Dear Members of the HMS and HSDM Community,
During their first week of classes each year, our incoming medical and dental students disperse by foot or MBTA to community-based organizations and community health centers across Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and Mission Hill. This year, some of them learned about the first community health center in the country: Dorchester’s Geiger Gibson Community Health Center, which originally opened in 1965 in the basement of a Columbia Point housing development. At another site nearby, students met a physician who had been caring for that community since 1981. “Seeing how passionate she was about caring for her patients as people, not just as clinical cases, was deeply inspiring,” one student reflected.
Encounters like these, facilitated by our Office for Community-Centered Medical Education within our Office of Medical Education, are part of what makes our curriculum so distinctive and transformative. From their very first week of classes, students meet local community leaders and health care workers whose intimate knowledge of the community is essential to understanding and advancing patients’ health and well-being. Indeed, our Program in Medical Education (PME) welcomes students to the profession by directly illustrating the ways high-quality care can make a profound and lasting difference.
Speaking of our PME, I am pleased to share the news, already known to some, that after serving in the interim role for the past several months, Jennifer Potter has officially been named dean for students in the Office of Student Affairs. Her dedication to the medical student learning environment and to student community and wellness has been invaluable. Together with Dean for Medical Education Bernard Chang and our new HMS co-director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), David Hirsh, we have an exemplary team guiding our MD program.
Our Programs in Graduate Education remain resolute and strong and our school a magnet for outstanding students despite tumultuous funding challenges and uncertainties about the future. Our Master of Medical Sciences (MMSc) in Biomedical Informatics program had its most competitive admissions cycle ever. And the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program received the largest number of applications it’s had in the course of more than 50 years.
Looking ahead to this fall, we have a number of important events on the horizon:
- First, I will deliver my annual State of the School address next Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 10:30 a.m. in the Veritas Science Center amphitheater and via Zoom. Among many topics, I will speak to the resilience of our community in the current climate of uncertainty, as well as the impact of hospital realignments and integrations on our academic and clinical faculty. The State of the School address provides a critical accounting of our strengths, challenges, priorities, and opportunities, and I look forward to seeing many of you there.
- The HMS Office for Culture and Community Engagement is continuing its Opening Doors series, beginning with a conversation with Mitchell T. Rabkin, former president of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, on Sept. 24. Conversations with Barbara McNeil and Edward J. Benz Jr. will follow on Oct. 22 and Dec. 10, respectively.
- The fifth annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture at Harvard on Oct. 15 will honor President of Wellesley College, eminent physician-scientist, and Harvard and HMS alumna Paula A. Johnson.
- And finally, on Nov. 5, the HMS Center for Bioethics is hosting the George W. Gay Lecture on Medical Ethics featuring John Green, author of Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. Green’s work to raise awareness of the social and political structures that allow tuberculosis to continue killing over 1 million people each year is an encouraging example of highly effective advocacy on behalf of patients worldwide.
These events should serve to remind us — amid ongoing threats to our research funding and soaring pressures on clinical productivity — that the work we do is meaningful and matters to our patients and to the world. Regardless of external circumstances, all of you commit yourselves to excellence every day for the sake of science and the people you serve — and for that, I am extraordinarily grateful and proud.
Sincerely,
George Q. Daley
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Harvard University