Picayune, Mississippi, sits 45 miles northeast of New Orleans, a town with a population of around 12,000. It’s the home of Benny Nunez, a devoted father and husband who’s been a caregiver to his wife ever since she had a stroke. When Benny had a heart attack last year, he was rushed to a small community hospital in St. Tammany Parish, where the doctors revived him again and again as his heart stopped multiple times. Recognizing that his challenging case required highly specialized care, those attending Benny called on Tulane’s world-class heart failure and transplant program at East Jefferson General Hospital (EJGH), launched earlier in 2025 as part of our transformative partnership with LCMC Health.
Benny was in a coma when he arrived at EJGH. His organs were shutting down. Led by Dr. Jamil Borgi and Dr. Sasha Vukelic, over three dozen of Tulane’s dedicated medical professionals worked together to give him a fighting chance, and Benny took up the fight. After months of inpatient care, he was strong enough for a heart transplant when a donor heart became available. The operation was a success.
A few months earlier, Benny’s children were planning his funeral. Instead, they pivoted to planning a Thanksgiving gathering filled with gratitude beyond measure.
This is destination health care in action. Rooted in both clinical excellence and academic leadership, the Tulane Interventional Cardiology team provided Benny with lifesaving, research-driven treatment that simply wasn’t available anywhere else. In partnership with LCMC Health, Tulane is building a region-wide, integrated health ecosystem that will improve and save lives from Metairie to Monroe to Mobile, while advancing medical breakthroughs with global impact.
With clinical care centered at EJGH, Tulane is coalescing a vibrant community around research, innovation, education and world-class translational medicine that brings scientific breakthroughs to patients on our evolving downtown campus. In the School of Medicine’s Hutchinson Memorial Building, finishing touches are being applied to 50,000 square feet of state-of-the-art laboratory space, (see story, page 15) while the Tidewater Building sports new signs celebrating the recently named, and rapidly expanding, Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. The former Tulane Medical Center has been reimagined as the Downtown Campus Center with renovations underway to build a home for Tulane’s new nursing program, while Wave City Market on the ground floor offers an inviting space for faculty, students and staff to refuel, connect and spark new ideas.
Steps away from this bustling evolution sits a silent icon: the long-vacant former Charity Hospital building. Today, Tulane is planning a new chapter for Charity, and for the city itself. We will lead an historic redevelopment that will dramatically expand our downtown footprint, occupying more than half of the one-million-square-foot space which will also include a mix of residential, retail and dining spaces. This is not just a renovation. It’s a reimagining that will invigorate the area without displacing a single resident.
Our growing downtown campus will foster discovery, nurture startups and grow Tulane’s more than $5.2 billion annual impact on the regional economy. It will vastly increase educational, entrepreneurial and career pathways for both Tulanians and community members. To this end, the university is continuing to invest in impactful programs like the Tulane Innovation Institute, which supports startups from within and beyond the Tulane community, and the Mussafer Internship Initiative, which aims to provide all Newcomb-Tulane College students with access to paid internships, mentorships and real-world career experiences (see story, page 18). With support from the Mussafer program, a pre-med student may be empowered to enroll in a surgical internship instead of taking a summer job unrelated to any career goal. This opportunity, just an example among countless others, could be life-changing not only for the student in question but also for the patients who will benefit in the future.
From Charity to EJGH and beyond, Tulane’s bold vision will touch countless lives. For the Nunez family of Picayune, Mississippi, this vision is far from an abstract idea. It’s a shared meal, a warm embrace and the incomparable gift of more time together
