How Research & Education Work at University Hospitals

UHCMC Quarterly Update | May 2021

A robust commitment to education and research has always been part of the identity of University Hospitals. It’s the “teach” and “discover” in our three-part mission: To Heal. To Teach. To Discover. Today, these key priorities are overseen by the UH Research & Education Institute, led by Mukesh K. Jain, MD, UH’s Chief Academic Officer.

“Our vision is to create a virtuous cycle of discovery and impact, leveraging the remarkable talent that exists within our health system, coupled with the excellence that our strategic partners bring to bear, in order to achieve maximal impact,” he says. “The end goal is to create a healthier community and world by delivering world-class science and advanced, compassionate clinical care.”

What does this look like in practice at UH? In a word, complicated. But necessarily so.

The process begins with the work of physicians and scientists within UH academic departments, institutes and Centers of Excellence. Research here runs the gamut, from basic laboratory studies to projects evaluating health outcomes of entire populations.

These scientific discoveries, in turn, are translated into new potential medicines, sometimes through the Harrington Discovery Institute, or into new medical devices or diagnostic tests with the support of UH Ventures. A rare disease discovery could be advanced through the Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre, a trans-Atlantic collaboration between UH and the University of Oxford. Clinical trials studying the effectiveness of these therapies are managed expertly in the UH’s Clinical Research Center, with the goal of determining if these new therapies are making a difference in patients’ lives.

While all of this is going on, medical students from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Northeast Ohio Medical University here locally train under UH mentors, as do medical students from Israel’s Technion University, learning what they need to know to become the next generation of physician researchers and leaders.

Although this all makes for a complicated organizational structure, the end goal is very simple, Dr. Jain says: “We want to ensure that research and education are aligned with clinical excellence, so that we can offer maximal impact for our patients.”