The Medical School as Research Campus: IUSM—South Bend in Its Own Record

Item 3 · Boundary (South Bend, on Notre Dame's ground)

Lead: The branch medical school that serves this region is the Indiana University School of Medicine—South Bend, seated in South Bend on Notre Dame's ground — boundary here, and carried as a research campus in its own right, not as a pointer to Indianapolis. In its own record, external funding for its faculty research “exceeds $2 million per year,” and its named lines are specific: “the circuitry of pain and the genetics that drive mosquitoes to spread malaria and Zika virus,” pursued through collaborative partnerships with Notre Dame, with critical instrumentation housed in Raclin-Carmichael and Harper halls. Its cancer identity is the Harper Cancer Research Institute, which its faculty formed with Notre Dame faculty (see Item 9), fostering research on breast, ovarian and pancreatic cancer and leukemia. Its global-health identity is named in its own pages a second way: students may pursue an MD/PhD or an MS/MD in global health and take part in research at Harper and at Notre Dame's Eck Institute for Global Health. One investigator shows the shape of the work without inflating it: Molly Duman Scheel, associate professor at IUSM—South Bend and adjunct at Notre Dame, won a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations award, announced 8 June 2015, for small-interfering-RNA larvicides against malaria-vector mosquitoes, with the Eck Institute's David Severson as collaborator — mosquito genetics as a South Bend research line, stated exactly as the institutions stated it. No part of this campus, its funding, or its investigators is seated in New Carlisle; the town's connection is that its residents are served by the region this campus trains and studies for.

Sources:

1. IU School of Medicine — “Research | South Bend” (medicine.iu.edu/south-bend/research, read 2026-11-11): funding over $2 million per year; pain circuitry; mosquito genetics for malaria and Zika; Harper Cancer Research Institute lines; Raclin-Carmichael and Harper halls.
2. IU School of Medicine, South Bend faculty / Pathology page: MD/PhD and MS/MD in global health; research at Harper and the Eck Center for Global Health.
3. Harper Cancer Research Institute / Notre Dame news, 9 June 2015: Molly Duman Scheel Grand Challenges Explorations award for RNA larvicides for malaria-vector control; collaborator David Severson, Eck Institute for Global Health.