>> GAIL HACKETT: Good morning.
Welcome to the 2019 State of the University Address.
My name is Gail Hackett and I have the privilege of serving as
provost and senior Vice President for academic affairs
here at Virginia Commonwealth University.
I am very pleased to welcome the many members of the community
who are here today in the James Branch Cabell Library as well as
the many others who are joining us via livestreaming through
our website.
I would also like to welcome the VCU Board of Visitors member who
is here with us today, Todd Haymore.
As you know, our former rector, Phoebe Hall,
passed away earlier this month.
Although we miss her deeply, her legacy will always be a part of
the fabric of this university.
So, before we move into today's program,
will you please join me in a moment of silence in honor of
Phoebe Hall?
Thank you.
The State of the University Address is an annual tradition
at VCU that provides the opportunity for each of us to
reflect on the many successes and to learn about our future
goals and aspirations.
Before we welcome President Rao to the stage,
let's take a few moments to meet some of the many people at VCU
who exemplify our university's
national prominence.
[video playing]
>> PATRICK WELCH: Hyperloop is a new idea
for transporting goods and eventually people at a very fast
pace with minimal impact to the environment.
>> TAMMY CHEN: So, this experience will lead me into my
future career as a product designer because it will give me
more hands-on experience making parts and being hands-on with
machines and tools.
>> GARRET WESTLAKE: Hyperloop is an example of what innovative
universities do, and VCU is definitely a leading university
for innovation.
>> PATRICK WELCH: We're doing something that's going to change
the world one day.
And being a part of that is amazing.
It's an honor.
>> CHRIS GOUGH: The mismanagement of land use
conversion away from forests will erode the capacity of
forests to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
>> ELLEN STUART-HAENTJENS: Scientifically informed
management allows our forests to scrub more carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere and sequester it long-term in soils and
in biomass.
>> LISA TURNER: One of the most cost-effective ways to scrub
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is just to let
forests regrow and not convert forest land to other land types.
>> CHRIS GOUGH: The State of the Carbon Cycle Report provides a
quantitative assessment of how much carbon our North American
forests sequester.
We're very interested in taking our science and influencing
policy, by communicating our science in accessible ways
to policymakers.
>> CHERRON GILMORE: My local hospital was ready to pull the
plug on me.
They were like there's nothing more we can do.
And I talked to Dr. Tang and I said they just said I was too
much of a risk, and he's like, no, no,
we don't believe that here.
>> DANIEL TANG: In our population, we've seen that
80-plus percent of our patients who do require an artificial
heart are able to successfully go on to get a transplant.
>> VIGNESHWAR KASIRAJAN: We are currently the largest and the
most active total artificial heart center in the country.
We have done over a hundred total artificial hearts and a
number of them have gone to successful transplantation.
>> CHERRON GILMORE: They put the heart in and it was like a
complete change and I haven't felt like this in a long time.
[applause]
>> MICHAEL RAO: It's a great video.
Gail, thank you so much for that wonderful introduction and thank
you for your continued, fantastic leadership overseeing
our academic programs, and more importantly,
the future of our academic programs along with your team,
but also our faculty colleagues, our faculty leadership that's
here, and I'm so pleased that you are here.
I want to thank all of you who put some time into appearing in
our video.
Thank you for letting us highlight you.
Please stand so that we have a chance to recognize you.
You were the stars of our screen today.
[applause]
Thank you.
You know, this is a really exciting time at Virginia
Commonwealth University because we're celebrating some very
significant milestones from our past and we're certainly
charting our strategic course as we look forward to the future.
So, when this institution began in 1838,
no one could have ever imagined the enormous impact that we
would make in 2019.
The university has evolved in just astonishing ways,
but that's really thanks to all of you, our faculty, our staff,
our students, our alumni, our patients, our partners,
and our friends who really personify the soul of
our mission.
It's you.
You have made us one of America's premier
research universities.
