Medical College of Georgia

Institution Overview

The Medical College of Georgia, the state's health sciences university, was founded in 1828 and is the 13th oldest medical school in the nation. It is the site of several historically significant medical milestones, including a cure for pellagra (a vitamin deficiency caused by diet, once common throughout the South) and the groundwork for breakthroughs such as fertility pills, birth-control pills and beta-blocking drugs.

MCG is located in Augusta (population 470,000), Georgia's second-largest metropolitan area and a major medical center. MCG's 100-acre campus includes Schools of Allied Health Sciences, Dentistry, Graduate Studies, Medicine and Nursing; MCG Medical Center; the MCG Children's Medical Center; and the Ambulatory Care Center/Specialized Care Center. Recent additions to the campus include the Interdisciplinary Research Building II, complementing the original Interdisciplinary Research Building, and the MCG Wellness Center. Upcoming buildings include a 190,000-square-foot Health Sciences Building (the future home of the Schools of Allied Health Sciences and Nursing) and an impressive facility dedicated solely to cancer research.

Nearly 2,000 students are enrolled in MCG's seven undergraduate programs and 42 graduate programs. Ninety-two percent of them come from Georgia. The university offers the full gamut of health sciences degrees and has heavily incorporated distance-learning, the Internet and other innovative techniques into its curricula. Students repeatedly rank MCG high in terms of student satisfaction, and many disciplines are among the top-ranked in the country.

The mission of the Medical College of Georgia is to improve health and reduce the burden of illness in society by discovering, disseminating and applying knowledge of human health and disease. To improve health tomorrow, MCG actively pursues new knowledge through research in the health sciences today. Research efforts focus on diseases that have the greatest impact on Georgians: cancer, neurological diseases, infection/inflammation and cardiovascular disease.