Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Forward Together podcast. I'm Rick Newma, president of Wichita State University.
Today we're going to talk about the Wichita Biomedical Campus, an exciting project that we've been working on for quite some time and at this very moment is being constructed in the heart of downtown Wichita. A quick overview of the project. Wichita Biomedical Campus is a cooperative effort among Wichita State, WSU Tech and the University of Kansas to centralize healthcare education and research in Wichita. The $300 million facility is the largest ever investment in downtown Wichita. Anticipated to open in 2027, the campus will accommodate 3,000 students and establish Wichita as a hub for world class healthcare education and research. I'm joined today by two exceptional leaders who are deeply committed to the success of the wichita Biomedical Campus. Dr. Sherry Utash, President of WSU Tech, and Dr. Greg Hand, the dean of the College of Health Professions here at Wichita State. Welcome to the show, Sherry and Greg. All right, well, welcome, Sherry and Greg to the podcast. Thanks for stopping by, we really appreciate it. And we're going to talk about the biomedical campus that is emerging downtown. Hope you all are excited about that as much as I am. This is something that the university has been talking about for a long time and no one ever thought that it was going to happen.
When I started talking about it, when I was interviewing Greg, I'm sure he thought, well, yeah, that's not going to happen. But it is and it's very exciting for not only the university, WSU Tech, certainly the College of Health Professions, but know our community. It's going to be very transformational. And so Sherry, I thought I'd start with you. And you know, we've been partners in crime for a while.
When we started talking about the affiliation with Wichita Area Technical College, now WSU Tech, you know, we, we imagined that we would have a lot of opportunities to partner together. And I wonder, I think would have thought we would be partnering like this.
And so the affiliation between Wichita State and WSU Tech plays a crucial role in how we shape opportunities for our students and build a talent pipeline. Tell me how WSU Tech fits into this vision of establishing this interprofessional collaboration between our university, WSU Tech and ku.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: So thanks for having me on the podcast. And you are right.
Watching that big crane be built in the air. And I just happened to be down at Niche the day they were building it and I just couldn't leave because it was really cool. And now to drive down Kellogg and see that 110 foot crane and you know what's going to come out of the ground next and the footprint of it, it's pretty phenomenal.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Yeah, well you can see that crane from far and far away.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: It's just so cool. It's just such an incredible sign of progress in downtown Wichita. But when we go back to the affiliation, the reason that we did the affiliation, I mean we did it for lot reasons, but we did it because we thought it was a good thing for students. We thought it was a good thing for business and industry and certainly a good thing for both of our institutions. And the thing about it is it was innovative, it was a bit disruptive at the time and we knew it would provide opportunities that we could never imagine. When I look at what's going to happen with BioMed, it's like the next natural extension of that. All of a sudden now you have a technical college with two research univers, you know, actually moving forward in a whole new area to really put Wichita on the map and to really become a very, very focused area on healthcare and to create that for our city, for our community. When I think about this and I think about the way that students are going to benefit from this, I'm going to go to the. Let's start at the Future Ready center. We opened that healthcare center for Future ready Center for USD 259 students just two years ago. We started with 53 students.
This semester we have almost 300.
Once we move some of the programs that we're moving to the biomed we can expand that probably double. So we're starting to put people on that trajectory. And then when you think about the students and nurses that are going to be and Surg Tech, which are the two programs that we're going to have down there and the opportunity for interdisciplinary learning and to work with other students and to learn and to increase self efficacy and to train healthcare people in a completely different interdisciplinary way.
I mean it's game changing.
It is a true transformation of downtown Wichita from a building standpoint. But the things that are going to happen inside the walls of those buildings are truly transformational to the healthcare industry.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And one of the unique aspects that I haven't really seen across the country, you know, I was trained in, you've heard me say this before, the largest health science center in the world, the Texas Medical center in Houston, which is very innovative, cutting edge, but one of the things that I haven't seen across the country, I've been to lots of health science centers. I know Greg comes from that background and across the country there's many health science centers. There's not usually a technical college associated with it. So I think that really makes it unique. From the very entry level to postgraduate medical education. Theoretically a student could enter in there and if they wanted to be a physician, they could finish there too.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: And then there'll be opportunities to facilitate more learning with the high schools and you're already doing that with the future.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Ready centers, creating those stackable pathways. You know, education's a super highway. Get on, get off, get back on, get off. And I think that the biomed, I mean it's the real essence, it's the next step in the real essence of what we established with the affiliation several years ago.