You've built an institution that's known for access to
excellence, fundamental to economic and social mobility in
this country.
And this year, we'll expand our impact even more through a new
strategic plan that we call Quest 2025.
This is a plan that focuses on our national prominence.
So, let's start this work by asking ourselves an important
question, and that is what does a nationally prominent VCU
really look like right now?
Well, what has it always looked like?
Let's go back to the very beginning.
So, what became MCV opened in 1838 and it very rapidly gained
national prominence.
In its first few years, observers noted,
and I want to read this specifically because it's so
well said, the advantages here afforded the student,
in contrasting with those of similar schools,
will not suffer by comparison.
A full course of lectures in this college will be received as
equivalent to the very best of medical schools anywhere.
Medical students around the nation took notice back then,
too, because in 1859 alone, 244 students actually left their
home institutions elsewhere so that they could enroll right
here and 70% of our class of 1860 were actually transfers.
So, now, let's fast-forward back to 2019,
and national prominence and impact are still very much in
our DNA.
This past year alone, the final year of our transformative quest
for distinction, you set institutional records for the
graduation rate of our undergraduates,
for invention disclosures, and for fundraising.
We're serving more patients now than we have ever served.
Our faculty is larger and it's stronger and it's more diverse.
Since 2016, we've had the highest percent increase in
hiring minority faculty members in our history.
Among them, it includes Guggenheim fellows,
Fulbright recipients, and NIH career award winners.
And there are other ways that we could characterize them as well.
But this is thanks in part to our shared efforts in the
Institute for Inclusion, Inquiry, and Innovation.
And it's because of our enduring institutional commitment that we
will be more representative everywhere throughout
this institution.
Our first-year student class is also a majority minority for the
first time, and it's the largest class that we've ever had at VCU
with the same standards, by the way.
Given our recent history, these students will succeed in every
record‑setting way.
You've increased our six‑year graduation rate by 37% in just
a little more than ten years.
Now, that's a story we've all got to tell.
So, I want that to sink in for just a moment.
A 37% increase in our graduation rate in just
ten years. That's amazing.
You've achieved this in part by closing the gaps in graduation
rates for historically underrepresented students and
for students who receive Pell grants.
That's unheard of in almost any other research university in
America and it's a clear sign that VCU,
we're doing our part to help Virginia realize its statewide
goal of leading the nation in educational attainment by the
year 2030.
Our research enterprise has also grown by nearly a quarter in the
last decade.
You've set institutional records for research eight times in
those ten years, by the way.
And by the way, we learned just this week, once again,
that we are ranked in the top 25 among public research
universities in America.
You remember I used to talk about 50, top 50?
Now it's top 25 for several years in a row.
And the group that does this is actually called the Center for
Measuring University Performance.
So, congratulations.
[applause]
And the need and the demand for our clinical services
and expertise is more than it's ever been,
including in the Commonwealth's longest standing level 1 trauma
center and with our health plan that now serves about a quarter
million Virginians.
VCU earned a $21.5 million clinical and translational
science award from the NIH.
By the way, this is the largest NIH,
single NIH grant that we've ever had in our history,
but what it does is it promotes and expands research that helps
us draw from the rest of the University to find cures for
cardiac, pulmonary, and addiction diseases.
Addiction diseases, something we're all very concerned about.
Fewer than 1% of US universities actually have a
CTSA, and, by the way, we're the only one in Virginia,
so we've got a big responsibility on our shoulders,
but we're there because of our colleague, Gerry Moeller.
Gerry, stand wherever you are. Thank you
[applause]
We put a lot on Gerry's shoulders and he
came through because he had a great vision and he had the
ability to translate that vision into very meaningful
circumstances for those who were evaluating VCU.
And VCU is, by the way, only one of 20 universities in America
with both a CTSA and an NCI‑designated cancer center,
meaning that we're on the front lines of the war on cancer like
almost no place else.
