Baylor College of Medicine

Baylor College of Medicine

File:Bcm.jpg
Type	Private University
Established	1900
Endowment	US $1.08 billion
President	Peter G. Traber
Academic staff	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 is a private medical school located in Houston, Texas, USA. Situated within the Texas Medical Center, a 1,000-acre complex that is home to 46 member institutions, Baylor College of Medicine has affiliations with eight teaching hospitals. It has been consistently rated the top medical school in Texas and among the best in the United States. Its Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences is also highly rated. Baylor has become one of 63 American colleges with an endowment greater than $1 billion.

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 loosened 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.

Medical School

Baylor College of Medicine ranked 10th overall in the 2008 U.S. News and World Report top medical schools for research and 11th for top primary care. Each year about 172 medical students join the medical school and about 75% of whom are Texas residents. For entering medical students (2007), the average undergraduate GPA is 3.82 and the average MCAT score is over 34.5. 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.

Graduate School

In 2005 BCM ranked 13th in terms of research funding from the National Institutes of Health, 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:

• No. 1: Molecular & Cellular Biology; Molecular and Human Genetics; and Pediatrics
• No. 2: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• No. 8: Neurosciences

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 for 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.

• Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
• Immunology
• Molecular and Cellular Biology
• Molecular and Human Genetics
• Molecular Physiology & Biophysics
• Molecular Virology & Microbiology
• Neuroscience
• Pharmacology (no longer accepting students)
• Cardiovascular Sciences
• Cell and Molecular Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Structural and Computational Biology & Molecular Biophysics
• Translational Biology & Molecular Medicine
• Clinical Scientist Training Program

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, UW at Seattle, and UPenn. Housed within this research space are exceptional centers and facilities, such as:

• BCM's Human Genome Sequencing Center
• The Human Neuroimaging Lab
• The Cancer Center
• The Center for Cell and Gene Therapy
• The Huffington Center on Aging
• The National Center for Macromolecular Imaging
• The W.M. Keck Center for Computational Biology
• State-of-the-art core facilities, including microscopy, DNA sequencing, microarray, and protein sequencing
• One of the largest transgenic mouse facilities in the country

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.

Baylor College of Medicine is also home to a nurse anesthetist (NA) program.

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. Jay Stein. The department has consistently ranked among the top twenty-five in the U.S. News & World Report listing of the nation's top programs. Other notable departments at the college include the Department of Pediatrics, which U.S. News & World reports is also one of the best in the country, 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.

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 the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston, Texas Children's Hospital, Ben Taub General Hospital, Quentin Mease Community Hospital, St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, the Texas Institute for Rehabilitation and Research and the Menninger Clinic, which moved from Kansas in 2002. 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 terminated many of their connections during a bitter conflict in 2004 for reasons that seem to revolve around a planned ambulatory care center and ownership of the physicians' private practices. This led to the loss of several prominent Baylor physicians who chose to stay with Methodist. Baylor's primary private affiliate then became 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 some affiliation. 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.

The plan for St. Luke's to be Baylor's primary private teaching hospital dissolved, and Baylor now plans to build its own 256 bed hospital within the Texas Medical Center³ Such a hospital may give Baylor more control over its clinical mission and streamline the clinical use of research advances.

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.

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.

Notable physicians and researchers

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

• John Barnhill — Chief of the Consultation-Liaison Service at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
• C. Thomas Caskey — American internist and prominent medical geneticist and biomedical entrepreneur.
• Michael E. DeBakey — award-winning cardiovascular surgeon
• Gregory Duncan — Professor and world-renowned professional curler.
• H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. — American philosopher
• Ralph Feigin — Former President, Baylor College of Medicine, Chief of Pediatrics, President of Texas Children's Hospital, author, Textbook of Pediatric Infectious Diseases
• Louis J. Girard — inventor of the first contact lens.
• Roger Guillemin — Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine (1977)
• Read Montague — Director of the College's Human Neuroimaging Laboratory
• Andrew W. Schally — Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine (1977)
• Peter G. Traber — current President of Baylor College of Medicine.
• Denton Cooley — founder of the Texas Heart Institute and world-renowned cardiovascular surgeon. Carried out the first successful implantation of an artificial heart.

External links

• Baylor College of Medicine Homepage
• Graduate Programs at Baylor College of Medicine
• History of Baylor College of Medicine
• History of the Office of President at BCM