UB has officially purchased the first of three parcels of land at 960 Washington St., in its effort to move the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences downtown.
The purchase is part of the $375 million construction of the medical campus, which is in conjunction with President Satish Tripathi's vision of UB 2020 - a comprehensive plan to achieve "enduring prominence" for UB's future. UB needs to update its 60-year-old medical buildings, which hold classrooms "used for medical education in 1950," according Michael Cain, dean of the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.
"In moving the medical school downtown, where it will be aligned with local hospitals and other key life sciences partners, UB is staying true to our roots in more ways than one," Tripathi said in a press release. "Building healthier communities has always been a vital focus of our academic vision ... The acquisition of this land is a timely and important step as we move forward with this critical next phase of UB 2020."
With the first parcel purchase, UB has begun laying out the plans for the new campus, which is currently slated to open in Aug. 2016. UB has selected an architecture firm, Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK), to head the project.
The first step HOK took was creating a plan that focused on the practicality of the layout of the campus. They had to make sure certain buildings, which housed similar programs, were adjacent.
The next step is the design phase, which will cover everything from the style of the buildings down to the location of electrical outlets.
UB is working to purchase the other two parcels needed to complete the medical campus. The final legal papers are currently being executed.
New York State gave UB a $35 million grant to start the plans for the medical campus and allowed UB to borrow $215 million at a low interest rate, according to Provost Charles Zukoski. The school of medicine is taking $50 million from its reserves to put toward the project. They also have money they were going to put toward renovating the existing school and are putting it toward the new campus. The rest will be raised from capital fundraising campaigns. They need to raise $375 million total.
Cain said the goal for the project is to pay cash for 45 percent of the cost. The rest will be paid by New York State bonds, which are essentially a mortgage.
He said creating a new medical campus is necessary in order to improve the School of Medicine.
"We are in a school that is now over 60 years old and it shows," Cain said. "[Renovating] the school and making it a 21st-century school, the cost to do that is much more higher than building new construction."
Cain said the current classrooms are based on models used in the 1950s. Building a new campus will be cheaper than updating the old classrooms to what is expected in an accredited medical school, he said.
Having one unified campus for School of Medicine will help bring structure to the program, according to Cain.
He also said currently first- and second-year medical students are primarily on South Campus while third- and fourth-year medical students are "everywhere but South Campus."
The new campus will also bring students and facilities closer to major medical centers in Western New York.
"We are [currently] six miles in the wrong location," Cain said. "Almost every medical school in the country is on a campus with its major teaching hospitals. Although we have teaching hospitals in many sites around Buffalo, the largest number of those sites are in fact on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus."
By moving the campus closer to these medical centers, physicians and physician scientists on the faculty will be able to have their research labs near the hospitals where they primarily work, instead of having to drive long distances to get from work and school.
Cain is excited to embark on this project and he believes the new campus could be the turning point of medical studies for the university.
"This is something that will transform the School of Medicine and will help transform health care delivery in Western New York," Cain said.
Construction of the downtown medical buildings is expected to be complete in May 2016, and the campus will officially open that August.
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