By the way, Peter Buckley, our medical school Dean,
was the one who did that analysis and passed that on
to me.
You know, I want to tell you, speaking of the medical school,
that I'm really proud of Alex Krist.
He's now the sixth member of our faculty to be elected to the
National Academy of Medicine.
And Wanchun Tang -- yes, that's a big deal.
[applause]
Not easy. And Wanchun Tang, also in medicine,
became the third member of our faculty to be inducted into the
National Academy of Inventors.
[applause] Yes.
And for the second time in three years,
a company started by a VCU faculty member was actually
named the best university start‑up in the entire nation.
[applause] Yeah, you might as well recognize that, too.
And by the way, our students completed 1.3 million hours of
community service last year, 5% more than the year before,
and equivalent to about $30 million in value to our
communities. [applause] Yeah.
VCU backed 55 student‑led companies in the past five years
with two-thirds of those started by students from
minority backgrounds.
Again, a reflection of where America is going and that we're
a part of it.
But they're a part of the reason why our economic impact in the
Commonwealth of Virginia is more than $6 billion and now we have
19 academic programs that are ranked in the top 50 nationally,
including six top five programs.
Wow. What a year.
And I have to tell you, this is really only a snapshot of what
you, VCU, have achieved.
Congratulations, and of course, as your president,
I have to thank you for continuing to make VCU
synonymous with what I will call rampant excellence.
As I reflect on our national prominence as a public
university committed to the public good,
you've heard me say that many times,
I think about the ways in which we impact people,
the ways that we advance what I call the American Dream.
So, James Truslow Adams, a Pulitzer Prize‑winning
historian, writer, and he was also the grandson of a Virginia
merchant, he first gave phrase to this idea that in America
anyone can be successful.
So, it was about 1931 when he wrote this and I want to read
exactly what he wrote.
And he said, quote, there has been the American dream in which
each man and each woman shall attain to the fullest stature of
which they are innately capable and be recognized for what they
are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of
birth or position, end quote.
So, in other words, what he's really saying is that who you
are isn't going to determine what you can be.
You'll prosper in this country because you are tenacious,
not because of your heredity.
That was true for Adams.
And that was a while ago.
So the question I want to talk with you a little bit about
today is, is that really true today?
Well, some people are going to say, no,
the American Dream is obsolete.
It's harder to get ahead.
To them, the idea of bootstraps needs to be totally rebooted.
So, listen to this.
About a third of our people say that anyone can still achieve
the American Dream today and about half have abandoned the
whole idea altogether.
Last month, some of you may have caught the Washington Post
column where a columnist said that the American Dream is now
a myth.
Well, this is not just a cynical view.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Economic
Development found that in terms of occupational mobility,
the US actually is roughly average among its 34-member free
market nations and we are dead last for economic mobility.
Dead last.
By this study, Americans face more obstacles to economic
progress from one generation to the next than do citizens of
almost any other capitalist democracy in the world.
So, the idea of this being the land of opportunity could be
misplaced, or maybe it's really not,
because those who hold college degrees still prosper personally
and contribute to our nation's success dramatically.
Higher education catalyzes social participation,
democratic viability, and economic success.
A bachelor's degree increases lifetime earnings by nearly 70%,
and, in fact, it's exponentially more for people who have degrees
above the bachelor's level.
Low‑wealth students graduate into the same exact
opportunities, including lifetime earnings,
as their wealthier classmates.
And, by the way, this is an upward mobility that exists for
no other social demographic.
As a group, first generation college graduates surpass their
parents' median household income just six years after they
graduate with a bachelor's degree.
So, while some might want to bury the American Dream,
a recent report from the American Association of Colleges
and Universities said that most people still believe that higher
education strengthens society.
Three out of four people see higher education as an important
social good, and that's consistent, by the way,
across respondents' ages, their ethnicities,
and their political leanings.
