East Carolina University is investing $265M in a new medical facility to increase physician education capacity. By expanding class sizes and focusing on primary care, ECU aims to address North Carolina's physician shortage. The seven-story Center for Medical Education Building is set for completion in 2027, featuring cutting-edge classrooms, simulation spaces and resources to support future doctors.
East Carolina University rendering
East Carolina University has begun construction on a $265 million facility designed to increase the college's ability to educate more physicians.
East Carolina University (ECU) in Greenville, N.C., has begun construction on a $265 million facility designed to increase the college's ability to educate more physicians.
With the construction of the Center for Medical Education Building, ECU will add a 195,000 sq.-ft. facility to its existing Brody School of Medicine, according to Triangle Business Journal. The investment will allow the university to further expand its class size as North Carolina and the rest of the country grapples with physician shortages.
The investment comes in the wake of the Association of American Medical Colleges projecting in early 2024 that the United States will need as many as 86,000 doctors by 2036.
ECU's Center for Medical Education Building is planned to be a seven-story facility with three floors serving as simulation space that could support the university's wider Health Sciences campus, which includes schools for nursing, dentistry and allied health. The new structure will connect directly to the existing medical school's building, which houses all faculty offices and lab spaces.
Construction got under way in March 2025 with a tentative completion slated for August 2027, the Brody School of Medicine's online project page noted.
It will include:
• Two large learning studios that can seat up to 500 people in a lecture/banquet style setting or transform into classrooms, meeting and seminar spaces that will accommodate up to 136 in each studio.
• Highly flexible spaces that feature huddle rooms, which ECU describes as "pod-like collaboration spaces and small-group student spaces."
• A roof terrace and green space.
• A new home for simulation and standardized patient programs.
• Four student houses, or common spaces, which will serve as a "home" for blended groups of M1-M4 students. Each will contain lockers, changing areas, and study carrels.
• New gross anatomy space to include 28 beds.
• One large instructional lab classroom for neurology, pathology, and immunology with seating for up to 144 students.
• Lawn space for special events and ceremonies.
• A 500-car parking garage on ECU's Health Sciences Campus.
East Carolina Latest N.C. School to Address Shortages
ECU is not alone in expanding its medical school to provide more trained health professionals to the Tarheel State.
UNC-Chapel Hill in 2023 opened a new 172,000 sq.-ft. facility, Roper Hall, for its school of medicine to expand its class size to 230 students in the coming years, up from about 180 in 2016.
The Wake Forest University School of Medicine, based in Winston-Salem, has also grown to include a second campus in Charlotte that takes up part of a 14-story tower in "The Pearl," Atrium Health's innovation district within the state's largest city. The school is scheduled to open in June 2025 and welcome its first class in fall 2025.
Dr. Jason Higginson became executive dean of East Carolina's Brody School of Medicine about three years ago, at which time the school had approximately 86 students per graduating class. Recognizing a need and demand for more students, he led the effort to secure additional funding from the North Carolina General Assembly, and petitioned the university's accrediting body, to bring its class size to 100 students.
When the new facility opens in 2027, the ECU will then expand its class size to 120 students, with the eventual goal of potentially supporting 160 students at maximum capacity.
"Compared to other medical schools in the state, ECU fills a few specific needs for North Carolina," Higginson said.
"More than 50 percent [of our students] stay in the state," he said. "Not only that ... we're one of the top schools for producing primary care physicians, which is a big part of the [nationwide physician] shortage."
Some of this is by design.
ECU requires that its medical school students be North Carolina residents, a policy that was slightly modified this year to grow its candidate pool as the class size expands. The result is that ECU now allows students from UNC system schools who are not state residents to apply for admittance.
"They have to have some tie to the area," Higginson told Triangle Business Journal. "Our admissions criteria favors students, particularly from the eastern part of the state, because that's the community that we're attempting to serve.
One of the ways the Brody School of Medicine distinguishes itself from the medical schools at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University is a specific focus on primary care.
"We're pretty clear that we feel like our sweet spot is educating students for primary care, particularly primary care in rural environments," he said.
According to a 2024 report measuring the outcomes of North Carolina medical schools, 23 percent of ECU's 2018 class was either practicing or training in primary care in the state in 2023. This is compared to 4.9 percent of Duke's class and 18 percent of UNC's class.
Higginson said the data helped East Carolina's lobbying efforts with the General Assembly, which included $215 million in the state's 2021 budget to support the new building. Lawmakers subsequently directed another $50 million to the project to help absorb some of the effects of inflation and rising construction costs.
"The impact this new facility will have on education, research and regional health is immeasurable," said Dr. Michael Waldrum, dean of the Brody School of Medicine and CEO of ECU Health. "The new state-of-the-art classrooms, study space, anatomy labs, and simulation technology will allow our faculty to build on the tradition of excellence at the Brody School of Medicine as we educate the next generation of North Carolina's physicians to provide care in our region and across the state."
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