What are our goals for the MD-PhD program?
The short answer is that our goal is to identify students with outstanding potential and help them get the training that they need to be accomplished independent physician-investigators. We want them to emerge from Penn ready to complete their training and go on to make substantial contributions in their chosen fields. Our goal is not to produce private practitioners with research training. Many of them will have careers in which they have patient contact while spending most of their time doing research. As a result, we have worked hard with the graduate groups and the medical school to put together an integrated curriculum that has our trainees doing medical school and graduate school training during the entire time that they are with us.