Most people think that universities like VCU absolutely
prepare people to be successful and they contribute to a strong
American workforce.
People with a college degree are 24% more likely to be employed
and twice as likely, two times as likely,
to actually own a business.
Is that important today in our current economy?
Certainly is.
And people are, of course, voting with their feet.
Millennials are on track to be the very most educated
population –- generation I should say --
in American history.
And right behind them, the Generation Z that we call them,
90% of them believe that it's a lot easier to succeed when you
have a college degree.
So, no wonder that the culturalist Larry Samuels that
many of you have heard of said, and I want to the quote him
correctly, too, sending kids to college is still the heart and
soul of the American dream, end quote.
So, the evidence is clear.
Universities make our country stronger by helping our people
to succeed.
We've certainly seen this at VCU.
I'm going to give you some information about VCU.
Seventeen percent of our students move up two or more
income quartiles after they graduate.
By the way, this is among the very highest of any university
in the mid-Atlantic region where we've done our research.
Two percent actually jump from the very bottom quartile to the
very top and that's the most that you'll find anywhere
in Virginia.
And a student that's born into the bottom one-fifth of family
incomes actually has a 27% chance of reaching the top
one-fifth after they finish at VCU –- I should say graduate
from VCU so there is no confusion.
VCU is the place where American dreams do come true.
So to remain that way, let's take our commitments to
excellence and access to the next level.
More specifically, the impact that we make as a nationally
prominent university should be accelerated in three logical
ways, for our students, for our faculty and our staff, and for,
of course, our patients, along with others in our community.
Let's explore the three that I've really focused on for the
rest of our time together.
First, of course, I'm going to begin with our students and I
want to talk to you about a student named Megan Charity who
loves skateboards and she also loves video games.
In those ways, she's kind of like a lot of college
students, right?
But Megan also is a National Science Foundation Research
Education scholar and she's a VCU Wright scholar,
named after Ken and Dianne Wright,
and she's tackling a really, really big problem.
Even though she's still working on her bachelor's degree in
computer science, Megan is already a pioneer in the field
of virtual reality.
So, while she was moving through her new-age simulated worlds in
her video games, she noticed that she had this age-old
problem that some of you might be able to relate to.
It's called motion sickness.
And she's not alone.
One in three people actually struggle with this and it's a
pandemic for military and civilian pilots who are training
in these virtual reality aviation booths.
It's also true, by the way, for CAD-reliant shipbuilding, which,
as you know, is one of our keystone industries here in the
Commonwealth of Virginia, very important to our economy
in Virginia.
Technically, we call it cyber-sickness,
and Megan is going to find a cure for it.
By solving thousands of equations and writing thousands
of lines of code, Megan actually created a virtual reality low
acceleration vehicle, or, as she calls it,
something like a virtual skateboard.
Her digital deck allows VR users to navigate their
simulated worlds in a more smooth fashion with better
control and with better ability to engage their surroundings.
Early testing, by the way, shows a dramatic reduction in
cyber-sickness and that's piqued the interest, of course,
of entrepreneurs, but also our government,
particularly the US Department of Veteran Affairs,
and there are others looking at this, too,
because it has been amazing the results.
Megan, where are you?
Please stand so that we have a chance to recognize you.
[applause]
So, Megan, to help students like you succeed
whether here or doing designing virtual vehicles or creating
poignant art or preparing to transform the lives of children
who are in urban classrooms or in our clinics,
let's build on what we've already done to make VCU what
many of us view to be a student-centered university.
So, let's take a few examples.
We've launched our real initiative where Erin Webster
Garrett has provided some leadership.
Thank you, Erin.
And it's already beginning to transform the
undergraduate experience.
Our Provost and her team, like members of your team like Maggie
Tolan in academic advising, have widened the road to success for
first‑year students by designing clearer major maps and
curriculum pathways so that we can connect our students through
career counselors and make it easier for them to get a seat in
required classes.
