Dear UAB Community and Friends,

It was my pleasure last Friday to deliver our annual UAB Institutional Presentation to the UA System Board of Trustees. There were many exciting developments over the past year to share and celebrate, as we continue collaborating throughout our campus, community and state to advance all areas of our mission.  

Here are just a few highlights from the 2018 Institutional Presentation:

• Our distinctive campus culture and student experience — captured in this award-winning video produced in part by students — has attracted record enrollment for two consecutive years.

• Building on our reputation for global leadership in research, The Center for World University Rankings recently named UAB among the top 0.6 percent of universities internationally based on number of publications, citations, broad impact of research and other indicators.

• We continue to secure very competitive research funding, as we now rank 15th among public universities in federal funding (31st overall) and 8th among public universities in NIH funding (23rd overall).

• We are at the vanguard of precision medicine as we conduct the Alabama Genomic Health Initiative, among the nation’s first such statewide efforts to harness the power of genomic analysis in health and disease.

• We continue to partner effectively in the Innovate Birmingham initiative to grow a robust innovation-based economy for our region and build on UAB’s  annual economic impact that now exceeds $7.15 billion. 

• We are planning for even bigger strides through Forging the Future, our strategic plan that charts our course for the next five years. The plan includes the creation and revision of our core curriculum, a major undertaking, and I thank our faculty and staff for working collaboratively with Provost Benoit on this demanding and important task. 

• And we continue to receive overwhelming support in all our efforts through The Campaign for UAB, which is now over $862 million from nearly 99,000 donors.  

My thanks to our faculty, staff and students campus-wide, as well as our alumni and partners throughout the state and nation, for the role you are all playing in our success — present and future. 

As we look forward to our university’s 50th anniversary as an autonomous campus in 2019, we can all be very proud of the incredible progress in our mission, the prestige of our university around the world, and the prospect of forging an even greater future for UAB, Birmingham and the state of Alabama.