Physician Scientist Forum
The Physician Scientist Forum (PSF) is a course designed specifically for physician-scientist training that integrates clinical medicine skills and research principles. To mitigate discontinuity that may occur during the transitions between medical school and graduate school curricula, the PSF is vertically integrated and requires the participation of all MSTP students at all stages of training.
The curriculum provides:
- Integrated clinical and research content
- Differential diagnosis and clinical problem solving early in MD-PhD training
- Exposure to different research approaches
- Exposure to different clinical specialties
- Opportunities to develop communication and presentation skills throughout the training continuum
The PSF is held twice per month throughout the academic year and explores the interface between clinical medicine and basic science and population-based research. In this course, MSTP students integrate their medical and research training throughout the duration of their medical and graduate studies.
The course goals are to:
- Develop a customized course for training physician-scientists
- Incorporate differential diagnosis and clinical problem solving into MD-PhD training
- Connect clinical and research topics
- Expose MSTP students to different clinical specialties
- Provide MSTP students with content relevant to their long-term career goals
- Allow MSTP students to gain experience delivering content that satisfies specific learning objective
Hour-long sessions are structured as thematic modules and include didactic presentations by students and faculty with small group discussions around the following themes:
- Clinical Problem Solving
- Student Research Talk
- Science Consult
- Career Development
During these sessions, attendees interactively solve clinical cases, learn about current research being done by students in the program, comprehensively examine a specific disease treated by that clinical specialty or subspecialty, and hear about topics that support their career development.
Additional sessions are devoted to a variety of topics including career and family balance, professionalism, and other topics our students have expressed interest in.