In addition to a medical degree, the school offers various combined degrees, such as MD/MPH, MD/PhD and MD/MBA. The school offers separate master's and doctoral degree programs in various biomedical fields. It also offers programs in physician assistantship and nurse anesthesia. The joint MD-PhD program is part of a cooperation with the California Institute of Technology located in nearby Pasadena. USC also offers a combined engineering and medicine graduate certificate program, available to both PhD and MD students.
Keck Medicine of USC is an affiliated system of hospitals, clinics, and primary care providers and as of 2013, USC Health included three hospitals, some campus-based specialty clinics, five community-based ambulatory care clinics, and USC Care Medical Group, which is the physician practice of doctors who are on the faculty of the Keck School of Medicine. Hospitals and clinics include the Keck Hospital of USC and the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, which USC acquired from Tenet Healthcare in 2009 for $275 million after three years of litigation between the parties, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and the USC Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale.
History of the school
The school was founded in 1885, and is the oldest medical school in Southern California. The school's association with Children's Hospital Los Angeles began in 1932. In 1970, it formed the first academic Department of Emergency Medicine in the United States. By 1983, the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center was opened. In 1991, the USC University Hospital, later to be renamed Keck Hospital of USC, was opened. In July 1999, the W. M. Keck Foundation donated $110 million to the USC School of Medicine. The school was then renamed the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. The school committed to raising $330 million in matching funds, and used a large portion of the gift to expand research efforts, including the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute. In 2015, Paul Aisen, who leads the US Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study and its approximately $100 million in funding, left University of California San Diego and joined the faculty of Keck. Aisen had been recruited to UCSD from Georgetown in 2007 to run the ADCS which UCSD had established in 1991. Aisen left UCSD because he was unhappy with the level of support that UCSD was providing him and due to the offer from USC. UCSD and USC ended up in litigation over control of the program. USC rented space for Aisen in a San Diego office park, where Keck's Alzheimer's Therapeutic Research Institute is located under Aisen's direction. Some aspects of data management were temporarily settled in 2016; as of 2017 the litigation was ongoing. A report in Nature noted that Keck had been recruiting from San Diego, hiring four scientists from Scripps Research Institute after a proposed merger fell through, and that Keck had recruited the director of the UCSD Health System to run its Children's Hospital. In March 2016 Carmen Puliafito resigned as dean and Rohit Varma became the interim dean, and was named dean in November of that year. On May 1, 2018, Laura Mosqueda was appointed as dean of the school. She is a professor of Family Medicine and Geriatrics.
Controversies
The Los Angeles Times reported in July 2017 that while Puliafito served as dean and USC professor, he "kept company with a circle of criminals and drug users who said he used methamphetamine and other drugs with them." The reporters reviewed video and photographs of Puliafito engaging in these activities in hotel rooms, apartments, and the dean's office. According to the newspaper, a 21-year-old prostitute had overdosed while taking drugs with Puliafito in a Pasadena hotel room on March 4, 2016; the article included a recording of a conversation between a 911 operator and Puliafito. The report said that police had found methamphetamine in the room. Puliafito resigned as dean three weeks afterwards. Immediately following the publication of the Los Angeles Times report, USC announced that Puliafito had been placed "on leave from his roles at USC, including seeing patients." USC announced that Varma was no longer dean in October 2017, when the Los Angeles Times told the school it was going to publish a story about a 2003 sexual harassment finding by USC against Varma which had not been publicly disclosed previously.
