About us
Welcome from the Head of School
Welcome to our school! You’re landing here at a time of great change for the school and wider faculty of Medicine & Health.
The School of Medical Sciences recently became the School of Biomedical Sciences. The addition of the three letters, from Medical to Biomedical, embraces our aspirations to lead in the translational nexus between discovery science and clinical application and/or impact. This aspiration is, in reality, already a fundamental part of our DNA – we’re a vibrant ecosystem of educators, researchers and professionals, all working at the coalface of health and medical sciences. As teachers, scientists, clinicians and support staff, school members are driven by a collective desire to take the best ideas and turn them into transformational impacts in medicine and health, not just in Australia but globally, too.
Located within the Wallace Wurth Building on ‘upper campus’, our school is situated in the heart of the Randwick precinct. Geographically, UNSW’s main Kensington campus is to our west, with adjacent teaching hospitals located to the east. Sitting in this middle ground, the relationships between these two sites is very important to us. It’s here that natural collaborative partnerships are formed. Our strong cross-faculty connections with chemistry, maths, physics and engineering; along with academic staff and key partners whose work is based in the clinical or biotech space, create a naturally synergistic and innovative environment.
Looking to the future, with the emergence of the UNSW Health Translation Hub (HTH) next door and physical bridging link that will land right in the heart of the school, we’ll have even more opportunities to realise bench-to-bedside and bedside-to-bench biomedical research, teaching and education and patient-science interactions.
As one of the largest teaching schools at UNSW, we’re also uniquely placed to inspire the next generation of science and medical graduates. We play a key role in arming future doctors, health practitioners, biomedical scientists and a broader community of health professionals, each of whom will bring a specialised and diverse skill set to the frontiers of medical science. We produce graduates who are better able to practice and are better informed about biomedical research for their future careers.
Along with a new name, we’ve also gained a new department this year with the formal move of the Single Molecular Science EMBL node into the school as the newly minted Department of Molecular Medicine. Together with our longstanding pillars of anatomy, physiology, pathology and pharmacology, we cover the entire spectrum of biomedical research from the macro to the nano (and pretty much everything in between).
Whether you land here as a prospective student, future collaborator, industry partner or biomedical science pioneer, we look forward to connecting and welcoming you to the school.
With very best wishes
Professor Jake Baum, Head of School
