An academic health center brings together the talents of clinicians, educators and researchers to improve the understanding and treatment of disease.

The University at Buffalo is home to one of the most comprehensive academic health centers in the nation, comprising our School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and the schools of Dental Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Public Health and Health Professions.

Our affiliated teaching hospitals and health systems are Kaleida Health System, Erie County Medical Center, Great Lakes Health System of Western New York, Veterans Affairs Western New York Healthcare System, Catholic Health System, and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

Among the prestigious Association of American Universities, UB is one of only 10 institutions across the nation to have built an Academic Health Center that includes the full complement of health schools.

A noteworthy success of UB 2020 is the formation and branding of UB’s five health sciences schools as the UB Academic Health Center (AHC). A centerpiece of the plan’s future is the eventual location of the entire AHC to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus in Buffalo’s urban core. The mission of the AHC is to provide a superb research and educational environment to foster basic discovery in the biosciences, health-sciences translational research, preventive and interventional clinical trials, superb clinical care, and training of the next generation of health care practitioners in these disciplines.

UB’s activity in biomedical research has been jumpstarted by considerable institutional investments over the past five years in both infrastructure and intellectual capacity, resulting in an FTE increase of 10.6 percent in ladder faculty and a 21 percent increase in clinical faculty during that time. Of particular note is UB’s leadership in the area of biomedical informatics and the creation of the UB Institute for Healthcare Informatics, with investment of $14 million by University at Buffalo Associates, the management services organization of the clinical practice plans (UB|MD), $27 million in competitive grants obtained through the Healthcare Efficiency and Affordability Law for New Yorkers (HEAL NY) administered by the NYS Department of Health, and a collaborative agreement with Dell Perot Systems valued at $15 million.

Faculty in the AHC have recently completed the submission of the Buffalo Clinical and Translational Research Award (CTSA) application to the National Institutes of Health. The AHC, with the collaborators that comprise the Buffalo Translation Consortium, is ideally and uniquely positioned to make considerable advances in a host of interrelated areas, at the core of which is clinical and translational research, through the anticipated funding and intellectual and organizational rigor that accrues to obtaining a CTSA and carrying out the proposed goals and objectives.