Interview: Steven Currall

Consolidation

Having one single accredited university provides greater synergies, permeability for students and faculty

Steven Currall

President – University of South Florida

How does consolidation of USF’s three campuses benefit students and faculty? Consolidation enables us to combine all three of our campuses into one single accredited university. Prior to consolidation, we had three separately accredited universities, which are now merging into one. The advantage of this strategy for our students is that it allows greater permeability across the campus boundaries to provide new opportunities to take courses and get access to degrees offered at either one. It is highly synergistic for them. It also provides opportunities for our faculty to do interdisciplinary research that spans the boundaries of those campuses as well. The key implication for consolidation is greater permeability. It is the ability to move knowledge, information and people across those three geographical locations in a way that promotes new opportunities and new collaborations.

What does it mean that the university was selected for the Novavax COVID vaccine trials? This is just one more example of the extraordinary partnership that we have with Tampa General Hospital (TGH). We worked in collaboration with them on the Novavax vaccine and we will be distributing that in a joint effort. TGH serves as our teaching hospital for the Morsani College of Medicine and it is an amazing partnership that has deepened recently. We signed an enhanced affiliation agreement with TGH over the summer. It was a result of lengthy collaboration and negotiations between the hospital and USF. In some ways, that new arrangement with TGH was nearly as complex as our consolidation efforts. We have had long-standing clinical activity at USF Health but this deeper relationship with TGH allows us to advance the idea of an academic medical center that combines both the university and medical school elements and the clinical and hospital aspects that TGH contributes. We are excited about this new era in the history of the relationship between USF and TGH.

What are your near-term priorities? Looking forward, one of the things we have learned during the pandemic is the ability of the university community to pivot quickly and develop innovations that meet a societal and public health need such as COVID-19. One primary example is the Morsani College of Medicine’s work with the College of Engineering and TGH to develop a model for 3D-printed nasal swabs for COVID-19 testing. The university worked quickly. Within two weeks it developed the framework for 3D-printed swabs, printing them by the tens of thousands and distributing them across the Tampa Bay area, the country and the world.