Florida Atlantic University, founded in 1961, is currently serving more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students at sites throughout its six-county service region in southeast Florida. The University's student body, which ranks as the most ethnically and culturally diverse in Florida's State University System, includes many men and women of non-traditional age. Long known as an outstanding teaching institution, FAU is undergoing rapid development as a center of cutting-edge research, particularly in the biomedical arena. This process has been accelerated by the University's partnerships with four internationally known biomedical research organizations, the Scripps Research Institute, the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute, the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies and the Max Planck Society. Additionally, FAU's Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine recently welcomed its inaugural class.