BGE’s Move Into School of Medicine Expands Opportunities for Students, Programs
Georgetown biomedical students as well as medical students will benefit from a stronger community and more interdisciplinary engagement as Biomedical Graduate Education (BGE)’s move into Georgetown University School of Medicine (GUSOM) brings the expertise, programs and prestige of both closer together, BGE leaders said following the July 1 transition.
Anna Tate Riegel
The July 1 School of Medicine expansion builds on decades of growing collaboration between BGE, home to about 700 students across dozens of master’s, PhD and certificate programs, and the medical degree program, with around 800 students pursuing MDs and dual degrees. The official incorporation of BGE into GUSOM will fuel activities that span biomedical and medical education, said BGE Vice Dean Anna Tate Riegel, pointing to existing collaborations including One Step Ahead Mentoring, the Special Master’s Program for future medical students, and the M.D./Ph.D. program bridging research and clinical care.
Caleb McKinney, Assistant Vice President of Master’s Program Administration & Development and Associate Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Training & Development, expects that BGE will be able to collaborate more closely with the medical degree program’s resources for fostering community and academic success. He also said BGE could learn from the medical school’s strength in tutoring and retention support.
Caleb McKinney
“Our students are spread across 26 different graduate programs, so it’s hard to standardize such offerings for BGE students because they’re learning different curricula and facing different hurdles depending on the program,” McKinney said. “But I think there are valuable lessons we could learn from School of Medicine structures that could help us develop additional academic resources to support students, since they’re very good at that.”
At the same time, BGE’s experience with research and funding could help medical students working on their Independent Scholarly Project (ISP) or taking the MD program’s clinical and translational research track. BGE supports National Institutes of Health (NIH) T32 and TL1 training grants, which account for nearly $3.8 million and have provided hands-on experience to more than 170 doctoral students and 60 postdoctoral fellows over the years.
“We’re really good at research training, and we know how to assemble strong externally funded programs,” McKinney said. “We could potentially help with expanding research training support for all of our students, including medical students and graduate students.”
Looking further ahead, McKinney sees opportunities for new academic programs spanning BGE’s disciplines and medical education.
“Now that we’re going to be structurally closer to our clinician colleagues, we’ll have a lot of opportunities to build out more professional degrees,” McKinney said, possibly including allied health professions such as physician assistants, physical therapists and public health workers. Existing dual degrees such as the MD/PhD and MD/MS could also grow stronger thanks to new synergies between BGE and the medical education program.
Riegel said: “This is an opportunity for us to think about how we can develop new programs related to medical education and allied health professions, and how we can integrate basic science research and translational research into what medical education is doing. … We have very successful ongoing programs with medical education, so this is a wonderful opportunity to expand our collaboration.”
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