Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine is celebrating the fifth year of the medical school’s $105 million grant from the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation.
About $32 million of the grant was spent in the first five years, and the primary projects it has funded include scholarships, research and part of the college’s Dublin campus, which cost about $14 million.
“The gift has been truly transformational for us,” Kenneth Johnson, the executive dean of OU-HCOM, said. “It allows us to do things that we might not have been able to on our own.”
The Osteopathic Heritage Foundation awarded the gift, which runs through 2028, to the college in 2011, and it is the largest the university has ever received. Since that time, the college has come up with three main goals for the grant: primary care, community care and education and research.
Johnson said about half a dozen faculty members were hired because of the grant, though eventually the college will pay for them out of its own budget.
He added that another portion of the grant has helped fund more research within the college.
“The building of research infrastructure has been a major piece to it,” Johnson said. “We’ve been able to kickstart or seed a bunch of research. There’s money inside the grant for research infrastructure.”
The college still has about $73 million of the grant available and receives about $6.4 million each year, Johnson said.
“Virtually every single dollar already has a name to it,” he said.
One of the major projects the money will back in the future is the college's move to Union Street and the construction of new facilities. The college will move from Grosvenor and Irvine halls to Union Street in the coming years.
Phase one of the project is expected to cost about $12 million, and phase two is expected to cost about $6 million, which will go toward research facilities for the Ohio Musculoskeletal and Neurological Unit and the Diabetes Institute.
“We have people currently, right now, in sort of mismatched space,” Johnson said.
Johnson said officials do not have a specific timeline for the project.
“There’s still a lot of details to work out,” Johnson said. “The next thing we’ll be doing with that is going to the Board of Trustees with a resolution asking to be able to enter planning to do that, to hire an architect.”
Terri Donlin Huesman, vice president of programs for the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation, said she is looking forward to what the remainder of the grant money will go toward.
“Certainly, (we) look forward to five more years of implementation,” she said. “There are priorities that we’re looking forward to over the next five years, (including) new state of the art facilities here on the Athens campus.”
Richard Vincent, president and CEO of the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation, said the foundation had been interested in donating to the college for a while.
“We’ve enjoyed the relationship. We love OU obviously,” Vincent said. “The first endowment we did from our foundation back in ‘01 or so was to OU. And we knew at some point we would do a significantly larger grant, the largest in our history and the largest it’ll ever be in our history.”
