Medicine
Welcome to the Department of Medicine at BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center. The Boston University Medical Campus contains the Boston Medical Center and Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, School of Public Health, and Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine. The Department of Medicine is affiliated with our two principal teaching hospitals, Boston Medical Center and the VA Boston Healthcare System.
Goals
The faculty of the Department of Medicine at BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine are unified by an unflinching commitment to excellence, professionalism, service, and discovery. We believe that our success as a department is dependent upon exceptional achievement in each of our core missions of research, clinical care, and education.
Department Overview
The Department of Medicine has 476 full-time faculty. Of the total, 29% are associate or full professors, 59% are women, and 12% are from groups underrepresented in medicine.
Clinical Programs
The department’s clinical programs provide a full range of services to a diverse patient population from across Boston as well as the greater New England region. We have a distinguished history of providing care to the marginalized and well-resourced alike since the foundation of Boston City Hospital. Many of the department’s clinical units draw patients from across the country, with three prominent examples provided by our programs in pulmonary hypertension, amyloidosis, and scleroderma. The integration of the department’s compelling social mission with a rigorous academic tradition creates an especially rich environment for patient care, training, and discovery.
The department’s clinicians provide comprehensive care in both our outpatient clinics and the inpatient services of Boston Medical Center and the Boston VA Healthcare System. The department has a robust program in quality and safety, and our clinical programs are well integrated with the research agenda of the department as well.
The department’s clinical work is critical to the success of Boston Medical Center in meeting the needs of the communities we serve. Remarkably, the ambulatory clinics at Boston Medical Center have the largest visit volume of any of the academic medical centers in Boston.
Research Programs
The department’s world-class research programs foster a spirit of inquiry in the department’s clinical and educational programs, and bring new preventive, diagnostic, and treatment modalities to our patient population. These programs derive from a rich tradition of mentorship and critical thinking, and are fostered by a supportive and collegial environment that encourages faculty and trainees to work and learn collaboratively.
The department’s research program secured over $124 million in new extramural funding in AY 2024. Substantial growth in the department’s research portfolio has occurred in infectious disease, biomedical genetics, computational biomedicine, endocrinology, general internal medicine, hematology/oncology, nephrology, regenerative medicine, preventive medicine, and pulmonary medicine. The research programs in infectious diseases and rheumatology have also experienced continued robust extramural support. The expansion of these programs reflects investments in new faculty and research infrastructure. The department has continued its goal of supporting research faculty by awarding five pilot grants in 2024–25 in collaboration with the BU Clinical & Translational Sciences Institute. The department has also awarded bridge funding to two faculty members. The Department of Medicine’s established research cores—the Analytical Core, the Metabolic Phenotyping and IVIS Core, the Cellular Imaging Core, and the Single Cell Sequencing Core—all continue to support research across the Medical Campus. New instruments and services include an Abberior STED super-resolution microscope, a new IVIS and micro-CT for in vivo imaging, and an Octet R8 System for Molecular Interaction Studies. In AY 2024, we had over 200 unique internal and external users of the cores. The department’s funding from the National Institutes of Health is in the top decile of research-intensive departments of medicine in the United States.
The department has internationally renowned research programs in a number of areas. Examples include:
- cardiovascular biology
- pulmonary inflammation and immunology
- obesity
- mycobacterial infections
- diabetes
- arthritis and scleroderma
- alcohol/substance abuse
- genetics and genomics of neurodegenerative diseases
- cancer diagnostics and therapeutics
- clinical epidemiology
- amyloidosis
- HIV/AIDS
- lung cancer
- renal glomerular disorders
- precision medicine of acute and chronic kidney diseases
- geriatrics—aging and studies of centenarians
- sickle cell disease
- regenerative medicine
- computational biomedicine
The most important longitudinal study of cardiac risk factors ever conducted—the Framingham Heart Study—is based in the Department of Medicine at Boston University, led by newly appointed Director Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD. The Center for Regenerative Medicine was established by the Department of Medicine in partnership with Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center to accelerate groundbreaking work in stem cell biology and has experienced exponential growth and accomplishments since its inception. Its open-source policy for the distribution of induced pluripotent stem cells from various organs has received wide recognition. In addition, the department’s Evans Center for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research (ECIBR), founded and directed by Katya Ravid, DSc, provides resources and infrastructure for faculty to work in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams that create new approaches to the discovery process. As of AY 2024, over 470 faculty from various departments and schools and over 250 trainees were participating in the programs supported by the ECIBR and co-supported by the BU Clinical & Translational Sciences Institute, the office of BU associate provost for research, and recently also by Boston Medical Center. These faculty have secured over 450 extramural research grants and produced over 1,100 collaborative publications on work related to the ECIBR Affinity Research Collaboratives. The Center for Implementation & Improvement Sciences, established in 2017, further increased the scope and impact of the projects and training relative to implementation science in the department and established a new fellowship program in 2022.