It's one of the biggest headaches our first-year
students face is getting a schedule that works for them.
We're engaging our staff, our alumni mentors,
and our students' own parents and their family members so that
students have support beyond what we can provide as
a faculty.
And we have built physical spaces that enable and
inspire success.
This includes, as many of you know,
the five living- learning programs that we've
put together.
These are environments that really engage and challenge our
students whether they're in the classroom or in their
sleeping rooms.
We've more than tripled our institutional student aid
internally since 2008, helping more students stay in school
without amassing debt.
And I'm really, really grateful, it's really important that I say
this, I'm so grateful to our legislature and our state in
particular for ongoing and generous support to local aid.
By the way, you put it all together,
it's actually increased our local aid tenfold.
That's awesome.
And it has created so much more access and it's given us the
opportunity to take away a lot of the debt that our students
once had.
You know, we've also joined this national consortium of
urban‑serving universities that share best practices to help
improve student access and close the achievement gap.
And this is going to end up awarding hundreds of thousands
more degrees by the year 2025.
This is the APLU, the Association for Public and Land
Grant Universities that we're a big part of in Washington DC.
This is inspiring, but I have to tell you,
it's really only the beginning of what we've got to think about
what we're going to do together.
I envision that VCU will be a much more student‑centered
university everywhere.
And what I mean by everywhere, it's going to take every one of
us, regardless of our role.
We've all got to be committed to the mission.
I want every single student who engages with any one person at
VCU, every office, every group, every person to be taken
seriously, the center of the attention,
the center of our focus.
Their questions will be answered and we care deeply about them in
transformational ways, not in transactional ways,
and they can feel it.
People are very perceptive and intuitive and they know when
it's sincere and I know I can count on my community to deliver
on that.
You know, the Education Trust lists a few things that
student‑centered universities do really well and I want to tell
you about a few of those.
Not surprisingly, they make student success a campus-wide
priority throughout the universities that are
student-centered.
They use good data to make great decisions.
They remove obstacles that they find that are getting in the way
of students reaching graduation day.
And they require more from their students, too.
And here's how.
They do things like they eliminate optional participation
in the things that are shown to work and proven to work.
And then there's this one which particularly impels me.
Student-centered universities are much more innovative when it
comes to things like general education.
The idea of base courses worked well for most of us and goes
back 400 years in our own country and much,
much longer in Europe, of course.
But very little has changed since then.
In some ways, earning a degree in 2019 isn't that different
than it was in 1719.
But people certainly are different.
Our nation and our students are changing and we're going to
change, too, so that we can deliver an education for the
modern American Dream.
Time and again our students show us through their stunning
creativity and their great selfless efforts that they have
a relentless drive to find meaning in everything that
they do.
Why don't we find a way through a college education to
make that happen?
Let's help them do it.
By building on what we already do so well in areas like focused
inquiry that I think has been a tremendous success,
VCU will become the model for modern education by inviting our
students to solve the most important problems that our
society faces by giving their curriculum purpose and meaning.
Students today need to know why, a context in which what we're
asking them to learn really makes sense.
So, we need to imagine students focused on things like vexing
global health issues.
Let's take an example.
So, how could they, as undergraduate students,
consider why people in one zip code here in Richmond live so
many years longer than their neighbors in just another zip
code right next to it, something, by the way,
that we identified in VCU's Center on Society and Health.
So then we know that's the case, what could our students do
about it?
Or, think about how powerful and how motivated they could be if
they could take on things like climate change, or cancer,
something that we have been dedicated to as an institution
at our level for so many years, or social equity,
something that we know we really haven't been able to tackle in
our communities in Virginia, particularly our
immediate communities.
Today, I'm asking all of us as a faculty to reimagine the
educational experience of VCU.
Let's make it more meaningful for our students and make it
more purposeful and connect it more to our society.
We are a public institution and that's what people are looking
for, including our students, their parents,
and others who are supporting us.
