Last word

By Michael F. Collins, MD

A great deal of the work of an academic health sciences center is focused on what is happening now: The circumstances created during the pandemic made us suddenly and acutely aware of how much is going on at any given moment in this collective of thousands of faculty, staff and students spread across the commonwealth.

As a campus community, we were able to pivot effectively to working remotely, to maintaining essential operations, to attacking new research challenges related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and to expanding our reach into areas like our volunteer Vaccine Corps and participation in large clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines (both of which you’ve just read about in these pages). We have a strong and stable leadership team and a well-developed organizational structure accustomed to working “in the now.”

But while the “now” is critically important, we also must be intently focused on a future five, 10, 20 years away. This is why we have taken the strategic planning process so seriously, with hundreds of members of our community focusing on where a great academic medical center will be a decade from now and what we will need to do to get there. For every hour we spent in the past year and a half working in the moment on challenges that arose from the pandemic, there have been many hours and much energy spent on what happens next.

This focus on the “next” is why a new education and research building is being constructed on the Worcester campus: a nine-story, 350,000 square-foot component of our future academic hub that will be critical to the next generation of life sciences research and training. I must acknowledge that there were some who were surprised that we would break ground on a bold and complex building amid a pandemic. “Why now?” they asked.

The answer, simply, is because it is “what’s next.” We know from our strategic planning that when this building opens, we will have nearly outgrown our current research space. We know that the progress our research faculty are making for diseases like ALS and Tay-Sachs will need FDA-compliant manufacturing on site to create clinical trial therapeutics. We know that our new Program in Human Genetics & Evolutionary Biology—a key recommendation of our scientific leadership in the current strategic plan—must be established and recruiting by 2023 when the new building begins to open. And we know, because of our strategic growth and achievement over the last decade, that co-locating our programs in molecular medicine, gene therapy and the neurosciences will spark research discoveries and accomplishments with real world impact.

The campus right now looks a bit—I will say it—disheveled, as work on the new Veterans Affairs Community-Based Outpatient Clinic and the campus improvements that support it move toward completion, even as we are blasting for the foundations of the new research and education building on the west side of the campus green.

But we cannot wait for progress; we must shape what happens next now. So, as old traffic patterns and walking paths give way to new routes and new approaches as we make our way across campus, we look to the day when these buildings open, when new colleagues and new programs and new research funding move us forward in ways we can only begin to envision now. ■