Medical Scientist Training Program

'Medical Scientist Training Programs''' are highly selective combined M.D. and Ph.D. graduate degree programs offered by a number of U.S. medical schools with grant support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The vast majority (over 80%) of MD/PhD program graduates eventually go on to work in positions in academic medicine, government, or industry where medical research is a central component of their duties. According to a FASEB study, graduates of NIH-funded MSTPs make up just 2.5% of medical school graduates each year, but after graduation account for about one third of all NIH research grants awarded to physicians. Many MD/PhD graduates also practice clinical medicine in their field of expertise.

Developed by the NIH to stimulate training of talented physician-scientists for future careers in biomedical research, MSTPs offer full tuition support for both the medical and graduate phases of education, in addition to a stipend ranging from $19,000 to $28,000 per year. Typically, students complete the program in six to ten years, depending upon the time spent in Ph.D. research. These programs vary greatly in size, ranging from two trainees per academic class (e.g. University of Connecticut) to over twenty (e.g. Washington University in St. Louis). Additionally, several medical schools allow for the PhD portion of the MSTP to be completed at an allied institution, where research in specific fields may be stronger than at the home institution. Such alliances exist between the University of California, San Diego and the Salk Institute and the Scripps Research Institute, Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and the University of California, Berkeley, Stony Brook University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory or Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of California, Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine and the California Institute of Technology, and the Emory University School of Medicine and the Georgia Institute of Technology among others. Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons allows students that have also been accepted into the Graduate Partnership Program of the NIH to complete their thesis work through this program, typically at the NIH and the University of Cambridge (Health Sciences) or the University of Oxford (Biomedical Sciences).

Most programs have created MSTP-specific courses that fulfill medical or graduate school requirements and streamline the training schedule. These courses eliminate overlap between the curricula without sacrificing necessary rigor. This integrated curriculum takes different form at different institutions, but all MD-PhD recipients receive a complete MD training and a rigorous PhD experience.

A number of medical schools without funded NIH MSTP grant slots maintain their own non-MSTP MD/PhD combined degree programs, sometimes offering full or partial student financial support funded by the schools themselves. A few of the more popular non-MSTP MD/PhD programs include those at Boston University, Dartmouth College, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wayne State University, University of Southern California, Ohio State University, and the University of Oklahoma.

Nationwide MD-PhD enrollment is currently 4,600. According to the AAMC, there were ~1,700 MD-PhD applicants in 2007, of which better than 50% were interviewed. Of those interviewed, 65% were accepted. Average total MCAT of those receiving at least one offer of acceptance from MSTP-funded programs was 36; average GPA was 3.8.