Professor Fabio Pollice, rector of the University of Salento, all Apulian cities aspire to host a faculty of medicine. What is happening, the race to “medicalise” society has exploded in Puglia? Is it the consequence of the Covid-29 drama?
«For heaven’s sake, no competitive races. It should be said that our project comes from afar. It all started in the fall of 2019 when I was elected rector. The proposal to establish the degree course in biomedical engineering had strongly developed in the university bodies. We accelerated the procedures and on February 28, 2020 the engineering department council approved the project of the course, already in the preliminary phase of accreditation to the ministry. It is the first academic year and there are 198 students. An extraordinary success. We worked like crazy, close understandings. The Medicine proposal was born with dialogue, first of all with the universities of Bari and Foggia. We are moving forward together with a strongly cooperative approach. The common goal is to strengthen the Apulian system by first avoiding duplication. Our initiative is therefore integrative, that is, it refers to disciplinary areas not covered ».
Fabio Pollice is full professor of economic-political geography. He arrived in Lecce in 2001, together with his family. From Naples, where he studied and taught at the Federico II University. “We are very happy here, my wife repeats that she would not leave Lecce for all the gold in the world.”
The rector has an incredible capacity for initiative, keeping up with him is difficult. The recurring words: empathy, interaction, alliances, integral well-being, local, national and global understandings, and then research, research, research to achieve excellence also in teaching. Since becoming rector, the number of posts per researcher has grown by over 90 units. About forty funded by the region, another 50 in the insertion phase thanks to the program of the minister of university and research Gaetano Manfredi, former rector of Federico II. Unisalento, once just a university in Lecce, is less and less provincial. Researchers and teachers arrive and decide to transfer family and life projects here. A small “global” city, in short, thanks to the university. “We already have many phone calls, medical professors are ready to move to Lecce, not only from Puglia, but from other regions and other European nations”.
Pollice’s project is ambitious, in a few days the rector of the Humanitas University of Milan is expected, where Human Technopole is being set up in the former Expo area.
«The Milan model encourages us. Humanitas and the Politecnico proceed together, we go beyond the boundaries of medicine in the traditional sense. In July we formalized the agreement on the biomedical district of Salento together with the National Research Council Nanotec, the Biomolecular Center of the Italian Institute of Technologies and Medtronic, a multinational company that provides devices and services that are profoundly changing the way of doing healthcare. . Our project is to move from the curative aspects, that is, from only interventions to heal the disease, to taking charge of the person in the integral sense of his well-being. Here, our university must train the new professionals who will be the protagonists of the change. For this we will realize an integration between Medicine and Biomedical Engineering. After six years of Medicine, one year of Engineering, because doctors must know immediately the new technologies that are innovating healthcare practice. We have the human resources to do it. The names? No, I only indicate the coordinator of the project, Professor Pietro Alifano, full professor of general microbiology, of the department of biological and environmental sciences and technologies ».
We met the rector of Unisalento at 9 am yesterday morning, in his office at the former convent of Santa Maria del Carmine, piazza Tancredi, in the heart of Lecce. In normal times, the rectorate pulsates with an endless coming and going even between Christmas and New Year. Young students interact with each other and with the teachers. Here they use dedicated spaces. Yesterday morning the rector was in his post, first meeting with the general director De Benedetto. The accounts are in order. The registrations went well. Money. How to finance Medicine? Thumb welcomes the question with a smile. His collaborators reveal that the rector is irrepressible in his capacity for commitment. He spoke with the minister and met the president of the Emilia region. Two decisive go-ahead. Manfredi said the Lecce project is consistent with national planning. Emiliano, in a letter of intent, has undertaken to finance the investment. The interview ends, and Pollice immediately turns on his laptop for an online dialogue with a young student. «Let me be clear – he concludes – for me the best training is the one in presence. Without direct and face-to-face interaction with the students there is no excellent training ».
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