I challenge us to consider what a degree stands for at VCU.
If someone earns a degree from VCU,
in what ways have we prepared them to be thoughtful catalysts
of the human experience?
In which ways will VCU students and the degrees that they earn
be shining examples of our national prominence?
Next, a nationally prominent VCU also has a faculty.
Us. All of us.
We are fearlessly committed to pursuing answers to save and
improve people's lives.
I want to point out one of my –- a couple of my colleagues,
Tom Eissenburg and Alison Breland.
A few months ago, they received a $20 million grant from the NIH
and the Food and Drug Administration, making it,
I think, a total of $40 million now since 2013.
This is to make sure that policies that regulate tobacco
use are actually based on sound science and are not going to
lead to unintended consequences that will make a bad problem
much worse.
So, Tom and Alison consider a host of issues,
including how products like electronic cigarettes are
engineered, the psychology of smokers,
and the clinical effect of tobacco use,
and that's going to help the FDA and the NIH better protect not
just smokers but also nonsmokers.
Tom and Allison are doing really important work at a time when
smoking is still killing about half of our Americans every year
-- I'm sorry, more than half a million of our Americans every
year. [laughter]
And e‑cigarette use is rising sharply,
particularly among teenagers.
Did I get all of that right, Tom and Alison?
Please rise so that we can recognize you.
[applause]
Tom and Alison, really, they're not alone in their commitment
to shaping the human experience.
I wish I could tell you about all of the stories that I have
of VCU which I often take to Washington DC to help us with
our funding and support.
Everywhere VCU has people who are so committed to improving
and saving people's lives, to solving serious social problems,
to teaching and mentoring diverse students who will go out
and shape society, but what we all recognize is that there is a
place here for absolutely everyone.
This is a faculty that cares more for students than any place
I've ever known.
In doing this, we model faculty-student engagement in
ways that we should for a modern research university.
And you know what?
This is sorely needed.
One of my highest priorities in the coming year will be to
eliminate the challenges that my faculty colleagues face in your
ability to pursue national prominence through our teaching
mission, our research mission, our service and
clinical missions.
First, despite the significant gains that we've
seen, we still need more faculty members.
Secondly, we need to continue to focus on diversity,
and more importantly, we've got to be certain that we are
committed to inclusion.
I thank my colleague, Aashir Nasim,
for all the great work that he's doing to guide me on that front.
We cannot build a VCU that's accessible to everyone if we
don't take our commitments to including everyone
more seriously.
And we can step it up.
Next, we need more options to keep on board the outstanding
members of our faculty who we already have here.
This is going to include better compensation which remains one
of my highest priorities working with the General Assembly again
this spring.
It has been for many years.
It's going to be another priority again this year,
top priority.
The Make It Real campaign which has created more than 50 new
endowed chairs and professorships and 80 endowed
faculty support and research funds has helped dramatically.
We need to do more.
We're making great progress.
Jay, thank you to you and your team for all your help.
We can also retain our very best faculty members through
promotion and tenure, a process that reflects our mission and
our commitments as a modern research university.
And we can also make it easier to move innovations from the
laboratory or clinic or other place to the marketplace.
I should include studio in that.
Steps to streamline this process have already been made through
VCU Venture Lab, a pre-accelerator that launched us
this fall and pairs our innovators and investors with
potential product users.
This is going to help our faculty researchers
commercialize their discoveries and it's going to help fill a
void for Virginia.
Across the state, the volume of research exceeds the capacity
that we have to commercialize it.
What that really means is that we're collectively more
productive as innovators than we are as entrepreneurs and we've
got to take entrepreneurship to the
next level.
That's part of the human experience.
Our market potential also outpaces our resources,
including access to proof of concept funding,
a problem Venture Lab is going to help to alleviate.
