Endowed professorships recognize academic excellence and support extraordinary faculty
Endowed Professorships in the Harvard Faculty of Medicine
Harvard Medical School’s endowed professorships support a highly selected cadre of the most talented, accomplished, and promising faculty incumbents across the Harvard Medical School quadrangle and the affiliated teaching hospitals. Appointment to an endowed professorship represents the highest academic honor bestowed on a member of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine and fewer than 3% of HMS faculty currently hold such an appointment.
Endowed professorships have honored and supported HMS faculty incumbents at the forefront of academic medicine since 1791 when the Hersey Professorship of the Theory and Practice of Physic was established. These professorships also reflect the longstanding collaboration between HMS and the renowned HMS-affiliated teaching hospitals in advancing their joint research and educational missions. The investment in faculty represents an enduring commitment to scientific discovery and clinical translation to promote the future health of local and global communities and teaching excellence for the next generation of physicians and medical scientists.
The extraordinary academic excellence associated with this recognition and represented by these remarkable faculty is evident in the roster of illustrious incumbents, past and present.
The throughline over the two-century history of HMS endowed professorships has been vision, purpose, and excellence and there is perhaps no better way to illustrate their continuing legacy into the future than in the inspiring stories of the current incumbents. You can learn more about three of them featured in this video here: Endowed Professorships at Harvard Medical School
The HMS endowed professors and endowed distinguished professors were honored in a January 2025 celebration at Harvard’s Annenberg Hall hosted by Dean Daley. HMS will continue its tradition of celebrating HMS endowed professors at a gala event, Legacies of Excellence, in early 2027.
Giving opportunities
Every endowed professorship at HMS began with an act of generosity. Grateful patients, colleagues, families, and visionary donors established these chairs to advance a field, an idea, or the search for a cure. Several honor faculty who helped found whole disciplines, including neonatology, neurology, cardiac surgery and transplant surgery. Others were named by donors to honor a beloved mentor or colleague whose work shaped their lives.
The founding donors could not have foreseen the discoveries and clinical advances their gifts would make possible over generations of incumbents. Still, they saw that lasting support for exceptional people builds an exceptional community. Each professorship supports a single faculty member, and taken together, these chairs have helped make HMS the collaborative community it is today.
Named professorships are the highest honor HMS confers. Past and present incumbents include Nobel laureates and members of the National Academies. With each new appointment, the professorship adds to a lineage of scholarship and contribution that carries its name in perpetuity. Learn about endowing a professorship →
General Information for HMS and HMS-affiliate academic leadership and department chairs
There is a highly selective and rigorous vetting process for nominations to each HMS endowed professorship. Nominations are proposed based on the high caliber and impact of a candidate’s scholarly accomplishments in alignment with the terms. This process has its inception, of course, in the purpose set out by the donor in establishing the professorship, for example, expressing the hope that the professorship would advance a field of medicine and its therapeutic frontiers. The nominations process includes letters from hospital leaders or department chairs describing how the candidate rises above his or her peers toward fulfillment of the goals of the professorship.
After review by the HMS Office for Faculty Affairs and Office for Clinical and Academic Affairs, the nominating materials are carefully considered by the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, who advances them to the University Provost, where the process culminates in an appointment decision. Of course, each appointment starts with an outstanding candidate, and even before that, this candidate has been mentored and supported by an outstanding department chair.
Occasionally, an immediate past incumbent whose ongoing work exemplifies academic excellence in continuing research and teaching contributions to the HMS community, may also be nominated for and subsequently honored with an appointment as an endowed distinguished professor. Nominations for this honor may also be proposed by academic leadership in the corresponding affiliate institutions and departments in alignment with the terms.
HMS is grateful for the strong collaboration with academic leadership in the nominations process and for the outsized success of their efforts in this selections process, which has yielded an extraordinary cadre of endowed professors.
"Information and templates for the nominations process can be found at the following links:
- Faculty Handbook (Section 12 on Endowed Professorships)
- Forms related to Endowed Professorship nominations
References:
Harvard University History of Named Chairs. Sketches of Donors and Donations. Professorships of the Faculties of Medicine and Public Health. 1791-1992. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005.
Harvard University History of Named Chairs. Sketches of Donors and Donations. 1991 – 2004. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003.