Gwinnett Tech Dedicates New Life Sciences Center

After six years in the making, and considered by many to be an accelerated rate of speed in building, ’s Life Sciences Center was dedicated and opened to the public. The Life Sciences Center will enable GTC to add new curricula to its course offerings, while expanding on existing programs. GTC offers more than a dozen health sciences programs.

“This facility represents the greatest community partnership I know of any community in our state,” said dedication keynote speaker U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson.

Working together, business, industry and private donors contributed to the Life Sciences Center through GTC’s Legacy of Lives campaign. This campaign was led by honorary chair Ed Bastian, president, Delta Air Lines, and campaign co-chairs Jim McGean, president (retired), , and Kim Ryan, chief executive officer, Eastside Medical Center.

Donation supporters for the Life Sciences Center include the Scott Hudgens Family Foundation, , Clyde and Sandra Strickland,  and the Community Foundation of Northeast Georgia, among others.

Singling out Gwinnett Tech’s President Sharon Bartels for her leadership, Sen. Isakson spread his praise around to the local elected officials, to the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce and to the many donors that made the funding and construction of the center possible. And he offered a special acknowledgement to the Technical College System Commissioner Ron Jackson. Isakson called Georgia’s technical colleges “a treasure." He said, as a way to point out their prominence and importance, that every person in Georgia is only forty-five minutes away from a technical college.

The Life Sciences Center on GTC’s campus was built to meet the four year projected needs of the region to add 27,000 . It is anticipated that GTC will educate and train 3,000 students annually to meet future healthcare needs throughout the Metro Atlanta region. The Center houses seventeen laboratories and numerous classrooms to equip students with the practical applications of learning and the hands on experience to prepare them for the present and future job market.

Gwinnett Tech has been recognized as having the state’s highest number of health science students. In combining GTC’s new three-story, 78,000 square foot Life Sciences Center to its existing facilities, GTC now has more than 140,000 square feet in two buildings for health science education only.  Recently GTC was awarded a $1.65 million grant. This money will be used to assist in meeting the requirement that all healthcare records must be digital by 2013. GTC will dedicate these funds to its brand new health information technology program. It is estimated that there will be 12,000 vacancies in the next four years in HIT; GTC is committed to filling those positions with their graduates.   

“Seventeen percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States of America is in healthcare today; it will be greater in the future than it is today,” said Isakson. “That’s where the jobs are and the demand in the future will be. That’s why Gwinnett Tech is on point and in place.”

Addressing the more than 300 on hand for the dedication ceremony, Technical College System Commissioner Ron Jackson said technical colleges build Georgia’s workforce. He said education must be treated as an enterprise in Georgia. And technical colleges must do their part by ensuring that students are the most skilled and educated of anywhere in this country and anywhere in the world in order to compete in a global economy.

Jackson said a key factor of any business choosing locations for operations is who makes up the workforce. Therefore technical colleges play a committed role to businesses, said Jackson, which is to provide a skilled and educated workforce to every community in which they are found. To do that Jackson said facilities like the Life Sciences Center are needed.

President Bartels said that in the last two years GTC has turn away sixty-two hundred people seeking admissions into health science programs. With the addition of the Life Sciences Center it is anticipated that will become a thing of the past, not occurring in GTC’s future.