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Rice University and The Texas Medical Center Partnerships:
Rice University and the Texas Medical Center have done more than imagine. Since 1964, when Rice scientists and engineers teamed with Dr. Michael E. DeBakey of Baylor College of Medicine to develop an implantable artificial heart, Rice has been helping turn the scientific dreams of yesterday into the healthcare realities of tomorrow. Today, the Rice/Texas Medical Center partnerships encompass 90 programs and research efforts that touch nearly every aspect of medicine and human health and well-being.
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Our allied educational efforts with Baylor College of Medicine are particularly fruitful, offering advanced academic and professional degrees in conjunction with Baylor’s medical degree. One of the most important and long standing is the Medical Scientist Training Program, in which highly dedicated students undertake Ph.D. studies from Rice while they are earning an M.D. from Baylor. The program has been particularly successful in training researchers in bioengineering, neurology, immunology, genetics, and molecular science. Another Rice/Baylor enterprise is the M.D./M.B.A. program. Offered through Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, this program is designed to answer the growing need for professional leaders in today’s healthcare industries by combining a medical degree with management knowledge unique to healthcare organizations, operations, and economics. The educational interaction between Rice and Baylor isn’t limited to graduate programs. The Medical Scholars Program admits up to 15 freshman students jointly into Rice and Baylor College of Medicine. With their admission to medical school guaranteed, students are freed to explore a richly varied academic experience in the liberal arts and other fields as well as in their premedical studies. Thus, the program promotes the education of physicians who are not only expert about medical conditions but also who are knowledgeable about the humanities, arts, and society. Rice’s Honors Premedical Program is another distinguished program for undergraduates. Combining elements of outreach with academic enrichment, it is tailored for minority students interested in becoming physicians or biomedical researchers. Among the many other educational interactions with the Texas Medical Center that draw together students and researchers are centers and programs that target areas of research rather than specific degree goals. The Center for Neuroscience, a joint undergraduate/graduate program with Baylor, was established to explore the neural basis of human behavior, termed “the last great frontier of science.” The Houston Area Molecular Biophysics Predoctoral Training Program is a collaborative graduate program involving biophysics faculty from four major universities to offer advanced course work in molecular biophysics, structural biology, and other areas of biomedical research. And the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy was created to develop teaching and research programs that address ethical, legal, and public policy issues relating to health care and the biomedical sciences. These and other innovative educational programs offered through the Rice/Texas Medical Center partnerships are already having a profound affect on modern medicine, from individual health care to healthcare policy to the future of medical treatment itself.
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Research is the brain of the Rice/Texas Medical Center partnerships. Our sixty collaborative research programs, involving every one of Rice’s academic divisions and all of the Texas Medical Center’s major research institutions, are as diverse as they are exciting and important. Take, for example, the work of Rice and Texas Medical Center engineers, natural scientists, and physicians as they learn to build new bone and tissue from the body itself, introduce novel genes to repair and improve the function of cells, or focus the power of advanced computing on cellular and genetic studies, bioinformatics, and computer modeling and simulation. Look at the efforts of our social scientists as they examine behavior, memory, neuroscience, and the social and cultural determinants of healthcare delivery. Or consider the research of our humanists as they investigate, among other topics, the ethical implications of biomedical advances. Rice even has music faculty who explore the psychological and physiological aspects of musical talent and performance.
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Resources are the muscle of the Rice/Texas Medical Center partnerships. Leading-edge research requires resources, and the Rice/Texas Medical Center partnerships feature exceptional facilities and equipment. More important are the exceptional human resources—the consolidation of minds and talent from one of world’s great research universities and one of the world’s premier medical centers. One showcase of this concentration of talent is the W.M. Keck Center for Computational Biology, which unites more than 50 computational, physical, and biological scientists in expanding understanding of biological problems through theory, simulation, and experimentation. The center’s melding of high-performance computing techniques with the biological sciences is a particularly valuable area of study. High-performance computing not only provides the kinds of complex, multilevel database resources required for the study of biological functions, it enables researchers to model and simulate processes that are too costly, complex, or otherwise difficult to accomplish using traditional experimental methods.
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Outreach programs are the hands of the Rice/Texas Medical Center partnerships.Over the years, Rice/Texas Medical Center outreach collaborations have become a force of influence and inspiration by serving the surrounding community at all levels. The community at large benefits from the flood alert system developed and operated by Rice. This system keeps area employees, patients, and visitors apprised of the condition of local bayous and streams during heavy storms, reducing the potential for disruptions due to high water or localized flooding. Hospitals and research institutions benefit from the involvement of Rice student volunteers. While some Rice students from across university disciplines are working in mentorship programs at various Texas Medical Center institutions to develop leadership skills, others have become important participants in the daily operations within the medical center by serving in positions ranging from orderly to research assistant. Perhaps most important, patients in Texas Medical Center hospitals benefit in a personal way from the involvement of Rice students. Whether they are future physicians assisting in the care of patients in emergency rooms or foreign-language students acting as interpreters in Texas Medical Center hospitals, Rice students help give the human touch to people in need.
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Texas Medical Center institutions link research to public policy. In 1999, after many years of consideration, the president of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center Houston encouraged the establishment of the Texas Institute for Society and Health (TISH). Rice was a founding member of this program. TISH is a five-institution collaboration formed to examine the impact of social factors on population health. The efforts of TISH to improve population health encompass three broad categories: research, public policy initiatives, and action projects. The institutions participating in the collaboration are the three health sciences campuses—University of Texas Health Sciences Center Houston, Baylor College of Medicine, and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center—along with Rice and the University of Houston. Together, Rice and the Texas Medical Center are focusing their combined expertise and resources on health-related concerns that affect us all, envisioning better medical care and making it real, and helping change the face of health care for decades to come. IMAGINE . . . |
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Education is the heart of the Rice/Texas Medical Center partnerships. When we or those we love need health care, we want the best. And when our society looks to educational and medical institutions for the caliber of research essential for improving health care, we also want the best. Rice/Texas Medical Center collaborations are helping to make the best even better.
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