And certainly, you know, I would concur with you. I don't know that anybody ever thought it would really happen. And to by be living into this and really watching it and knowing for generations to come what's going to happen because of the vision that you had and the diligence and the grit and the perseverance you had to get to this point.
It's, it's phenomenal.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Well, I had a lot of good partners with you all and others and so.
But I appreciate that and I just learned a long time ago, and I think you operate this way too, is that you stay on message, you don't get on message and you keep moving people forward and people start getting off message, wait a minute, we're going this direction. And so I think that really helped move it forward. So Greg, welcome.
[00:07:24] Speaker C: Thank you. Happy to be here.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: So Greg started during COVID I did, came from West Virginia and University of West Virginia and has been central to getting to where we are today and the design and just the whole programming of the building and being involved in it in every step of the way.
So tell us a little bit more about partnerships and collaborations with private companies and government agencies that will be essential to making this a success.
How do you see the biomedical campus furthering that? You, you could probably already talk about some of the things that you've been working on so the listener can understand that.
[00:08:09] Speaker C: So I think the vision certainly for me and for the College of Health Professions is to look at the biomedical campus as potentially replicating the beginning of the innovation campus. When you think about Wichita State University nationally, what it's really known for is innovation in aeronautics and flight, thinking about flight, bringing industry, the aeronautics industry together onto a campus. I think we still have, we have that capacity to do that downtown with healthcare. Healthcare is certainly the second largest industry in south central Kansas.
And we have the capacity to do the kinds of things that were done on Innovation Campus, which is really consolidating, bringing industry to the area and consolidating it in one particular area and being a magnet for that. And we want to try and do the same thing with health care and healthcare education. This is really, this building is really the anchor for the biomedical district. But when we think about this building, it's beyond just education. It's research, there's clinical practice that will go in there. We already have partners that are going to move in in the next three or four years.
Literally across the street from us. We have a pediatric clinic that's going to move in. We have the osteopathic school across the street that will have 750 do students by the time we move in down there. So there's already critical mass of the education piece and the clinical piece. The other piece we need is to really be the magnet for industry, not only to bring it into the state but also into that area so that we can be seen as this core of education, research, practice and industry partnerships. And I think that's the direction we want to go. That's what WSU was able to do on Innovation Campus and we'd like to see that happen downtown in the biomedical.
[00:09:59] Speaker A: Yeah, and I'm glad you brought the Innovation Campus forward as an example of success that we already. It's a proof of, you know, a proof of concept of how this works. And we know that that's going to attract. It's already started to attract even before steel is coming out of the ground.
WSU Tech's health programs that Sherry already mentioned, nursing, surgical Technology and then KU's School of Medicine in Wichita and their School of Pharmacy in Wichita, at least initially. And then hopefully their clinics and additional clinics from the university will play a role going forward.
And we'll be done, knock on wood, by the end of 26 with students starting to actually learn and study in the building.
Research sometime in 2027, summer of 27 and beyond, I think. And faculty and staff might move in a little bit sooner. So it sounds like it's a long way away, but they'll go by really, really fast.
Okay, Sherry, back to you.
You talked a little bit about this, but a little bit more. How does the biomedical campus align, advance WSU Tech's mission to provide workforce ready and maybe talk a little bit about the future ready centers and that partnership with 259 and what the purpose of those are and you've already talked about some of the interest in the healthcare one.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Sure. You know, the future ready center is we've built the healthcare with USD 259. So it gives opportunity for juniors and seniors in high school to start looking at a career in health care and maybe getting some of those prerequisites done, maybe getting their cna, their cma, their phlebotomy, ekg, paramedic, emt, those kind of things done while they're still in high school. And then the next thing that we're getting ready to explore with that is a pre nursing. Is a nursing program, a pre nursing program for high school students. So a cohort of students while they're in high school starting towards the nursing degree. All of this is done in order to create that talent pipeline because you know, our job is to create that initial entry level pipeline of talent into all different industries. So as we look at that, then how are we building pathways from what we do in certificates and two year associate of applied science degrees into the university towards their baccalaureate degrees? And that's the beauty of the affiliation and that's the beauty of what we're doing together collaboratively is we're just setting, we're saying, okay, we're gonna start this, you know, education career ladder together and here's the first step. And then once you finish with that, what's the next step? And maybe you go to work and then you go, boy, I really, I want to do what they're doing. What do I have to do to do that? Well then they get back with industry and industry sees that. And oftentimes industry pays for additional education which reduces student loan debt.
