UCLA is home to one of the top ten medical schools in the country, the David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM). DGSOM engages the efforts of more than 6,000 clinical faculty, 2,000 full-time faculty and 1,000 active investigators, many recognized with the highest national and international awards and honors (e.g., Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, President's National Medal of Science, Wolf Prize, Charles F. Kettering Prize, Enrico Fermi Award, Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, membership in the Institute of Medicine, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators).
Constituting a critical mass of outstanding research in all areas of basic, clinical, translational, and population-based research, UCLA is ranked seventh in the United States in research funding from the NIH, with nearly 800 research activity awards totaling approximately $354 million, and has the fourth highest total research dollars from all sources (over $1 billion annually).
The School of Medicine education and training currently encompasses 1,800 residents, 700 medical students, and 500 graduate students working toward PhD degrees in health-related sciences, with 238 active (Fiscal Year 2008) D-, F-, K-, R-, and T-series training and career development programs and single-awardee fellowship projects.
The UCLA Health System is composed of four hospitals, three based at the new Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, which includes the Mattel Children's Hospital and Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, and the 271-bed Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital. The Health System's main campus facilities also include the Jules Stein Eye Institute and Doris Stein Eye Research Center, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior Neuropsychiatric Institute, and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of 39 NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers nationwide. The Health System hospitals and clinics have over 1 million annual patient visits, and 80,000 hospital admissions.
In addition to DGSOM, 10 other professional schools at UCLA, health and non-health in primary academic orientation, are strategic partners of the CTSI, engaging in collaborative research and training agendas and conducting interdisciplinary translational research:
The School of Dentistry is ranked 5th nationally (out of 54 dental schools) in NIH funding. The School's academic divisions include Advanced Prostodontics, Biomaterials and Hospital Dentistry, Associated Clinical Specialties, Diagnostic and Surgical Sciences, Oral Biology and Medicine, Public Health and Community Dentistry, and Restorative Dentistry. The Dental Clinical Research Center coordinates and conducts all phases of human clinical investigational study, with exceptional strengths in point-of-care and lab-on-a-chip technologies pertaining to salivary diagnostics and cancer biomarkers, conducted in collaboration with the Schools of Medicine and Engineering and the California NanoSystems Institute.
The School of Nursing, consistently ranked in the top 10 schools of nursing by U.S. News & World Report, has a central mission of clinical translational research and graduate-level training in research and clinical leadership. The School's major translational research centers include health disparities research, international HIV epidemiology, and nursing research methodologies. The School also has entered a strategic educational and research training partnership in program development for the new Mervyn M. Dymally School of Nursing at Charles Drew University.
The School of Public Health (SPH) is dedicated to enhancing the public's health by conducting innovative research, training future leaders and health professionals, translating research into policy and practice, and serving local, national, and international communities. The SPH is one of the top schools of public health in the country, with departments in Biostatistics, Community Health Sciences, Environmental Health Sciences, Epidemiology, and Health Services. The SPH is home to over a dozen interdisciplinary translational research centers devoted to health disparities, international health, cancer epidemiology, and chronic viral infectious disease (HIV and hepatitis).
The School of Education and Information Studies, encompassing the Department of Education and the Department of Information Studies, offers curricula and research and training programs in educational practice, information policy, information technology and science, and associated disciplines. School IT specialists are pursuing the potential translational science applications of a new generation of wireless sensing technologies under development at the UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), an interdisciplinary National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center.
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, one of the top 5 schools of engineering nationally, has consistently been at the forefront of cutting-edge interdisciplinary research. New research initiatives in biomedical informatics, nanomanufacturing and nanotechnologies, and information technologies ensure that the School will maintain its international reputation for leadership in emerging disciplines. The School is strategically engaged in interdisciplinary translational research, including development of new biocompatible materials, microfluidic devices, telemedicine and wireless biosensors, information systems design, nanofabrication, and microelectronics. Faculty of the School are leaders of major interdisciplinary centers at UCLA, including the California NanoSystems Institute, Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, Center for Systemic Control of Cyto-Networks, Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, Center for Information and Computation Security, and Biomedical Informatics Center.
The School of Law, among the Top 20 U.S. law schools, is nationally renowned for its curricular innovations in bridging the gap between classroom education and real-world practice. The School offers an extraordinary array of simulated transaction courses and live-client clinics across a diverse range of practice areas, including environmental and health care law. The School's outreach practica in lawyering as community problem solving cross-cut the CTSI community engagement agenda. Law School faculty are also collaborative colleagues at the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics and its Medical Genetics Node, which engages the academic community and the public at large in discussions regarding the challenges inherent to implementation of genetic and genomic technologies for screening, diagnosis, and intervention in patient care, and the risks and benefits of these technologies to individuals, groups, and society.
The Anderson School of Management is recognized worldwide as an innovator in management education and research, with particular reference to life science and bioscience firms. At the School's Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, these dimensions of biotechnology and health care provide unique opportunities for management education that will lead the 21st-century economy, including technology transfer and marketing for commercialization of faculty inventions in translational science and attraction of venture capital for faculty start-ups. The Price Center's Johnson & Johnson Health Care Institute, in linking corporate resources with community-based health care for children and enterprise zone development, crosscuts the CTSI community engagement agenda.
The School of Public Affairs emphasizes solving problems across boundaries, particularly at the intersection of the public, private, and nongovernmental sectors in the spheres of public policy, social welfare, and urban planning. The School is home to several research centers that tap the expertise of faculty from across the UCLA campus, addressing such issues as welfare reform, immigration, urban poverty, health care financing, economic development, and an aging U.S. and world population. The School's main community outreach program, the UCLA Policy Forum, acts both as a catalyst for dialogue on critical issues and as a leader in applied policy training. The Policy Forum sponsors public events and briefings and administers the School's Senior Fellows Program as well as Executive Education and web-based Community Information Neighborhood Knowledge Research Center.
The School of Theater, Film, and Television (TFT) is a unique regional and national resource, combining and integrating theater, film, television, and digital media into a single professional school and offering top-ranked undergraduate and graduate programs. Among the school's resources is the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the largest university-based archive of its kind in the world and constituting one of the largest collections of media materials in the United States, second only to the U.S. Library of Congress. TFT faculty are among the collaborators at the new UCLA Wireless Health Institute, an interdisciplinary group of experts and innovators who are engaged in a variety of projects deploying broadband wireless services. With substantial TFT technical assistance, the Wireless Health Institute is at the forefront of a major transformation in health management and health care with the introduction of low-cost, wirelessly networked sensor systems that offer real-time pervasive monitoring and guidance for a wide array of patient needs, at home, at work, and in conventional point-of-care environments.
The College of Letters and Science encompasses 34 departments, 40 specialized programs, and 130 undergraduate majors and degrees that span research and training in the liberal arts and sciences. The Life Sciences Division conducts biomedical research to utilize new technologies and develop innovative ways of treating human diseases. The cross-disciplinary collaboration that characterizes so much of the teaching and research in the College is equally evident in its Division of Physical Sciences.
