Florida State University President Richard McCullough hopes a planned academic health center will help raise the level of medical care in the Tallahassee area. The new center will be part of a partnership between the university and Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare.
The proposed building will provide more space for medical training and research. University President Richard McCullough says it will pave the way for what he calls “bench to bedside" research that creates a streamlined path from laboratory work to patient care.
“We believe that this will be a tremendous attractor to think about bringing more physician scientists to the Tallahassee area, more physicians to the Tallahassee area and build upon the already great reputation of a place, like, for example, Tallahassee Memorial Hospital and improve healthcare," McCullough says.
McCullough believes the initiative will attract high-quality doctors, teachers and students and will help more local doctors get awarded research dollars.
“One of the goals would be to have physicians coming into Tallahassee that would be Florida State faculty members, but work at the hospital. So that’s a great attractor for a physician that can be called a professor at a university and be a physician at a hospital and it also helps them because if they go apply for life sciences research money then they have the brand and infrastructure of a great university like Florida State behind them and so they’re more likely to be funded by the National Institutes of Health," McCullough says.
The building will be funded by a $125-million appropriation from the Florida legislature.
