Brashear, UB’s vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School.

“UB and the medical school have strong roots, and we are ready for anything,” she said. “We have seen that this year, and we have remained resilient and true to our core mission.”

Integral to that core mission is contributing to the health and the economic development of Western New York.

“The core areas are pillars that we knit together to have an impact,” Brashear said. “We are going to talk about education, research and clinical care, and how they are all grounded in community engagement, which is so important to our mission, our values and our future.”

Brashear noted that one of the latest Jacobs School highlights is a strengthening of its partnership with the Erie County Medical Center (ECMC) through the state’s Health Care Safety Net Transformation Program.

The two entities are at the center of a major investment announced by New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul to expand primary care access on Buffalo’s East side, support physician recruitment and retention, and develop a Community Health Care Pavilion and Learning Center at ECMC’s Grider Street campus.

“We built a proposal together with ECMC and we are very excited about this. Thank you to ECMC for inviting us to work with you on this groundbreaking proposal,” Brashear said.

“It is an era of collaboration and innovation, and it is all grounded in laying the foundation for transforming the health of Western New York,” she added.

Brashear noted the faculty at the Jacobs School continues to grow.

“During the last three years, we have hired 199 new faculty. We now have almost 1,000 faculty members at the Jacobs School,” she said.

Brashear also noted that over 650 physicians are part of UBMD Physicians’ Group, the medical school’s clinical practice plan.

“They are part of UB and part of our school, and they, along with our basic science faculty, teach our medical students and our 835 residents,” Brashear said. “And they are part of the fabric of our community.”

Brashear also talked about the Jacobs School’s efforts to create pathways for students to see themselves as future researchers and health care providers.

“Community outreach is one of our core four pillars and is tremendously important to what we do to change the health care of our community,” she said. “We have been going to the schools in the community through outreach in STEM education.”

Undergraduate enrollment numbers continue to climb at the Jacobs School, with 1,310 students enrolled this year, the highest amount ever.

The Jacobs School also has the largest graduate student cohort in the past decade — 284 master’s and doctoral students.

“We work very closely with Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center — our graduate and medical students are in those laboratories, so we are very appreciative for the partnership with Roswell,” Brashear said. “Students get exposure to laboratories where they want to find the next great cure for cancer and that is something that really drives students to want to come to UB.”

In terms of medical education, there has been a 7.5 percent increase in applicants year over year, compared to a national average of a 3 percent increase, Brashear noted. The MD-PhD Program is also expanding, increasing its slots from four to seven.

“Part of what is driving that interest is the new Well Beyond curriculum that really integrates the community early on,” she said. “Medical students must do 18 hours during their first year with a nonprofit — an incredible opportunity to get first-hand experience working in a shelter, a mission or a food bank. The new curriculum also gets students into the clinics sooner.”

Brashear also spoke about the pathways of research, noting nine out of 13 of UB’s largest proposals of more than $1 million came from the Jacobs School, and 11 of the 13 came from health sciences schools.

In fiscal year 2025, the Jacobs School accounted for more than 37 percent ($38.7 million) of UB’s research award. When combined with the other health sciences schools, that figure exceeds more than half of all UB’s research awards, she noted.

Research award funding at the Jacobs School rose by over 12 percent in fiscal year 2025, with 52 awards being designated for clinical trials.

The Jacobs School consistently represents 30 percent or greater of UB’s annual research expenditures. Overall, Jacobs School growth in the last five years is 42 percent.

“We want this to continue and that it why we focus on the proposals and the awards,” Brashear said.

Those faculty members who are conducting high-impact research want to disseminate it and Jacobs School faculty had papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and The Lancet, among others, in the past year.

“These are incredibly important journals,” Brashear said. “Our faculty are out there telling the story about UB, bringing their work to the larger community and having an impact worldwide.”

Training grants are a marker of a high intensity research institution, Brashear said, noting “they are hard to put together and hard to get funded.”

She said she wanted to recognize the team behind the school’s new National Institutes of Health T32 training grant — faculty members Christine E. Schaner Tooley, PhD; and Melissa R. McCartney, PhD.

