Downtown Campus
The University at Buffalo was born at the corner of Main and Virginia streets in what is now the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus in downtown Buffalo. UB’s first building was home to the medical and dental school. More than 160 years later, the university has come full circle with the beginnings of a new home for its Academic Health Center and the five health sciences schools that constitute it.
The vision for the new campus is still emerging and the plan is only beginning to take shape. But the rationale for the move is clear. The schools of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Dental Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Public Health and Health Professions need to be near the region’s leading tertiary care hospitals and Roswell Park Cancer Institute.
As neighbors and partners, UB, Kaleida Health System, Roswell Park, and other health care organizations can make the connections between clinical care, education, research, and the development of new life-saving treatments that can improve the lives of the region’s residents, and a new spin-off biotechnology industry that will grow the regional economy.
Imagine Buffalo’s downtown bustling with the kind of vibrancy that only a university campus can bring. The relocation of UB’s Academic Health Center to downtown Buffalo will bring more than 13,000 additional faculty, staff and students into the urban core; many of them will live and shop there. The growth of the campus will provide new jobs and income for Buffalo residents.
Where new UB facilities will be located is unknown—but an additional four million square feet of buildings will make a big difference. UB’s new campus will take advantage of proximity to public transit and will contribute to the development of the BNMC as a great new urban district.
While a timeline has not been established, the medical and nursing schools would be the first to move. The School of Public Health and Health Professions would move next. The schools of Dental Medicine and Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences would follow.
The university’s presence downtown already is growing. UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences opened in 2006. A new UB Downtown Gateway is under development in the former M. Wile Building, with a new, expanded home for the Educational Opportunity Center to be built adjacent to it on Ellicott Street.
Most exciting, UB is working with Kaleida Health and others to develop a mixed use, jointly operated facility on Goodrich Street that would house our clinical and translational research center and the UB biosciences incubator.
UB is going back to where it started – and forging a great new future at the same time.
