The Medical Scientist Training Program at the New York University School of Medicine is one of the oldest and most distinguished physician-scientist training programs of its kind in the country. It was anteceded by the Honors Program for Medical Student Research. The NYU Honors Program was created in the 1940s by, among others, Lewis Thomas and the Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa, and was designed to give medical students the opportunity to spend several of their summer breaks and additional elective periods in a research laboratory environment. To this day, the Honors Program remains a highly successful program at the NYU medical school.

In 1964, the year that the Rolling Stones released their debut album and the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, the NYU Medical Scientist Training Program became one of a select group of foundational physician-scientist programs funded by the NIGMS, one of the National Institutes of Health. Under the stewardship of Deans Lewis Thomas and Saul Farber and the subsequent six directors of the Program, the NYU MSTP combined MD/PhD degree training track has since served as a benchmark for similar programs in other medical schools across the country.

At the time of its inception, it was one of only three NIH funded programs dedicated to providing aspiring medical scientists with the practical biomedical background and clinical experience of a physician as evidenced by the requirements for a Medical Doctor degree in combination with the rigorous research foundation that is the hallmark of a Doctor of Philosophy in the basic sciences. The goal of the program is—and always has been—to prepare future physician-scientists for the challenges that arise from the efforts to bridge the gulf that threatens to divide the scientist's research bench from the patient's bedside and vice versa.    

The NYU MSTP has maintained this translational focus over the last four decades, a period during which it has produced close to three hundred MD/PhD graduates. For the last twenty-five years, a substantial majority of theses dual-degree graduates have been granted academic appointments at Schools of Medicine and many of them have enjoyed—or are enjoying—distinguished careers at academic institutions, NIH, the HHMI, and the Institute of Medicine. In fact, NYU ranks fourth among all U.S. medical schools in the number of its graduates who hold medical-school faculty positions. Just as prominently, a significant number of our MSTP graduates are actively engaged in research or hold equivalent appointments at highly ranked research centers or institutions. Indeed, since 1968, the year of our first graduate from the program (who is now the Chair of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Colorado), more than three quarters of our MSTP alumni have remained in academic medicine.

In the last ten years alone, the NYU Medical Scientist Training Program has graduated almost one hundred physician-scientists, almost all of whom have involved themselves in biomedical research or opted for careers in basic, translational, or clinical research at top-tier medical centers. These notable alumni demonstrate every day the creative combinations of art and science that the lab and the clinic require.