But I think the thing that is, it's creating that pathway, it's like it's creating that ladder that people can continue to succeed. And we're starting earlier and earlier with that with high school students, with middle school camps and those kind of things just to create exposure so that everybody, you know, everyone in this city, all of our young people and children can know what types of careers are out there for them and have a frame of reference for that. And I think that's super important.
And we have to create awareness and then create the pathway for them to be successful to do that. And I really, I just, I think that is the thing. And then seeing is believing. Can you just, just for a minute think about high school students, middle school students, walking into the biomed and seeing all of that and thinking, boy, if I didn't think I wanted to do this before, I sure want to do it now because look at all this cool stuff, you know, And I think there's such synergies there. So I think that reaches the mission and then I think there's things that we can do down the road with the culinary school in culinary health and sciences of food and food handling and all those kind of things.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Food is central to your health.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: I don't even know that we know what those are yet, but I do think that's a definite growth area for us as we continue to envision what this looks like. And I do think it's just going to draw industry in a whole different way than we've ever seen before. Very similar to the innovation campus. I think that's a great analogy, by the way.
[00:15:05] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: And so you kind of talked about this healthcare corridor that we're envisioning. And one of the reasons why I wanted it to be where it's located, where it's coming out of the ground, is because the culinary school is down there, because the do school is down there, because there is social services nearby, there's a hospital just north of it to create this ecosystem that is already starting before we're even building. So, Greg, a couple of things that I know you're working on, a couple of centers, institutes that you're working on. Why don't you talk about that? We also have academic center in the biomedical humanities and all focused around health ethics in a different college, but interdisciplinary in nature. But talk about the rehabilitation healthcare data stuff that you've been working on that you're trying to position with the new biomedical campus downtown.
[00:16:04] Speaker C: Yeah, let me start with the Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine and Assistive Technology, which is something we launched a few weeks ago. This is a collaboration among the College of Health Professions, Biomedical engineering over in the engineering college and our industry and defense partnership programs on innovation campus. We have what is really a unique opportunity here, which is in health professions. We have clinicians, we have a patient base. They're out seeing patients, particularly in pediatrics, but they understand what the clinical issues are.
Their challenge is that they were trained to diagnose and understand what challenges are for their patient base. We have biomedical engineering who were trained to solve problems from an engineering perspective.
That's not unusual for big research one type universities that have a lot of healthcare presence and have engineering presence to have health professions and engineering work together. La Jolla is building a new building for research to combine those things. There was just one built with Southwestern Medical center and the University of Dallas in Dallas. Research Triangle has several of Those Boston has numerous groups. We're trying to build that relationship as well. What we have that is really unique is not only do we have the capacity to understand, identify and understand the clinical challenges, but we also have the ability to solve those challenges technically building devices, building new technologies. But with Innovation Campus, we have this extra piece. We can actually fabricate devices, test devices, and if we put those on patients and we test the safety and do what's called a phase one trial, we have the ability in house to generate two or 300 of those prototypes to do a bigger clinical trial. And that's when industry starts getting interested in this. That's when they start saying, we think this may work and it may be something we want to put some money into. And when you do that, you bring in a whole new skill set from industry. So for WSU to be able to identify clinical problems, go all the way through fabricating a device and then testing a device, after being able to create and manufacture a few hundred of those, I can count on one hand the number of universities that can do that in the United States. That gives us an incredible competitive advantage to draw industry into the area.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: And certainly nothing in the Midwest that I can think of that would have all those assets. And I think for the listener who may not understand fully what we do at Wichita State, but you know, a lot of our research is based in the aerospace industry. But out of that has come our expertise in advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, smart manufacturing, robotics, automation, all of those things. And one of the big outcomes of that happened during the pandemic when we stood up that molecular diagnostic lab, utilizing all those assets that, you know, other institutions wouldn't be able to do. We did that in a matter of months to help really boost testing in our state and save a lot of industries, keep people you know well and preventing them from, you know, taking the virus into their work workplace. You can't build planes remotely. So the aerospace industry was a big supporter of that.
