One of the nation’s oldest medical schools is being reborn.
The last decade for the School of Medicine has yielded strategic, phenomenal growth in educational, research and clinical initiatives in disease categories affecting every family in Georgia and the United States: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity, infection/inflammation and neurological disease.
The growth is validated by unprecedented research funding and clinical activity as well as a re-chiseling of the face of MCG, Georgia’s health sciences university.
Research space has essentially doubled and existing laboratory facilities are being upgraded. The latest addition, the 160,000-square-foot Cancer Research Center, opened this year and serves as the hub for expanding work in this disease.
The 2006-07 freshman medical school class is the largest ever with 190 students, a 5 percent increase of the already large class to help meet the state and national need for physicians.
Major lecture halls have been revamped to accommodate growth and changes in teaching strategies; additional renovations of teaching space are planned.
The curriculum is being fine-tuned, with an early, ongoing emphasis on patients and an integrated approach to learning that better reflects how medicine is practiced.
A Message From The Dean
Lotteries, the ‘trifecta’ and parsing the “possible” for medical school expansion in Georgia...
Lotteries have long been an alternative to taxation in the South, with the first Georgia lottery in 1785 contributing to hospital and poor house construction in Savannah. The first statewide lottery was sanctioned by New Hampshire in 1964, and state lotteries have rapidly expanded nationwide since. As the industry has grown, multi-jurisdictional lotteries offer greater prizes and related economic benefits. Since the Georgia Lottery’s inception in 1993, nearly $1 billion have been directed to education and more than one million students have been aided in attending colleges by Georgia’s HOPE scholarship.
The school offers diverse clinical settings for learning, from the expansive MCG Health System – which includes an adult and a children’s hospital as well as outpatient clinics – to physician offices across Georgia that open their doors to students.
The school’s first regional clinical campus, the Southwest Georgia Clinical Campus in Albany, Ga., offers additional learning and future practice opportunities.
As part of a health sciences university, MCG School of Medicine also offers opportunities to learn medicine the way it is practiced: as part of a health care team.
That started in 1828 in two borrowed rooms in Augusta, Georgia’s old City Hospital has only just begun.
July 1, 2006 was my first official day as dean and I can tell you it’s an honor and privilege to be here.
Even before I started my new job, I met with some of the communicators for our school and told them my desire to communicate regularly and well with faculty, students, staff , alumni, potential students and our many other publics. A regular message from me on this site will be just a part of that.
"I firmly believe that the reason a school of medicine exists is not simply to do health care delivery, nor even to do research. It's really to educate and bring people at all levels to a better understanding of medicine, whether it's doctoral students or young physicians or established physicians."
D. Douglas Miller
Dean, MCG School of Medicine
We are proud to support the AAMC Aspiring Docs Campaign to Increase Diversity in Medicine:
