HISTORY
The Investigative Medicine Program is a free standing, interdisciplinary, Ph.D.
granting program that was founded in 1999. The program was established to address the critical need for formal trainingin clinical research to capitalize on the developments and discoveries in fundamentalscience and translate them to the clinical setting which is vital to the advancement
of scientific knowledge and the development of improved treatments for human
disease. The Investigative Medicine Program provides the training required to
create a cadre of talented, highly-skilled physician scientists who will be uniquely
prepared to meet the challenges of academic careers in biomedical research and
who will advance the frontiers of medical practice.
The unique role of the physician-scientist
is to focus on disease-oriented or patient-oriented research, ensuring that discoveries
in pure science are developed into clinically relevant concepts and evaluating
the benefits and outcomes of these concepts in clinical practice. Physicians
are uniquely poised to investigative these areas, offering an invaluable perspective
on the translational of laboratory findings into clinical practice, the development
of optimal therapeutic approaches, and the investigation of the effectiveness
of these approaches. Without physician-scientists, these vital areas will not
be suitably addressed.
Patient-oriented research on the strategies of clinical
care is now firmly established as a distinctive research discipline in Medicine.
The focus of the research is on the evaluation of data that can improve the care
of individual patients through rigorous assessments of diagnosis, prognosis,
and treatment. Uniquely among the clinical sciences, this patient-focused research
depends upon data collected from patients and outcomes measured in these patients.
This new but now established field was pioneered at Yale and the Investigative
Medicine Program is highly regarded as a national and international leader. Evidence
generated by studies of clinical strategies is helping to transform the practice
of medicine from a field dominated by experience and anecdote alone to one where
scientific data guides practice.
The program admitted its first students in
July 2000 and currently 14 students are enrolled. The students of the Investigative
Medicine Program are outstanding with significant accomplishments during their
graduate training. As of December 2007, 11 students have been awarded the Ph.D.
degree in Investigative Medicine.
