A Message from the Dean
Welcome back to the UD College of Health Sciences! It promises to be an exciting year filled with opportunities and innovation.
Our theme for this year is “Stay calm and dream big.” At our fall convocation meetings, we distributed T-shirts with this tagline to the students in our class of 2016. We want all of them to feel part of something bigger than themselves. We want them to realize that they will work as teams to develop new models of healthcare delivery. They will lead the change to healthier, happier communities as the next generation of healthcare leaders.
To encourage them to start dreaming big and working together, we launched our First Step program, which seeks innovative student solutions to challenging health issues. We’ve invited our students to submit proposals focused on important aspects of health care or healthy living, to develop potential solutions to those problems, and present their solutions for review. CHS will provide $500 to each of the top 20 applications. Then, in the spring, we will give awards to the top three completed projects at an annual awards dinner.
As our new students acclimate themselves to campus, classes, and internship activities, all of us in the College are looking forward to the great new opportunities that will develop in Phase One of the STAR Campus. Delle Donne and Associates and Bancroft Construction, our partners, have begun the work to remodel the administration building as the new home for our Physical Therapy Clinic and Department, our Nurse Managed Health Center, and home for many of our biomedical researchers. We look forward to sharing the STAR campus with our private healthcare business partners. It will create many wonderful learning opportunities for our students in clinical and real-world settings.
Our development plan for the Health Sciences Complex on the STAR campus is focused on putting all of the pieces together for a healthy community by design, where health is not only the topic of our research, education, and clinical programs but also a way of life—with fitness facilities, walking and biking paths, convenient mass transit, and cafes serving healthful food.
I invite everyone in CHS—our faculty, staff, undergrads, and grad students, our alumni, and our friends—to join together as we move toward an exciting new era of health education, research, and service. Think about becoming a part of this great new adventure. Come visit us through our website or come visit us in person. We welcome your partnership.
Kathleen S. Matt, Ph.D.
Dean, College of Health Sciences
Professor, Kinesiology & Applied Physiology
