President's Testimony

Challenges

• UMB, like academic health centers nationally, faces some serious fiscal challenges, currently and in the immediate future.  While the campus has been very successful at entrepreneurship, the recession is impacting negatively our traditional sources of external funding.
  

• Clinical revenue depends directly on the health care marketplace, the sector of the economy that is arguably the most stressed.  As unemployment rises, so too does the number of uninsured and underinsured Marylanders.  
  

• We hope that the federal "American Reinvestment and Recovery Act" will provide some greatly needed assistance both for the NIH budget, on which our research is heavily dependent, and on the uninsured.
  

• As reported by the Commission to Develop the Maryland Model for Funding Higher Education (Bohanan Commission) UMB has a current research and laboratory space deficit of  nearly 1,000,000 NASF.  Without additional research space we run the risk of losing out in the highly competitive race for extramural support, particularly from the NIH.
  

• Leasing space in the UMB BioPark has been a critical stopgap, particularly for the Institute for Genome Sciences, but it is only a stopgap.  HSF III is desperately needed; finding a way to fund this facility continues to be one of our largest challenges.
  
  

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