Educational Programs
The department’s educational programs have a long-standing tradition of training national leaders in discovery, clinical care, and medical education. The present faculty enthusiastically embrace this tradition and are eager to promote the development of the next generation of leaders in medicine. The residency program includes a robust training experience with a very diverse patient population and a wide range of opportunities for academic pursuits. It has a strong emphasis on equity and social justice. In addition, the residency program provides pathways that provide enhanced training in the following areas: HIV medicine, health equity, medical education, quality improvement/patient safety, medical informatics, point-of-care ultrasound, and cardiovascular epidemiology.
The residency program includes 143 residents, over 20% of whom are from groups underrepresented in medicine and 15% of whom have advanced graduate degrees. The residency program also offers a nationally renowned track in primary care as well as an accelerated research track. The department offers 14 ACGME-accredited subspecialty fellowships. In addition to our GME programs, the department’s educational programs include PhD programs in Translational & Molecular Medicine, Genetics & Genomics, and Nutrition & Metabolism, as well as a long-standing successful program in Continuing Medical Education.
The goals of the department’s educational programs are to attract the most outstanding trainees, enforce rigorous standards of achievement, develop a supportive learning environment and individualized programs of study that help trainees reach their full potential, and to create an exemplary mixture of professionalism, clinical excellence, service, and integrity.
Medical Student Education
The Department of Medicine plays a central role in educating students throughout the four-year Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine curriculum. Since 2023, the school has initiated students into a longitudinal integrated course, known as PISCEs (Principles Integrating Science, Clinical Medicine, and Equity), and the department provides significant leadership in this course, which integrates foundational science, pathophysiology, and disease management.
Medicine faculty promote the development of foundational communications and physical diagnosis skills while providing significant preclinical instruction as Academy of Medical Educator (AME) faculty. They develop relationships early on as advisors and coaches of the preclinical students, teaching regularly scheduled small group discussions. In addition, AMEs help students realize goals, navigate challenges, identify additional faculty mentors, find research projects, and provide general career advice across the curriculum.
During the Medicine Clerkship, students learn clinical medicine while working side by side with residents and faculty in providing care to a cohort of inpatients. A key principle that guides learning is to provide students with graduated responsibility with supervision. The clerkship introduces the clinical tools and perspectives of inpatient care that are appropriate to the “undifferentiated” medical student. This learning experience on the inpatient wards is complemented by unique enrichment in which students work in small group settings with Associate Clerkship Directors to hone essential clinical skills (including advanced-level patient-centered communications skills, physical diagnosis, and clinical reasoning).
Advanced medical topics and skills are addressed during the final year of the clinical curriculum. The Ambulatory Medicine elective provides outpatient learning opportunities that are supplemented by enrichment sessions in communications skills, clinical reasoning, and evidence-based medicine. This elective also aims to provide a bridge to internship by addressing interdisciplinary ambulatory topics relevant to students entering residency.
The Subinternship in Medicine is a hands-on, capstone inpatient rotation that prepares students for the challenges of internship. Students are given additional clinical responsibility in patient care while under close supervision. During their subinternship, they have the option of rotating on traditional medicine floor teams—that include attendings, residents and interns, an Acting Internship team with one resident and attending, and three 4th-year students—or in the Medical Intensive Care Unit.
Finally, students can enroll in the department’s many fourth-year medicine Subspecialty electives, where they develop a more focused knowledge and clinical skill set in general internal medicine or one of the discipline’s subspecialties. These electives include the Medicine Internship Prep Course to directly prepare for their transition from medical school to an internship in medicine.
