MD/PhD Program - Director's Message
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Dr. Lynn Raymond |
After four years of working together with Dr. Anthony Chow as the Co-Director of the MD/PhD Program, I am looking forward to the next five years as the Director. We are all grateful for the leadership and dedication of Dr. Chow over the past decade in building the combined MD/PhD Program at UBC.
Dr. Chow’s vision of an integrated program, in which the medical curriculum is interleaved with graduate course work and research, is now well established. Over the past three years we have celebrated the graduation of the first six students from the combined program. All have entered research-intensive residency programs, continuing on the path towards a Clinician-Scientist career. Their successes confirm the effectiveness of the integrated MD/PhD Program at UBC.
In recent years the need for Clinician-Scientists has grown, along with the rapid pace of discovery in genomics, proteomics, new technologies, and many other areas that can be applied to medicine. Moving forward, cutting edge medical research requires multi-disciplinary teams that include not only basic scientists and clinicians, but also experts in bioinformatics, statistics, large scale data analysis, health care systems and other related areas. Clinician-Scientists are uniquely positioned to become leaders of such multi-disciplinary groups, as well as to execute their own translational research that will take discoveries from the lab to the bedside.
To keep pace with the expanding need for Clinician-Scientists, we plan to increase enrolment in the UBC MD/PhD Program over the next several years. The first step towards this goal has been to enlarge the funding base for MD/PhD studentships. We are very grateful to the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and to the four UBC-based medical research institutes: Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, Child and Family Research Institute, Providence Health Care and BC Cancer Agency for their commitments to supporting student stipends over the next few years. With this additional funding we have the opportunity to leverage funds from other research-based foundations and potentially double the number of students in our program.
In addition to expanding the MD/PhD Program we are working with other stake-holders at UBC, who are involved in promoting the training of Clinician-Scientists at the postgraduate level, in order to optimize opportunities for graduates of our program to continue in research-intensive residency training programs. As well, our students are involved in a new, nationwide initiative to improve communication between MD/PhD programs and establish networks to disseminate information on postgraduate training, funding opportunities, negotiating faculty positions with protected time for research and other information essential for success as a Clinician-Scientist.
The last decade has seen the establishment of an excellent combined MD/PhD Program at UBC. Over the next several years, we hope to see that program grow and thrive in order to train clinician researchers for the future.
January 2007
