WEST LIBERTY, W.Va., Feb. 28, 2023 — Thanks to a $500,000 federal grant, West Liberty University’s College of Sciences will be able to begin work on a new Healthcare Professional Training Center.
“This award of $500,000 will support the beginnings of our Healthcare Professional Training Center, to be created on the fourth floor of Campbell Hall. We are so grateful to Senator Joe Manchin who secured these federal funds for us. It represents a critical investment to our mission of higher education for our region,” said Dr. Cathy Monteroso, interim WLU president.
The award is one of the Congressionally Directed Spending (CDS) projects that were funded through the Fiscal Year 2023 omnibus passed in December and signed into law by President Joe Biden on Dec. 29, 2022.
“The Healthcare Professional Training Center will support the education of all health science and biomedical science programs, including undergraduate psychology, speech pathology and audiology, medical laboratory science, nursing, dental hygiene, and biology students, as well as graduate clinical psychology, speech-language pathology, biology, and physician assistant studies majors,” explained Dr. Karen Kettler, dean of the College of Sciences.
Once completed, the Healthcare Professional Training Center will include a new Psychology and Communication Sciences and Disorders Laboratory, an Anatomy Suite that will include a new Anatomy and Physiology Laboratory, a Biomedical Research Laboratory, as well as a Human Gross Anatomy Laboratory, and cooperative learning spaces for graduate and undergraduate students along with faculty offices to support the learning community.
Additional funding is needed to complete all the spaces, but the award will kickstart the project.
“We are very thankful to Senator Manchin for working to secure these funds to support higher education in West Virginia and, specifically, improving the education for future healthcare professionals for West Virginia,” Kettler stated.
For more information on the College of Sciences, please visit westliberty.edu/college-of-sciences.