Vision for Building an Interdisciplinary Research-based Medical School

UCF’s College of Medicine Dean, Dr. Deborah German, presented at the 2007 Research Week to talk about the vision for building an interdisciplinary research-based medical school. To create incentive for attending, Dr. German promises that every student in the first class at UCF’s medical school will have their first year completely paid. While the last time a medical school was built from scratch was in the eighties, Dr. German explained the process for becoming accredited and how UCF went about creating the curriculum in advance for the next two years. She stressed the importance of encouraging partnerships with every other college on the UCF campus and provided samples of how she initiated similar partnerships when she worked for Vanderbilt University. While students cannot be recruited at this point, Dr. German answered questions for the audience and explained that applying to the new medical school will be the same as the standard application process for UCF. As the College of Medicine Dean, Dr. German wants to focus on research opportunities that will exist in the future, not ones that have already been discovered. “UCF has science in its DNA,” she says.

The event was sponsored by the UCF Graduate Student Association.

UCF Division of Graduate Studies, the Division of Undergraduate Studies and the Office of Research and Commercialization are proud organizers of the the 2007 UCF Research Week.