Charles Lockwood, Executive Vice President, USF Health & Dean, USF Health Morsani College of Medicine

August 2026 —Charles Lockwood, executive vice president of USF Health and dean of the Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida, spoke with Invest: about the college’s record-breaking student performance, the rapid growth of its research and clinical enterprise, and how AI is revolutionizing everything from patient access to medical education. “I believe it will be the biggest revolution in healthcare ever, surpassing even germ theory and penicillin,” Lockwood said.

What changes over the past year have had the greatest impact on the Morsani College of Medicine, and in what ways?

We really like to think about everything we do in terms of our three missions: the educational mission, which involves medical students as well as graduate students and allied health providers in physical therapy and athletic training; the research mission; and the clinical enterprise.

Speaking just for the medical school, we’ve continued to develop a world-class educational program with a super competitive medical school class. The average MCAT score was once again 520, which is at the 97th percentile — top 10 in the country, not the top 10%, but top 10 of 160 allopathic medical schools. The students’ average GPA was 3.96, the highest in the country.

Their scores on national licensing exams (USMLE) are very close to the highest in the country. The pass rate for Step 1 is 99% — nationally it’s 91%. For Step 2, it’s 100%. We averaged a score of 256 last year; the national average is 245. The average student publishes four peer-reviewed publications, and our student’s residency match this year was the best ever. I say this every year, but they really are extraordinary students.

What I’m  most proud of is that when we look at student satisfaction — determined by the Association of American Medical Colleges’ year-end graduation questionnaire — we are always at or near the  top of U.S. medical schools. An organization called the Center for Accountability in Medicine recently ranked us as the top medical education program in the country and the only one to receive a perfect score.

We also had another great research year. We recruited 25 NIH-funded investigators and reached $381 million in grant support. Combined with our student performance, we were the only medical school in the state last year to be ranked Tier 1 by the U.S. News & World Report — one of just 16 medical schools nationally, and we were recently ranked Tier 1 again this year. When I arrived here 12 years ago, we were ranked 80th.

So, we went from 80th to the top 16 in about a decade. The challenge now is that we’re running out of lab space — an unimaginable problem a decade ago when we had empty labs everywhere. We’ve begun funding through the state for a new Translational Research Institute facility and are building out every square inch of campus space we can.

On the clinical side, we’ve more than doubled our annual total patient visits. Including hospital-based clinics, we see about 1.5 million patients a year with over 1,000 providers — one of the largest faculty practices in the Southeast. On the Vizient scale, which measures quality among top academic medical centers, we’re in the top 10. Tampa General Hospital had six programs ranked on the U.S. News Survey in the top 50 last year, with OB-GYN ranked No. 5 in the country.

How is USF Health working to attract and train the next generation of healthcare professionals, particularly in response to workforce shortages?

We’re obviously focused on recruiting very high-quality physicians, but we’re also trying to keep as many of them in Florida as we can. We have a very large residency and fellowship program between Tampa General, Moffitt Cancer Center, James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital and Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. The quality of our graduate medical education program is extremely high, driven in part by the quality of the hospitals — the opportunity to train at Tampa General, Moffitt, the V.A. and All Children’s is a huge draw.

Our goal is to continue recruiting the best and brightest to Tampa and retaining them here. The nursing school has doubled in size thanks to strong support from the Florida legislature and Governor. We also have a great dietetics program in the College of Public Health where students earn both a master’s in public health and a dietitian degree. The College of Public Health’s genetic counseling program is the only one in the state, and we plan to double its size as well. We are trying to address workforce needs broadly across all our schools.

What major trends are currently shaping your work?

AI, AI, AI. We’ve taken a very aggressive approach on the clinical side with the help of Tampa General to embrace it, covering everything from patient access to sepsis detection.

Our AI agent, Aimee”, has seen 600,000 patients in less than six months and has reduced our call abandonment rates to zero. We’re training her to be even more responsive to patient questions and to ensure outstanding access. It would have taken 40 additional agents  to do what “she” does, so the cost savings are enormous.

We’ve also worked with Nuance and Epic to have most of our charting done by AI. A doctor sees a patient, has a conversation, does the physical exam — and AI writes a comprehensive note drawing from the entire medical record, comes up with a plan, and embeds decision support to ensure the best treatment approach, optimal medications, and checks for drug interactions and allergies.

Of course, all this is reviewed by the physician, but it has saved our doctors two hours a day. In addition, previously, our doctors were spending 20 hours a week after hours on charting. That’s now zero for the 80% of physicians who are using this program. We already have 51 AI programs embedded in our clinical operations, and that number will likely double every few months. 

We’re also embedding formal AI objectives into our medical education curriculum, and we’ve incorporated a rich nutrition curriculum along the lines of the 72 topics recommended by the new federal guidance — we expect to cover 69 of them by September.

On the research side, we’re rolling out a new program in our Epic electronic health record that gives us access to 300 million anonymized patient records for research. We’re also using AI for literature reviews and drug discovery, saving millions of dollars. I compare it to the moonshot — I believe it will be the biggest revolution in healthcare ever, surpassing even germ theory and penicillin. AI will reshape how we deliver primary care, expedite prescriptions and review diagnostic tests, and handle much of the routine aspects of care— freeing physicians to focus on the complex cases that truly require human expertise.

What are your key goals and priorities for USF Health and the Morsani College of Medicine over the next two to three years?

We’ll continue growing across our clinical and research missions. On the educational side, it’s hard to improve when you’re already the best, so the goal is simply to stay the best.

From a research standpoint, our goal is to continue recruiting up to 25 NIH-funded investigators per year. We need to keep up with the demand for lab space, which is why the new research building is critical. We need the state legislature to continue funding its construction, and we’ll also be raising private funds for it. Our broader goal is to double our total grant support again over the next five years, which would put us in the company of the most elite medical schools in the country. That’s where we want to be.