The center's academic wing consists of Columbia's colleges and schools of Physicians and Surgeons, Dental Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health.

The center's healthcare wing include Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital, New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the Audubon Biomedical Research Park.

The Medical and Graduate Education Building was designed by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Gensler, and the structural engineer was Leslie E. Robertson Associates.

The hospital completed the first successful heart transplant in a child,[3] the first use of the anti-seizure medication, dilantin, to treat epilepsy,[4] and the isolation of the first known odour receptors in the nose.

[5] The institution supported discoveries related to how memory is stored in the brain, and Nobel Prize-winning developments in cardiac catheterization (1956) and cryo-electron microscopy (2017).