The grant’s purpose is to provide strong foundational scientific training in cellular, biochemical and molecular sciences, coupled with innovative career development training.

“This grant will help train the next generation,” Brashear said. “That is another thing about pathways. We need to train our successors, and this is one of the ways we do that.”

“We are also continuing to advance research and innovation, and I want to give a shoutout to a couple of the innovators,” Brashear said, naming faculty members Ram Samudrala, PhD; Zackary M. Falls, PhD; and Thomas D. Grant, PhD.

She explained that Samudrala and Falls have developed the CANDO platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze drug-protein interaction at scale, helping to find which drugs may be appropriate to treat a disease.

Brashear noted that Grant has become UB’s top user of Empire AI, the largest academic computing system in the country.

In the past two months, Grant, a faculty member in the Department of Structural Biology, has already presented his work to both the SUNY chancellor and to the governor.

“His research has an opportunity to really speed up drug development and create treatments for the diseases we have yet to find drugs for,” Brashear said.

With the retirement of Timothy F. Murphy, MD, several people have been appointed to fill his various roles at the Jacobs School and UB, Brashear said.

Sanjay Sethi, MD, SUNY Distinguished Professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, has been appointed senior associate dean for clinical and translational research and director director of UB’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI).  Daniel Woo, MD, professor and Irvin and Rosemary Smith Endowed Chair of neurology, joins Sethi as associate director of the CTSI.

Murphy also founded UB’s Community Health Equity Research Institute, and Heather M. Gardiner, PhD ’06, has joined it as the inaugural Carl V. Granger Endowed Chair in Health Equity.

“Dr. Gardiner has already hit the ground running. She is from Buffalo, she trained at our School of Public Health and Health Professions, and she is really inspired to come here and make a difference,” Brashear said.

Brashear also said that while Murphy has officially retired and has stepped away to spend more time with his family, he will still be involved in future UB efforts.

“We are really grateful for all of Tim Murphy’s hard work,” she said. “He has set the Jacobs School and UB on a different trajectory, and we will continue that growth.”

Brashear stressed there is a primary care shortage in New York State and throughout the country.

“There are individuals who do not have access to primary care physicians,” she said, noting there are challenges in that New York State ranks in the top 10 in need, with 133 federally designated medically underserved areas.

“We need to do more about making sure our patients in our communities have access to a primary care doctor.”

To that end, Brashear announced the Buffalo Primary Care Initiative, a new program to transform the health of Buffalo residents and reduce health care disparities by putting more primary care physicians on Buffalo’s East and West sides.

The fundraising effort will endow four full-tuition scholarships each year for three years, with a goal of funding 12 three-year primary care scholarships.

The proposed program is designed for students who are committed to pursuing a career in a primary care field — family medicine, internal medicine or pediatrics — and who pledge to stay and practice in primary care in Buffalo for at least five years after their residency.

The three-year MD degree program, anticipated to open for applications in spring 2026, requires approval from the New York State Education Department. Upon approval, students are anticipated to start the three-year MD track in summer 2026.

Brashear also announced the official launch dates for Epic, the community-wide electronic medical record (EMR) system.

Both UBMD and ECMC will go live with the system in October 2026, preceded by Kaleida Health’s launch in May 2026.

“We are deeply committed to a community-wide EMR, and I’m grateful to both ECMC and Kaleida Health for leading the way,” Brashear said. “Their early adoption of Epic reflects a shared vision for coordinated patient-centered care across Western New York. This system will not only improve access and continuity for patients but also enhance learning for our students and residents. It’s a game-changer.”

Lastly, Brashear also announced the launch of a new podcast that was developed at the Jacobs School.

“Everyone knows I really want to get the word out about what is going on in the Jacobs School, so we have developed the UB Medicine Podcast,” she said.

The first episode, featuring interviews with Murphy and Gardiner launched Oct. 22, and new episodes will be released on the first and third Wednesdays of every month.

“Our goal is to highlight not just research, but our educational programs and community engagement to tell the stories of what’s happening at the Jacobs School.”

The address took place Oct. 21 in the Ronald I. Dozoretz, MD ’62 Auditorium at the Jacobs School building.