Building community is key goal

SCHOOL TIES: Brown administrators hope the new medical school, planned for 2011, will help students bond, and draw more experienced medical students back to campus. /
SCHOOL TIES: Brown administrators hope the new medical school, planned for 2011, will help students bond, and draw more experienced medical students back to campus. /

Today, Dr. Philip Gruppuso, associate dean for medical education at Brown University, considers himself lucky if he spies third- and fourth-year medical students on campus. The students often shuttle directly between home and their clinical work. The medical school at Brown provides no central gathering point, no consolidated administrative offices and, in fact, no building the school can call its own.
That will change in August 2011 when Brown plans to open its new Warren Alpert Medical School in a renovated building at 222 Richmond St. in Providence’s Jewelry District. Gruppuso said administrators hope the building and a system of learning communities will help beginning medical students bond, while drawing more experienced medical students back to campus.
“This geographic separation has really been a challenge all the years it’s been here,” Gruppuso said. “It’s kind of remarkable this medical school has grown and thrived without a physical home.”
In October Brown leaders signed off on a $45 million project to renovate the 135,000-gross-square-foot building to include a central atrium with entrances on both Richmond and Eddy streets, lecture halls, an anatomy lab, and case study and seminar rooms. The university will also boost its medical-student capacity from 96 students per class to 120 students per class.
To organize those students, Brown will take a page from other medical schools and divide students into three academies starting in the fall of 2011. The university will house each academy in adjoining 10,500-square-foot suites on the second floor of the renovated building. Each suite will contain three administrative offices, a student lounge, two meeting rooms, a pantry and student lockers, Gruppuso said. “If you can create a place in the medical building that medical students think as home, their medical school home, then when they’re off doing rotations during year three and four of medical school they’ll come back,” Gruppuso said.
But students should not expect to find cutthroat competition among houses. Gruppuso said administrators are aiming to essentially randomly assign students to the academies, though they will attempt to avoid a disproportionate amount of one gender landing up in an academy. Administrators also want to make sure each academy contains a mix of students who arrived via the university’s Program in Liberal Medical Education and those that arrived from other schools via the standard admissions process. And administrators will not, Gruppuso said, split students up based on their anticipated specialty, because half of students typically change their minds by the time they graduate. Plus, the university wants to foster interaction. And as such it will also not assign classes based on academy affiliation.
“[The academies are] really a framework for advising and mentoring and social interaction outside of classrooms,” Gruppuso said.
In addition, because of the school’s physical location, the academies will serve as a bridge between the major hospitals in the city, where students conduct clinical work, and Brown University’s main campus on College Hill. The new home also will provide additional space for public lectures and continuing medical-education classes for health care professionals. University officials also hope the renovated building will jump-start the development of a “knowledge-based” economy in the area and draw medical research companies. In November Isis Biopolymer Inc., a medical-research company, announced it would move from Warwick to Richmond Street, in part to be close to the medical school.
A preliminarily report commissioned by Brown said the new school will create an additional 36 on-campus jobs and 20 more through the “multiplier effect” of the school. The report also expects the school to add $26.2 million to the state’s economic output, according to Appleseed Inc., a New York-based consulting firm. That potential has some state officials excited.
“The move of the Brown medical school will bring new energy to the emerging knowledge district,” said J. Michael Saul, interim executive director of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation (EDC). “We see the medical school, along with the Rhode Island Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the land freed up by the relocation of [Interstate] 195, as important anchors for an area that the EDC envisions as a hotbed for innovation and the commercialization of new ideas.”
The nine current tenants of the building, among them a public relations firm and a law firm, will leave the building by June 30, 2009, a Brown University spokesman said.
In January 2007, Brown announced it would expand and rename its medical school to honor entrepreneur and philanthropist Warren Alpert for his $100 million gift. A portion of the gift will help finance the new building, with other money supporting scholarships, research, faculty recruitment and two endowed faculty positions. •

No posts to display