[00:19:34] Speaker C: One of the, one of the interesting things about molecular Diagnostics lab is not only have they been incredibly successful at doing testing, high throughput testing for Covid, they've also developed a research program there where they are really searching for what I call the holy grail in medical lab sciences, which is testing, getting away from blood, being able to use fluids, being able to use saliva, things like that, to get away from sticking needles in people. And they're not only beginning to use those kind of tests, but they're able to stack those tests so they can take a saliva sample and test for many viruses rather than just one and not have to poke holes in people to do it. And that really is the holy grail with med lab sciences.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Well, and just to follow up with that, our connections with industry, some of our partners on campus like Deloitte helps us when we need equipment, when we need to get first in line to get something, like we did when we were standing at that lab. Standing at that lab. And I don't think people understand that of these assets indirectly help us as well. And so there was another center that you're working on around healthcare data. Explain that in layman's terms what you're working on there.
[00:20:54] Speaker C: It's called the Kansas center for the Advancement of Healthcare. It is perhaps the first major effort for a partnership between WSU and KUMC in Kansas City. University of Kansas Medical center we're working together to build a healthcare analytics center that will be able to collect lots of different kinds of health related data from across the state. Whether it's personal health information, from hospitals to social chatter online to wearable devices. It really will give us the opportunity not only to get a holistic view of people's health rather than just what they report, their signs and symptoms when they go to the doctor, but really where they live and how that impacts their lives. But we'll be able to do it with Kansans, from birth certificates to death certificates. We did this in South Carolina many years ago, which is really the prototype for this type of center. And they currently have about 3 1/2 million data sets on South Carolinians, literally from birth to death certificates. And it's a data set that's used all over the world. We have the capacity to do that in Kansas, but we have the ability to go one step further. And now with AI, we can actually take different kinds of data, data from satellite images of air quality all the way down to personal health records and really create that holistic view of what someone's life looks like in terms of their health. We'll be the first center in the United States to do that. There are very few in the world.
And again, I think it is really emanating from us being able to be partners with the biomedical campus. But it's really, I think our first effort with KU to create something that's going to really impact health statewide.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: And we have the infrastructure in place in the innovation campus to help move that forward with the Digital Transformation Hub and the National Institute for Research and Digital Transformation that really is not available anywhere else. So that's Also a plus. All right, let's go back to the healthcare corridor and that whole concept again. And we've talked a little bit about this.
It was important for me to think about establishing some centralized core of healthcare services in the core of our city. Any city the size of Wichita or larger has something like this at their core in it, usually in an academic health science center environment.
So, Sherry, could you talk a little bit more about how you might think that WSU Tech will be fitting into that? You talked a little bit about the culinary school, but you've mentioned some other things around culinary medicine and that sort of thing and relationship with.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Well, certainly I think the culinary school will have a part to play as we move forward into this. And that might even result in some of the industry that will go into that corridor. Possibly. The other thing too is, you know, let's think about the partnerships that are going to naturally occur. As you know, we are really building in our RN program, we're building the capacity in that program. We're building the bridge programs from, you know, paramedics to RN and from PN to rn, and we're going to continue to build these bridges to be able to continue to build careers that will then ultimately be able to go into the BSN program at the university in the biomed center. When you think about industry, this is such an economic development opportunity because, you know, think about any of your healthcare ecosystems. They're like cities. They're like cities. I mean, it takes all kinds of people to make this run. So not only do they need the healthcare individuals that we're gonna be educating and ready to go into that talent pipeline, but think about all the other functions of these ecosystems. And for us, as we try to provide that, that's going to open up a lot of doors and probably a lot of new programs at WSU Tech in order to meet those needs and in order to build that infrastructure that's needed not only by our hospitals today and our health facilities, but then as we build into all of this in research and in different ways of adding in, you know, I mean, the dream. The dream is, is that, you know, it starts right there at the corner of Broadway and Williams and it goes all the way down in an L shape all the way down to via Christi to St. Joe. That's the dream. It doesn't have to stop there either. But I mean, the dream is, is to build this incredible infrastructure. And the other thing, I think long term for us, we do apply a lot of applied learning, of course, in this area. But I do think there's some, there's some lower level applied research that we could probably get into at some point. WSU tech could be involved that WSU tech could be involved in as we continue to build this out and really live into the vision.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: Yeah, so the city is updating their master plan for downtown. And just yesterday I met with the architectural design firm, planning firm, and someone asked me at that meeting, okay, so we know what phase one is, we think we know what phase two is. So what's phase three?