So, let's make all of the resources of our enterprise work
for all of us by collaborating more and competing less and
looking at our place in the overall world as opposed to
looking at our world as just VCU.
Let's erase the imaginary lines that we seem to have drawn
between ideas and ideologies.
We are one VCU.
As a faculty, we perform at extraordinary levels.
I want nothing to get in our way as we exemplify national
prominence for VCU and the profound impact that VCU has on
the human experience.
I say that word because that's what we're here for is shaping
the human experience.
Finally, a nationally prominent university like VCU, at VCU,
it means that our healthcare mission,
just like our educational mission,
is as accessible as it is excellent.
I want to tell you about someone named Cameron Drake.
Cameron is a biomedical technician at VCU and he repairs
our dialysis machines for kidney patients.
I want to tell you about a remarkable twist of fate that
Cameron himself, he actually learned that he needed a kidney
transplant to live.
His mom, Kimberly, she donated her left kidney to her son last
October at VCU Medical Center.
Just hours before their procedure,
Cameron wrote something on social media that I thought was
really cool.
A mother's love, he says, is unfathomable.
She gave me life once, and she's going to do it again today.
That was the day of his surgery.
Kimberly and Cameron are both doing really well.
The transplant was successful and it was historic, by the way.
Theirs was the 162nd kidney transplant at Hume-Lee
Transplant Center at VCU in 2018, which was a record.
And by the year's end, by the way, I wanted to tell you,
we actually had to perform 202, which is actually like an
average of something like four in a week at VCU.
Cameron can't be here today because he's actually doing so
well that he's at work, but Kimberly is here.
Kimberly, could you stand?
[applause]
It's great to see you, Kimberly.
And it's great to see you looking so well.
You know, there were so many other milestones at VCU Health
as well that I want to talk about and I'm going to take a
moment to thank Marsha for being my partner,
my right arm in healthcare.
Chandra Bhati in Medicine performed the first
robotic‑assisted kidney implantation anywhere in the
East Coast, which means an easier recovery for both the
recipient as well as the donor.
Massey Cancer Center became the first in Virginia to offer
FDA-approved CAR T‑cell therapies.
So, I think most of you know what this is,
but it's basically a revolutionary immunotherapy that
uses the patient's own immune cells,
takes them out and puts them back in so that the cells can
attack the cancer.
John McCarty who has been our leader in this area has just
been a tremendous pioneer.
I'm so proud of him.
I don't know if he's here today but I'm very grateful to him for
the great work that he's done there.
At Pauley Heart Center, you should know that we actually
implanted our 114th total artificial heart.
You saw a recipient of an implant on the screen.
I wanted to tell you something; 114 actually makes it so that
there are only three hospitals in the world, not the country,
in the world that have ever done more.
That's pretty cool. [applause]
And as most of you who drive by 10th, 11th,
and Leigh Street know, because something has dramatically
changed, we broke ground on our largest capital project in our
history at VCU.
It's our 16‑story adult outpatient facility that's going
to bring together the services of most of our outpatient
clinics, but it includes Massey Cancer Center and I'm really
happy about that.
It'll put them all in one location and it will have
wonderful parking that you will be thrilled with.
But, you know, it's a really significant step in what I've
been talking about for years, which is my passion to transform
this medical center.
This is a preeminent medical center.
By the way, we are, again, the number one ranked hospital
in Richmond.
I'm really proud of that.
But something else I'm really proud of,
and I did the calculation myself, I'm so excited about it,
inpatient satisfaction.
In just the last five years, our inpatient satisfaction has
increased 17%.
That's a hard story to tell in a place as large and complex
as ours.
But you know what that does?
That puts us in the top 20% of academic medical centers in
terms of inpatient satisfaction, so I'm really,
really pleased with that, and I cannot thank the entire
healthcare team.
I'm, of course, talking about healthcare providers,
our care partners, everyone who does so much to be so faithful
to this vision that we have put together.
