How We Came Together

In the spring of 2023, the deans of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of the University at Buffalo and the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine (MSU) attended a session on gun violence at the AAMC Council of Deans meeting in Chicago. In their conversations after the session, the two deans discussed the experiences of their communities with recent mass shootings: the racial killing of ten Black people at an Eastside Buffalo supermarket in May of 2022 and the targeted shooting of students at MSU leaving three dead and five wounded in February 2023. They decided to exchange students and faculty at the one-year remembrance of their community’s mass shooting, and so MSU’s medical school sent four students and a faculty member to Buffalo for the May 14, 2023, remembrance in Buffalo. This conference is the second leg of that exchange.