UB Medical School Ranked No. 7 By U.S. News & World Report Among Nation's Comprehensive Medical Schools

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo has earned the distinction of having three of its five professional health schools ranked among the top 10 schools in their field in the United States by U.S. News & World Report.

The UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences is No. 7 among comprehensive medical schools in this year's ranking of the nation's 126 medical schools, up from the "second tier" -- those schools ranking 11th through 20th -- among comprehensive medical schools in last year's survey.

This year's rankings appear in the national news magazine’s March 21 "America’s Best Graduate Schools" issue.

The ranking divides medical schools into research and comprehensive categories, based on their primary emphasis. Comprehensive medical schools are those whose chief mission is to train primary-care physicians.

While the magazine does not include other health-professional schools in this year's rankings, the UB School of Dental Medicine and the School of Pharmacy each were ranked No. 6 in the nation in their respective fields in last year's compilation of "America's Best Graduate Schools."

This year, the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences joins them in the Top 10 rankings.

"We are very pleased to be ranked so high, and to rise in the rankings so dramatically over last year," said John P. Naughton, M.D., UB vice president of clinical affairs and dean of the medical school. "This indicates that we are succeeding in our striving to be one of the leading comprehensive medical schools in the nation, and we are grateful to our faculty for helping to make this progress possible.

"UB has continued to provide both state-wide and national leadership in educating more physicians in the fields of family medicine, pediatrics and internal medicine," Naughton added.

"In the past year, we’ve been fortunate to win grants to fund two major centers -- $12 million for the national Women’s Health Initiative Vanguard Center and $8 million to co-found the nation’s first Center for the Clinical and Medical Epidemiology of Alcohol. These awards will help us to do our job better, serving our students and the public."

In 1992, the UB medical school became one of the first in the nation to embark on a major primary-care initiative, with the goal of having 50 percent of its residents entering the fields of family medicine, pediatrics or internal medicine by 1994.

The initiative involves recruiting and retaining students most likely to enter primary-care fields, establishing more out-of-hospital primary-care training sites, increasing primary-care research funding, providing increased teacher training for faculty, and establishing a leadership track in primary-care medicine to raise the visibility of primary-care physicians in the health-care community.

The rankings by U.S. News & World Report are based on the following criteria:

Those ranked ahead of UB in this year's survey are Oregon Health Sciences University at No. 1, followed by George Washington University, Thomas Jefferson University, University of California-Davis, The Ohio State University and Brown University.

The UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences is followed in the Top 10 by the University of Kentucky, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical/Dental School, and the University of Kansas Medical Center.