Baylor College of Medicine

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Baylor College of Medicine
Established: 1900
Type: Private University
Endowment: US $1.08 billion
President: Peter G. Traber
Faculty: 3,378 (1,755 full-time, 327 part-time, 1,237 voluntary, and 59 emeritus)
Postgraduates: 1,211 (678 in medical school, 533 in graduate school, and 130 in allied health)
Location: Houston, TX,, USA
Campus: Urban, Texas Medical Center
Website: www.bcm.edu

Baylor College of Medicine, located in Houston, Texas, USA, is one of the world's leading centers for biomedical research and clinical care. Situated within the Texas Medical Center, a 1,000-acre complex that is home to 46 member institutions and is the largest medical center in the world, Baylor College of Medicine has affiliations with eight teaching hospitals, including the world-renowned Texas Children's Hospital, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Menninger Clinic and Texas Heart Institute. It has been consistently rated the top medical school in the greater Southwest and is widely regarded as one of the top medical schools in the country, ranked 7th overall in the 2009 U.S. News and World Report top medical schools for primary care and 13th for research[1]. Its Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences is also highly rated. BCM, despite being solely focused on medical and graduate education, has become one of 63 American colleges with an endowment greater than $1 billion[2].

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[edit] History

The school was formed in 1900 in Dallas, Texas as University of Dallas Medical Department. It allied with Baylor University in Waco, Texas in 1903 and moved to the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas in 1943.

In 1969, Baylor College of Medicine severed its ties with Baylor University under the direction of Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, in order to receive more state funding and grants. Currently, it is led by Dr. Peter G. Traber, formerly of GlaxoSmithKline and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

[edit] Medical School

Baylor College of Medicine was ranked 7th overall in the 2009 U.S. News and World Report top medical schools for primary care and 13th for research[3]. The composite ranking of these two categories (research score plus primary score) gives Baylor an overall ranking of 7th amongst medical schools for 2009[4]. Each year around 172 medical students join the medical school, about 75% of whom are Texas residents[5]. For entering medical students (2007), the average undergraduate GPA is 3.82 and the average MCAT score is well over 34.5[6], making it one of the top 10 medical schools in the country when measured by quality of matriculants.Baylor College of Medicine is the only private medical school in the southwest region of the United States, and has the lowest tuition of all private medical schools in the United States. Baylor is one of the few medical schools in the United States that is structured with an accelerated 1.5 year preclinical curriculum (the other is the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Its students have the notable distinction of scoring a median of one standard deviation above the national average on the USMLE Step 1 exam, usually placing them as the #1 or #2 school in the nation annually when measured by this metric.[citation needed]

[edit] Graduate School

In 2005 BCM ranked 13th in terms of research funding from the National Institutes of Health[3], and its Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences ranked 22nd for best Ph.D. program in the biological sciences (2007). Additionally, several individual departments earn particularly heavy NIH funding, receiving several "Top Ten" rankings by the NIH in 2005[4]:

100 students join the graduate program each year, of which one-half were women and one-third were graduates from foreign schools. The average graduate student GPA is 3.5 and the average GRE score is above the 70th percentile.

Many departments of the graduate school collaborate with Rice University and other institutions within the Texas Medical Center. Currently, 489 graduate students are enrolled in one of the fourteen different PhD programs. These programs are:

Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is ranked among the top Schools of medicine in the United States.
Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is ranked among the top Schools of medicine in the United States.

[edit] Biomedical Research

Baylor College of Medicine has dedicated more than 800,000 square feet (70,000 m²) of its space for laboratory research, and is adding another 322,000 in the next few years. According to the National Science Foundation 2004, BCM ranks sixth in R&D spending in the life sciences, behind UCSF, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, University of Washington, and University of Pennsylvania.[citation needed] Housed within this research space are exceptional centers and facilities, such as:

[edit] Graduate Program in Nurse Anesthesia

Baylor College of Medicine houses one of the top-ranked Nurse Anesthesia programs in the country. Currently accepting 14 students per year, applicants are among the brightest minds in critical care nursing, each possessing experience in a variety of intense settings. The program is academically front-loaded with students beginning coursework mid-summer and completing 12 months of comprehensive didactic preparation prior to immersion into clinical anesthesia training.

Clinical anesthesia experiences are gained within the distinguished Texas Medical Center, and include an array of settings, such as pediatric, obstetric, cardiovascular, and trauma anesthesia. The clinical phase of the program is 18 months in length, and enables graduates to enter practice as proficient, well- equipped anesthetists. Additionally, throughout their training, students are given ample opportunities to enhance non-clinical skills, such as leadership and research, with nationally-recognized faculty members.

[edit] Physician Assistant program

Baylor College of Medicine is also home to a Physician Assistant (PA) program. Thirty PA students are accepted each year. For PA students entering in 2004, the average GPA was 3.70 and the average GRE score was 1169 verbal/quantitative and 4.9 analytical. Baylor College of Medicine ranked 7th in the 2007 U.S. News and World Report rankings for Physician Assistant schools. The overall passing rate for all graduates of the PA Program on the Physician Assistant National Certifying Examination is 97 percent with a 100 percent pass rate for the past eight years.

