While I agree with the premise of this article, I nevertheless wonder how a city like El Paso will be able to recruit established and/or talented up-and-coming research scientists from across the globe to carry out these types of studies. As such, The Center of Excellence for Infectious Disease is the only one so far to have directors, which were recruited from Harvard Medical School.
The Paul L. Foster School of Medicine hopes to one day develop into a force in international research with its investigation of conditions important to El Pasoans.
The county's 81 percent Hispanic population and proximity to Mexico are set to help the medical school's growing research team explore parts of the population that long have been neglected.
"I can't emphasize enough the importance of the population which is here," said Dr. Rajkumar Lakshmanaswamy, an assistant professor in the department of biomedical sciences.
"You could be in New York or somewhere else and not get this population. When you're looking at federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health or the Department of Defense, all of them are emphasizing to study minority populations, and this is a place where the majority are minorities."
Dr. Jose Manuel de la Rosa, founding dean of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Paul L. Foster School of Medicine, said that as the school determined its research priorities, its leaders stepped back to evaluate the region's strengths. They also looked at illnesses prevalent in the population.
The result was the establishment of four centers of excellence focusing on cancer, infectious disease, neurosciences, and diabetes and obesity.
