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Medical and Biomedical Education:
President of Johns Hopkins University. Chief of Vascular Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. President of the Scripps Research Foundation. Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health. CEO of a regional children's hospital. NASA astronaut. Outbreak investigator for the State Department. Dean of Dartmouth Medical School.
Wherever you look, you'll find that Stanford School of Medicine graduates have made their mark as innovators, leaders, thinkers, pioneers, and healers.
The Best and the Brightest
If we are to make good on our pledge to transform health care in this country and around the world, we must begin with the young men and women who have the potential to become the most influential scientists and clinicians of their generation. Our role is to create the most challenging and comprehensive education possible, helping each of these gifted students achieve his or her tremendous promise. When we succeed, the results have a ripple effect, spreading out from Stanford and benefiting people everywhere.
Breaking down borders
When Rebecca Kim was considering her medical school choices, the breadth of Stanford's curriculum and the "amazing access to faculty" were key factors in her decision.
Having already spent three years in Senegal working in the Peace Corps, she knew that she wanted to devote her medical career to international health issues. And Stanford's Scholarly Concentrations — a program initiated by Dean Philip Pizzo that encourages student scholarship in a specific field — allowed her to jumpstart her interest. Working through the interschool Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, Kim's project reviewed alternative methods to the treatment of post-partum hemorrhage in developing countries. Her concentration required extensive coursework in economics and biostatistics that, together with her medical student training, will give her the skills she needs to pursue her goal of making a difference in global health.
One of the defining characteristics of our approach is our small size, designed to foster an intimate intellectual environment and promote meaningful interactions between faculty and students. Each year we admit just 86 medical students from a pool of 6,000 extremely talented applicants, as well as an equal number of exceptional students pursuing their PhDs in fields ranging from genetics to biochemistry to developmental biology. They are joined by more than 600 interns and residents training in 26 medical specialties and over 1,000 postdoctoral scholars and trainees. Together they form a community of young researchers and physicians who come to Stanford to learn all this remarkable institution has to offer, then leave prepared to make their own contributions in the world.
Creating a Common Language
We believe the greatest advances in health care will come from productive partnerships between investigators who are unraveling the mysteries of living organisms and the mechanisms of disease and doctors who are carrying the benefits of those discoveries to patients as well as shaping health care principles and policies. Toward this end, we are committed to giving our MD and PhD students the vocabulary to speak each other's languages and the skills to develop creative enterprises. We are thus redefining our education and training programs, making sweeping changes to our curriculum and creating new opportunities for learning that will position Stanford as a model for medical and scientific education.
Building For Better Medicine
Central to our effort are crucial new tools and technologies, many of which will be incorporated in a new building designed to be one of the most advanced centers for medical education in the nation. The Learning and Knowledge Center will utilize technology to transform the way we train both scientists and clinicians, including such innovations as virtual reality and simulation laboratories where students can get hands-on clinical skills training, a state-of-the-art digitized library enabling instant access to vital scientific resources, and a conference center for symposia on emerging topics in biomedical science.
While we may not yet know who tomorrow's brightest stars in science and medicine will be, we do know with certainty that many of them will begin their journeys here, at Stanford University Medical Center.
