The seven-story medical school, viewed from Main Street, features two L-shaped structures linked to create a six-story, light-filled glass atrium that includes connecting bridges and a stairway.
Yet today this plan is a reality. Construction of the new school is scheduled to begin this summer. The first students will enter the new facility in 2016, which, serendipitously, designates them the Class of 2020. The factors driving this dramatic transformation of UB’s medical school are threefold: the need to modernize medical education for the 21st century, the need to more rapidly translate basic-science discoveries into clinical care, and the need to grow the medical school and reorganize health care in our region to better serve its population and to address economic realities. “Moving the medical school downtown is an appropriate first step toward realizing our university’s vision of excellence,” says UB president Satish K. Tripathi. The move also presents alumni and friends of the school with a unique opportunity to take part in an educational initiative that is transformative both in its scope and its potential impact on generations to come. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a new school from the ground —President Satish K. Tripathi up,” says Michael E. Cain, MD, vice president for
“Moving the medical school downtown is an appropriate first step toward realizing our university’s vision of excellence.”
health sciences and dean of the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. “We are instituting change on an order of magnitude few in our generation have known. Yet this change responds to a necessity similar to what the founders of our school identified over 167 years ago when they galvanized efforts to establish a medical school in Buffalo.”
High and Main Streets Revisited Phase 1 of the $375 million plan was begun in May 2011, when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and SUNY chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher announced a $35 million grant—long in the planning—that served as a down payment for the medical school’s new home. In addition to the state grant, the new medical school will be financed by UB capital and other sources; a medical school program fee; private gifts from medical school alumni and friends, corporations and foundations; and research grants. In May 2012, following a year-long international competition, UB selected HOK—a premier U.S. architectural firm with an extensive portfolio of health sciences and academic buildings—to design the new medical school. In the months following, land was acquired for the new 520,000-square-foot building, which will sit at the southeast corner of High and Main streets. This locates the school at the center of the region’s emerging biosciences corridor and returns it to High Street, where it formerly resided for 60 years before moving to its current location on UB’s South Campus in 1953.
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