Baystate Health Welcomes CEO of Massachusetts Life Sciences Center

SPRINGFIELD — Dr. Kirk Taylor, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC), and his team recently met with Dr. Andrew Artenstein, chief physician executive; Mike Knapik, vice president of Government Relations; Dr. Peter Lindenaurer, professor and chair of the Department of Healthcare Delivery and Population Sciences (DHDPS); and other physicians at Baystate Health. The purpose of the meeting was to learn more about Baystate Health’s ongoing efforts in the research and life sciences sectors.

The mission of MLSC is to accelerate medical breakthroughs, promote scientific education, create research opportunities, and expand the workforce through a global ecosystem of public and private partnerships. Since its inception in 2007, MLSC has strategically invested more than $2.6 billion across Massachusetts. Currently, the organization is looking for new opportunities and partners for further engagement and potential grantmaking.

In previous years, Baystate Health has benefited from grant funding from MLSC, which helped develop the Wason Avenue research facilities and finance the TechSpring space in downtown Springfield.

During the meeting, the MLSC team heard updates from a variety of DHDPS physicians on several projects, including community-engaged research focused on parental mental health, the use of digital health and virtual reality to improve medication adherence for substance use, multi-component interventions in preventive cardiology, increasing lung cancer screening among patients at community health centers, utilizing big data to enhance population health and health equity, and supporting the growth of healthcare delivery research in Western Mass.