Medical Scientist Training Program

The mission of the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program is to provide an academic and social environment that inculcates in our students the vital importance of rigorous clinical and scientific know-how, the highest ethical standards, and most of all, the drive to harness their remarkable talents to promote healing over the short and long term. A key component of our mission is the recognition that each student brings to the table a unique skill set and vision for their future career. For this reason, we promote an integrated training curriculum that affords essential standards complemented by operational flexibility. Our students pursue either (1) a truly unique Health Sciences and Technology (HST) curriculum that represents a Harvard and MIT collaboration emphasizing the mechanisms of medicine and the impact of mathematics, physics and engineering on our fundamental understanding of physiology and opportunities to innovate; or (2) a Pathways curriculum that features a “flipped classroom” approach in which multidimensional thinking and hands-on learning rules the day and a liberal arts culture of “any and every medical career route is possible” is palpable. The academic choices available to our students at the graduate research phase are equally profound, spanning a remarkable breadth of institutions, basic and social science graduate programs, and research spectra that incorporate essentially any and every training discipline available at Harvard University (HU), Harvard Medical School (HMS), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As an MD-PhD training program that sits at the intersection of such renowned institutions and hospitals, our mission is based on five key pillars: (1) selecting and recruiting the nation’s most promising young talent; (2) providing an integrated and evidence-based MD-PhD curriculum that features comprehensive dual-degree training; (3) assembling and training the ideal constellation of faculty leaders, advisors, and role models who embody the breadth and depth of clinical and research disciplines; (4) fostering a dynamic MD-PhD training community that is enriched by tailored academic, social, and career development programming; and (5) developing the funding base to maximally support our enrolled students and enable the continued growth of our program so that we can contribute to building a larger, much-needed MD-PhD workforce to serve the critical health care and biomedical technology needs of the nation and world. To execute the proposed training program, we have assembled a quartet of academic leaders with complementary expertise and institutional representation, spanning HMS basic science and clinical care, MIT basic science, HU/HMS social science, and education evaluation and student/faculty recruitment. Our leaders have established a bold set of 9 academic and integrative training objectives to promote the personal and professional development of budding physician-scientists who are balanced, fulfilled, and maximally prepared to make their mark as multi-talented, multi-dimensional, and multi-disciplinary caregivers, researchers, and educators.