Inside Duke Medicine

Learning Center rising toward late-2012 opening

The Duke University School of Medicine’s new educational home is rising quickly at what is expected to be the heart of a transformed medical campus.

This summer, workers have poured the concrete foundations and begun erecting six floors’ worth of steel beams for the new Learning Center. The ideal location, matched with the large meeting and innovative learning spaces inside the new building, will have a profound, positive impact on the future of medical education at Duke.

“The School of Medicine doesn’t have a centralized space where faculty and students can interact, both formally and informally,” said Edward G. Buckley, M.D., vice dean of medical education. “Modern medical education requires greater interaction and the Learning Center will give us that central hub, at the very heart of the medical campus.”

The Learning Center, Buckley said, will lead to many great interactions – planned and unplanned –among students, residents, fellows, postdocs, faculty, and staff that will transform medical education at Duke.
The first new home for medical student education at Duke since classes began in the Davison Building in 1930 is designed with the future of medical education in mind. Located close to research buildings and labs, Duke Clinic, Duke University Hospital as well as the future Cancer Center facility and Duke Medicine Pavilion, the Learning Center will provide flexible classroom and meeting space, and more.

For example, an entire floor will be dedicated to human simulation, including examination, surgery and intensive care suites. Spaces on the third and fourth floors will provide places that can’t be found on campus today – modern dedicated study rooms for medical students, areas to relax and spaces where faculty and students can meet informally.

The design of the 104,000-square-foot building, whose estimated cost is $53 million, is the product of a broad collaboration among senior leaders, faculty, staff and students. For example, early in the design process, students told architects there really wasn’t a place to study in Davison.

“I did my studying in the undergraduate library, and when it closed for the day, I went home,” said E. Philip Lehman, M.D., who was president of the medical students’ Davison Council and is now an internal medicine resident at Duke Hospital. “The Learning Center is going to provide that central gathering space, and because they will have a place to meet and see each other regularly, it is going to lead to strong relationships between students and faculty and among the students themselves. That will have a huge impact on the quality of their education.”

For faculty, the new building means modern and flexible teaching spaces that will spur innovation.

“I am very excited about the Learning Center, particularly when I think about the challenges we have right now finding spaces for the large, interdisciplinary courses I teach,” said Barbara Sheline, M.D., assistant dean for primary care and associate clinical professor of community and family medicine. “The flexible teaching spaces in the Learning Center will greatly enhance these courses, which can bring together as many as 200 medical, nursing and physician assistant learners.”

Over the next eight weeks, the building will grow quickly, as ironworkers finish the steel frame and crews pour concrete floors, said project manager Reba Wagner, staff architect in Facilities Planning Design & Construction. After that, the building’s glass and limestone skin should be added. It will take about a year to finish the interior. The Learning Center is expected to be ready for students in late 2012.
Dean Nancy Andrews, M.D., Ph.D., said she has been tremendously impressed at the thought and collaboration that has gone into planning and building the new learning center.

“Vice Dean Ed Buckley convened a working group that includes faculty, students, staff and alumni with a wide range of perspectives on Duke and on education,” Andrews said. “They've worked closely with the architects for many months to design spaces that will not only be exciting and current when the building opens, but will also be flexible enough to keep us at the leading edge of medical education for many years to come.”