was associate dean for primary care and professor and chair of the Department of
Family Medicine. J. Ocie Harris, M.D., associate dean at the College of Medicine
since November 2001, was named dean Jan. 28, 2003, replacing Scherger. John
P. Fogarty, M.D., was named dean April 10, 2008, assuming leadership of the
college Aug. 8, 2008, following Harris’ retirement. Prior to accepting the position
at FSU, Fogarty served as senior associate dean for operations and associate
dean for primary care at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.
The FSU College of Medicine welcomed its first 30 students, the Class of
2005, in May 2001. Enrollment steadily increased to the current maximum class
size of 120 new medical students a year. The first full class to be admitted, the
Class of 2011, arrived in May 2007. And in 2010, with the arrival of the Class of
2014, the college reached full enrollment of 480.
The college was designed as a community-based medical school. The students
spend their first two years taking basic science courses on the FSU campus in
Tallahassee and are then assigned to one of the regional medical school campuses
for their third- and fourth-year clinical training.
Regional campuses originally opened in Orlando, Pensacola, Sarasota and
Tallahassee. Additional campuses in Daytona Beach and Fort Pierce opened in
July 2007 to help accommodate 240 third- and fourth-year students training
with a clinical faculty of more than 1,500 physicians throughout the state. In
addition, the college in 2007 opened a rural clinical-training site in Immokalee.
There, third- and fourth-year students from the six regional campuses have the
option to take required or elective rotations in a setting with a strong tie to the
college’s mission of working with the medically underserved. Other rural clinical-training
opportunities are available in Marianna, home of the college’s Rural
Track, and Thomasville, Ga. In the Rural Track, third-year students have the
option to spend an entire year completing rotations in Marianna, approximately
an hour’s drive west of Tallahassee.
Originally housed in Duxbury Hall (administrative offices and student community
room), Montgomery Gym (anatomy lab), several science buildings
(classrooms) and portable buildings (administrative offices), the college moved
into transitional facilities at the former FSU Developmental Research School
on the northwest corner of the FSU campus in three phases between December
2001 and April 2002. The college broke ground Feb. 4, 2003, on a new
300,000-square-foot complex of buildings to house the first- and second-year
educational program, and moved into these buildings in October 2004.
Years earlier, in 1970, the Program in Medical Sciences (PIMS) was founded
as an expansion program of the University of Florida College of Medicine.
Funded by a National Institutes of Health grant, PIMS was designed to address
the need for physicians in the rural areas of Northwest Florida. Through PIMS,
students completed their first year of medical school at FSU and then transferred
to UF to complete their medical education. Initially, the PIMS pharmacology
course was taught by faculty from Florida A&M University, which was a partner
12 | Breaking the Mold