The College of Medicine’s MD-PhD program has been awarded a prestigious National Institutes of Health grant and designation as a Medical Scientist Training Program.
With the five-year grant, the UIC College of Medicine joins an elite group of only 41 medical schools nationwide that may use the designation.
“In awarding the grant, the NIH cited the range of opportunities for scientific study as one of the strengths of the UIC program,” says Larry Tobacman, MD, professor of medicine and director of the MD-PhD program.
The grant provides tuition and stipends to students entering the program.
In the PhD portion of the program, students work with distinguished researchers in fields such as neuroscience, molecular biology, pharmacology, microbiology and biophysics, as well as engineering and public health.
The UIC College of Medicine has produced physicianscientists with the dual MD-PhD degrees since the 1920s, when the dual degree was achieved through an informal arrangement with each student. Since 1986, MD-PhD training at UIC has been run as an organized program with an integrated curriculum.
Under Tobacman’s leadership over the past four years, the program has been enhanced to merge the two very different learning styles that go into training scientists and clinicians.
Candidates spend their first two years completing the regular medical school curriculum while also taking a research methods course and attending weekly seminars offering an overview of bioscience investigation.
Choice of a thesis adviser and an intensive period of original research follow the second year. In the final years of the program, candidates rejoin other medical students to complete the clinical phase of medical school.
“Our aim is to produce a physician who can apply clinical understanding to the study of disease and a scientist who sees beyond the test tube to apply in-depth thinking and understanding to the whole patient,” says Roberta Bernstein, program coordinator.
Tobacman says the consistent support of the UIC College of Medicine has made it possible to build a program that can attract and train students “who will define the future of medical science.”