The Medical Scientist Training Program at Yale is designed to train physician-scientists who will translate basic and clinical research to problems of human pathobiology. About 12 students each year enter our MSTP and make up -12% of the medical school class. The strength of our Program is the flexibility of the Yale System of medical education and the breadth and depth of the graduate programs at Yale. These programs of medical and graduate education allow MSTP students to customize their educational paths. Graduate training at Yale provide students with opportunities in many biomedical tracks including Cell Biology, Physiology, Genetics, Immunology, Microbiology, Molecular Biophysics &Biochemistry, Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Molecular Cellular &Developmental Biology, and Chemistry. We accommodate students in nontraditional areas such as epidemiology and public health, psychology, computer sciences, sociology and anthropology. New programs in Translational Research (e.g... Clinical Immunology and Cancer Biology), and in Biomedical Engineering provide new opportunities for MSTP students. The Program requires ~8 years to complete but emphasizes interdisciplinary training and correlation with clinical disciplines. Students spend the first two years studying basic sciences of which some courses can be taken for graduate school credit. Clinical medicine is introduced in the 2nd year and emphasizes systems approaches to disease. All students complete 6 months of clerkships in medicine, pads and psychiatry before beginning thesis work. This prepares them for participation in weekly longitudinal clinics in ambulatory medicine, designed for MSTP students during the research years. Students are thus able to relate research training to clinical medicine without compromising lab time. Approximately 74% of our graduates now in academic positions are in clinical departments while 26% are in basic science departments. Our goal of preparing physician-scientists for academic careers has been successful in that -90% of our graduates have peer reviewed research grants. Over the past 36 years the Program has been in existence, >8,000 publications in top journals have appeared.
Basic and translational/clinical research form the basis for all advances in health. We are now at a crossroads in basic science with our understanding of the human genome and our ability to decipher the cellular and molecular basis of normal and pathophysiological processes, and design rational approaches to alleviating disease. The future of medicine depends on the marriage of basic and clinical disciplines: MSTP nhvsician-scienti.sts will lead these endeavors.
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