Nationally, trends suggest that there are diminishing numbers of academic physician investigators. Thus, there is a need to train a cadre of future scientists who can link their research to clinical care to address the trends, causes, and treatment of disease. The Indiana University Medical Scientist/Engineer Training Program (MSTP) was conceived to meet this need, and this application represents the second competitive renewal of the Indiana MSTP since its funding almost 9 years ago. A notable aspect of our program is the integration of faculty within the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University to include the exceptional training of physician engineers.
The Aims of our MSTP are: (1) To recruit a competitive pool of students from diverse ethnic and regional backgrounds who espouse a strong commitment to both research and patient care. (2) To engage students in a training pathway that integrates a productive basic/translational research component with a next-generation systems-based medical training curriculum that reinforces commitment and minimizes attrition to develop a community of scholars equipped to succeed as physician investigators. (3) To graduate students with dual MD-PhD degrees who will be competitive for residency and post- doctoral funding at the best academic medical centers throughout the country. To achieve these aims, we have taken the necessary steps to grow and advance our program over the past 10 years to its current level of 57 students. This programmatic growth is bolstered by support from the MSTP T32 and a dedicated $10M endowment to the program. Our program emphasizes coursework that broadens research training at the bench with quantitative skills, provides opportunities for public speaking, provides a range of enriching extracurricular opportunities, and allows for integration of medicine and science/engineering throughout all years of training. Defined oversight mechanisms are in place to track the progress of trainees throughout the program. With the help of our outreach activities and the MSTP designation, our program notoriety has grown tremendously, as evidenced by a 100% increase in our applicant pool over the past 10 years and the remarkable diversity of our current student pool (17% underrepresented, 74% from out-of-state). In this competitive renewal application, we will build upon our successes and to make the necessary programmatic adjustments going forward to ensure that our trainees continue to be prepared to become future scientists and engineers who pioneer advances in medical practice through research.
Nationally, trends suggest diminishing numbers of physician scientist; as a result, there is a need to train a cadre of future scientists who can link their research to clinical care to address the trends, causes, and treatment of disease. The Indiana University Medical Scientist/Engineer Training Program was conceived to meet this need. This application describes our ongoing program to train the next generation of physician scientists who will become leaders in research and clinical care.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 94 publications