[edit] Residency Training

The Baylor College of Medicine offers residency training in a wide variety of specialties. Notable highlights among its various training programs include its Internal Medicine Department, headed by interim chair Dr. David Tweardy. The department has consistently ranked among the top twenty-five in the U.S. News & World Report listing of the nation's top programs.[5] Other notable departments at the college include the Department of Pediatrics, led by world-renowned pediatrician Dr. Ralph Feigin, which is, as measured by US News & World Report rankings and NIH ranking tables, by far the best in the country,[6] and the Department of Surgery led by Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, the world-renowned cardiothoracic surgeon, and chaired by Dr. F. Charles Brunicardi, the Debakey/Bard Professor of Surgery.[7]

[edit] Hospital Affiliation

BCM is affiliated with many of the hospitals that make the Texas Medical Center the largest medical center in the world. These include:

Cooperating Patient Care Institutions:

  • Community Health Centers
  • Cullen Bayou Place
  • DePelchin Children's Center
  • Houston Child Guidance Center
  • Jewish Family Service Cancer Center
  • Kelsey-Seybold Clinic
  • Park Plaza Hospital
  • Quentin Mease Hospital
  • Seven Acres Jewish Geriatric Center
  • Houston Shriners Hospital (orthopedic)
  • Thomas Street AIDS Clinic
  • The Woman's Hospital of Texas

While The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center is affiliated with the University of Texas, its faculty and trainees may be affiliated with either Baylor or the University of Texas medical school in Houston, which is located across the street from Baylor. Methodist Hospital had been Baylor's primary private teaching hospital for many decades. Baylor and Methodist dissolved some of their connections during a conflict in 2004 for reasons that seem to revolve around a planned ambulatory care center and ownership of the physicians' private practices. Both Baylor and Methodist suffered in the short-term, with each institution losing some physicians to the other, but Baylor was able to quickly recruit and hire physicians to replace those lost to Methodist. Baylor's primary private affiliate has since become St. Luke's, while Methodist has affiliated with the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, which is located in New York City. Methodist and Baylor retain a number of important affiliations and Baylor medical students continue to rotate through The Methodist Hospital during some rotations. In the meantime, Baylor has strengthened its ties to MD Anderson, leading, for example, to the recent decision for MD Anderson's chairman of neurosurgery to also be chair at Baylor.

Rumors have existed regarding a plan for Baylor and St. Luke's to construct a new hospital together. However, Baylor is currently building its own 600 bed not-for-profit hospital within the Texas Medical Center³ Such a hospital will give Baylor more control over its clinical mission and streamline the clinical use of research advances. An important facet of the construction of this hospital revolves around the application of personalized, genomic medicine in conjunction with more traditional patient care [8] . This effort will be supported by the strength of Baylor's Human and Molecular Genetics Department, currently ranked number one in the country.

[edit] University Affiliation

Baylor is also affiliated with DeBakey High School for Health Professions. Tuition for both schools is fully paid. Baylor has combined Bacc/M.D. programs with several other universities as well.

[edit] Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative

The Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative (BIPAI) (http://bayloraids.org) at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital was established in 1996, and has rapidly become the world's largest university-based program dedicated to global pediatric and family HIV/AIDS care and treatment, health professional training and clinical research. Baylor constructed and opened the world's two largest centers for the care and treatment of HIV-infected children and families, the Romanian-American Children's Center in Constanta, Romania in 2001, and the Botswana-Baylor Children's Clinical Center of Excellence in Gaborone, Botswana in 2003. These centers have transformed the care and treatment of pediatric HIV/AIDS in the two countries, making Romania and Botswana two of a precious few countries worldwide where children are at least proportionately represented among those accessing HIV/AIDS care and treatment. BIPAI has replicated these successes in Uganda, Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, and Burkina Faso, where it has entered into partnership with the Ministries of Health to scale up pediatric HIV/AIDS care and treatment, and build and open new Children's Clinical Centers of Excellence.

BIPAI also has created the Pediatric AIDS Corps; a model program to place up to 250 American pediatricians and infectious disease specialists in its African centers to vastly expand capacity for pediatric HIV/AIDS care and treatment and health professional training. Major funders of BIPAI's activities include NIH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Abbott Laboratories, and numerous private and corporate foundations.

[edit] Notable physicians and researchers

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy certain standards for completeness.
Revisions and sourced additions are welcome.

[edit] References

  1. ^ About Us: Baylor College of Medicine Accessed April 03, 2008
  2. ^ College and University Endowments, 2005 Accessed January 3, 2007.
  3. ^ NIH Awards to Medical Schools Accessed January 3, 2007
  4. ^ NIH Awards to Medical School Departments Accessed January 3, 2007
  5. ^ Baylor College Internal Medicine Homepage.
  6. ^ Baylor College of Medicine Department of Pediatrics Homepage.
  7. ^ Micheal E. Debakey Department of Surgery Homepage.
  8. ^ Baylor College of Medicine Webpage.
  9. ^ Dr. Feigin Biography. Texas Children's Hospital.
  10. ^ Roger Guillemin - Autobiography. The Nobel Foundation (1977). Retrieved on 2007-03-31.
  11. ^ Read Montague, Prof. Dr.. Baylor College of Medicine. Retrieved on 2007-12-17.
  12. ^ Andrew V. Schally - Autobiography. The Nobel Foundation (1977). Retrieved on 2007-03-31.
  13. ^ Peter G. Traber, M.D.. Baylor College of Medicine. Retrieved on 2007-04-06.
  14. ^ http://www.bcm.edu/immuno/?pmid=6217

[edit] External links

Houston Portal