And so I had to stop and think about that. And really the next step is that bioscience connection with industry and where would that be? And they even said, well, could the dental school, does it have to be across the street from the biomedical, the phase one of the biomedical campus? And I hadn't thought about that either. I think it does because we're trying to leverage some of those resources.
But as you both know, we kind of use Phoenix as a model because it's the most recent sort of health science ecosystem that's been developed in the last 20 years. And they bookended that that district with research on one end and education training on the other end had a high school for the health sciences in the middle.
So we do need to think about, because we have developers that are actually starting to work on that in the north part of this envisioned corridor. We do need to start thinking about, well, what would the next thing be? And my message to them was it's important, I think, is to demarcate that area so people understand what this is. You know, we have people asking all the time, well, where should I build? If we were to come here, I think it needs to be intentional like that. And so we'll see where that, that goes. But I'm excited that the universe is going to play a role in helping shape that, that as well. I'm sure you all be involved in conversations. So, Greg, same question for you. You kind of alluded to the, the. You call it a healthcare district, I call it a healthcare corridor. Some people call it bioscience corridor, whatever ends up being called. Same principle. How do you see the college fitting into that here at the university, or other things that we haven't really talked about?
[00:28:24] Speaker C: Well, you know, from our college perspective, we really have four missions. We have the education mission, the standard tripartite mission of education, research and service for service in health professions. It's really outreach. We also have that clinical piece which many of the other colleges don't have. We have an expectation of Clinical practice, and we have an expectation of impacting people's health through clinical practice. All of those things will fit very nicely into the biomedical corridor.
I think there are certain anchors. If you look at the successful corridors around the country, there are some anchors. There's always a hospital. There are clinics and clinical practice going on. There's a major educational component. There's always a high school, because that's really where the pipeline for us begins.
And, you know, we're talking about a magnet high school, a magnet health professions high school downtown. So I think we already have a good anchor in there. With St. Francis on the north end, with us on the south end. It really, as you allude to what's going to go in between, we need industry coming in. They're going to come where they see their employment, where they see their next generation of employees, not only in terms of hiring them, but also being involved in the education of them. Innovation Campus has done that incredibly well. So the prototype for us, that model is already there, and we want to do that. The next steps I see, and we're already doing it. Is talking with industry we have at St. Francis. We certainly have, for example, probably the premier structural heart program in the world, where they're doing minimally invasive heart surgeries and doing just incredibly progressive things.
Companies come all the time. Vice presidents and presidents from international companies fly here all the time to watch them do the surgeries and do those kinds of things. We want to be more involved in that. I'm sure Sherry, with her Surg Tech program, is very interested in playing a role in that. But again, to have that pipeline from high school to university level, where we have employees coming out or future employees coming out at different levels, from associate degree to bachelor's all the way up to doctoral and the clinical practice, all of those things in the same area, it's a huge. It's going to be a huge magnet for industry.
Not only industry to build their own buildings, but to have buildings where you have education and industry working together potentially on different floors, maybe on the same floors. But if you look at the successful biomedical districts, you see that happening now, where buildings are being built with a combination of the education and the clinical and the industry pieces together, whether it's basic science labs or more applied sciences, I think that's really the future of these districts, and I think we're lining our assets up perfectly to do that.
[00:31:28] Speaker A: I agree. Well, we could talk all day long about this, but if the listener would like to learn more about the biomedical campus, go to Our website, Wichita.edu, and search Wichita Biomedical Campus. It'll take you to a website with renderings and a live cam where you can actually see, as Sherry mentioned, the crane that's, I don't know, a couple hundred feet in the sky. You can see it from all over, is up. And you'll start seeing steel coming out of the ground in a couple of weeks, and it'll be completed in about two and a half years. So thank you guys for being here today. It's good to see you. Thank you and appreciate the conversation.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: You bet.
[00:32:08] Speaker A: And thank you all for listening. And be sure to rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to the Forward Together podcast. Go Shock Trackers.
[00:32:25] Speaker C: Sponsorship for the Forward Together podcast is provided by Scott Rice.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Officeworks and the Shocker Store.
Additional thanks to Nair Amp WSU Carpentry Shop and gocreate.
