Photo by: Rick Danzl/The News-Gazette

University of Illinois professors Neal Cohen, left, and Rahit Bhargava, at Beckman Institute Friday Feb. 5, 2015, both will be talking at Monday's senate meeting about how a College of Medicine in Urbana would help their health research and the community in general.

URBANA University of Illinois researcher Neal Cohen brings in grants worth millions of dollars to design tests used worldwide for patients with amnesia, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and brain injuries.

Yet almost none of the patients he has studied are in Champaign-Urbana.

With no academic medical center in town, his team works with doctors and patients at medical schools at the University of Iowa, Washington University, Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Rush Medical College in Chicago.

"Much of the grant money I've obtained, much of the opportunity to train medical students and interns and residents about memory and amnesia, and much of the opportunity to apply what we've learned about memory and amnesia to help patients in the local community have gone to those other institutions," he said.

Cohen, director of the UI's new Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative, is among the professors campaigning for a new engineering-focused medical school at the Urbana campus, developed in partnership with Carle Health System.

The campus Academic Senate is scheduled to vote on the proposal when it meets at 3:10 p.m. today, in what would be the first formal step toward approval for the plan.

The senate will also consider several items dealing with fallout from the Steven Salaita case, ranging from revamped hiring procedures to a proposal to reconsider the embattled professor's appointment, as the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure recommended in December.

Chancellor Phyllis Wise proposed a small, engineering-focused medical school last year that would be independently accredited and use no state funding. The current medical school here is a regional campus of the College of Medicine at UI Chicago.

Continued here:

UI-Carle medical school up for Academic Senate vote