Former names | Medical College of Louisiana |
---|---|
Type | Private medical school |
Established | 1834 |
Parent institution | Tulane University |
Dean | L. Lee Hamm III |
Academic staff | 309 (full-time) 1,289 (part-time) |
Students | 640 |
Location | , , United States |
Campus | Urban |
Website | medicine |
The Tulane University School of Medicine is the medical school of Tulane University, a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana. The school is located in the Medical District of the New Orleans Central Business District.
The school was founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana and is the 15th oldest medical school in the United States and the 2nd oldest in the deep south. The first classes were held in 1835 at a variety of locations, including Charity Hospital and the Strangers Unitarian Church.
The first permanent building for the school was constructed in the French Quarter in 1844. In 1893, the school moved to Canal Street in the Richardson building, and then shortly after to the Hutchison Building, also on Canal. Finally, in 1930, the school moved to its current location—the Hutchinson Memorial Building—on Tulane Avenue, next to Charity Hospital.[1]
In 2007, the school acquired the Murphy Oil Building on S. Robertson by donation. The Murphy building houses the DeBakey Educational Center, a simulation center, a student lounge with gym, and several administrative offices.
The school refused to fill out the U.S. News statistical survey, and so is unranked for both Research and Primary Care by U.S. News & World Report.[2]
The school has highly competitive admissions, accepting only 175 medical students from more than 12,000 applications. About 40 percent of the students in each class are concurrently enrolled as candidates for the Master of Public Health degree in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. It is estimated that Tulane University has graduated more than 40 percent of all physicians in the U.S. who have earned both M.D. and master of public health degrees.
In 2001, the Tulane Center for Gene Therapy started as the first major center in the U.S. to focus on research using adult stem cells.
Today, the medical school is but one part of the Tulane University Health Sciences Center, which includes the School of Medicine, the Tulane University Hospital and Clinic, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the University Health Service, the Tulane National Primate Research Center, the U.S.-Japan Biomedical Research Laboratories, and the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research. Most components of the Health Sciences Center are located in the heart of New Orleans, in the medical district that comprises Tulane facilities and the LSU/Charity Hospital center just north of the New Orleans Central Business District. It comprises 20 academic departments: Anesthesiology, Biochemistry, Family and Community Medicine, Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, Neurosurgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Ophthalmology, Orthopaedics, Otolaryngology, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Pediatrics, Pharmacology, Physiology, Psychiatry and Neurology, Radiology, Structural and Cellular Biology, Surgery and Urology.
The school periodically hosts social events with the Tulane University Law School and the Freeman School of Business.
On August 31, 2009, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal along with Tulane President Scott Cowen and Louisiana State University System President John V. Lombardi approved a plan to establish both schools as board members for the future $1.1 billion University Medical Center New Orleans. Ground was broken in 2011 and the hospital opened on August 1, 2015.[3] The 446-bed hospital serves as the flagship for Tulane medical students and residents.