So, how can our national prominence ensure that every one
of our patients, no matter what their background is,
regardless of the pathologies they're dealing
with, we want them all to have a chance at better and
longer lives?
That's the human experience and that's really what our conscious
tells us to do.
So, how can we do this?
For one, VCU will be ranked top 20 among children's hospitals
three years from now.
We're going to do it.
We're going to build on our successes since we've opened the
children's pavilion just three years ago.
By the way, in the Children's Pavilion,
our patient satisfaction in the Pavilion is now among the top in
the nation, very high patient satisfaction.
Next, we're going to make Massey Cancer Center the first
NCI‑designated comprehensive cancer center in
the Commonwealth.
That's really important.
We're on the cusp of it anyway, but we're doing some things to
make that happen.
What does that mean?
It means we're going to be able to take better care of more
people with complex issue, where they haven't had the hope.
We're going to give them the hope.
It's a larger commitment to clinical trials that's going to
put us on the leading edge of medical science.
We're also improving patients' abilities to access life-saving
services that we provide by removing obstacles.
So we're going to be focused on patient flow and we're going to
make it as easy as we can possibly making it to get into
VCU and to get out of VCU healthy.
This isn't a VCU problem, by the way, alone.
Large medical centers around the nation struggle with this.
Twenty-four million Americans end up in the emergency rooms as
opposed to getting the kind of care that they need to get,
so we need to make certain that they have access.
And one of the reasons, by the way,
that so many Americans end up in emergency rooms is because they
just can't get to see a primary care physician or the kind of
specialist that they might need based on what they might be
dealing with.
A lot of people have no place to turn and we're going to
fix that.
Finally, because we're a preeminent health system and an
incredible research university put together,
VCU is going to help the Richmond community become the
national hub for healthcare innovation,
and that's why I'm really excited to announce something to
you today.
It's an initiative called The Health Innovation Consortium.
This is a partnership of VCU Health, Activation Capital,
which you might have known as the Virginia Biotech Research
Partnership, and VCU, of course.
What it's going to do, it's going to merge our commitments
to research, to human health, and student success
all together.
This is a consortium that's going to allow students and
faculty who have an idea to innovate healthcare,
how they move it seamlessly from concept to commercial viability
to a mature start‑up.
That's what we need to do more of.
This is a consortium that will attract the very best and the
brightest health innovators in our region.
And it's going to show that the real benefit of national
prominence ‑‑ I want you to hear this because this is not just a
superficial thing -- why is national prominence important?
Because it allows us to attract the nationally prominent people
who can give us -- bring us the local benefit and local impact.
And we need that impact in Richmond.
We know it.
The Health Innovation Consortium can only happen at VCU because
we're the only comprehensive public research university with
a nationally prominent medical center.
And this is an institution‑wide commitment to human health,
a remarkably entrepreneurial student body, and, of course,
we have a history of innovation at every level.
We need to take it to the next level,
but we have had that wonderful history of our reputation
in innovation.
We also have the benefit of being in a capital city with a
strong collaborative and innovative ecosystem that grows
every day.
The spirit in Richmond is awesome. I love it.
The demand is there.
Last fall alone, VCU students pitched more than 60 healthcare
starts‑ups through the VCU daVinci Center, by the way.
The need is there and this new initiative is going to help more
people gain from the innovative spirit of VCU.
For the patients we serve, this means more access to our
nationally prominent healthcare.
It's been an amazing 180 years, wouldn't you say?
Not to mention what's happened in this last year.
I'm so proud of what VCU has become, which is to say that,
honestly, I'm really very proud of all of you.
There is no better place to chase your American Dream than
right here at a nationally prominent Virginia
Commonwealth University.
Thank you all so much for gathering together today for
our talk.
I really, I sincerely appreciate everything that you do to shape
VCU and the way that you have shaped it and all the ways that
you touch so many people's lives.
Have a wonderful rest of the day and thank you.
[applause]
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