King’s College held a formal blessing and dedication ceremony for its now operational Frank and Carolyn Kowalski Center for Advanced Healthcare Education, a more than $8 million redevelopment project of the former Times Leader building that includes 60,000 square feet of renovated space and five floors of state-of-the-art labs and education resources.
The facility’s new name honors benefactors Frank Kowalski Jr. and his wife Carolyn, lifetime residents of Wyoming Valley who committed a major gift to the College’s recent Send Us Forth campaign. The Kowalskis have been following this project since King’s College first purchased the Times Leader building, and its transformation into a health care education facility was particularly important to them given Carolyn’s career as a registered nurse.
“We’ve lived and worked in the Wilkes-Barre area all our lives,” said Frank Kowalski “This community has been very good to us. We wanted to do something for the future, and the best way to do that is to invest in young people and education.”
The facility is home to the College’s new Doctorate in Occupational Therapy program—the first doctorate program in the institution’s history—and its new accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. The site now houses several pediatric, physical rehabilitation, daily living, and cadaver labs, many of which feature augmented reality technology, 3D imaging and printing services, and other advanced educational equipment.
