LETTER FROM THE DEAN

What does it mean to be on the front line of medicine?

Frontline medicine is speaking 70 different languages in the care of patients and meeting people where they are—in rural villages, on street corners, in community health centers, and at our teaching hospital affiliates, including Boston Medical Center.

Frontline medicine is direct engagement with complex and even controversial problems—chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Ebola, Zika, addiction, PTSD, and COVID-19—and a relentless investment in basic science, because the next treatment (or even the next cure) might lie in a gene sequence or test tube.

In frontline medicine, the stakes are high—high when our predecessor school graduated the first Black woman physician, and high when we took responsibility for the Framingham Heart Study, one of the great longitudinal research programs in the history of medicine. And the stakes are high every day for the people we serve—often those most at risk of falling through the cracks.

Working on the front lines of medicine is what distinguishes the faculty and students of the Chobanian & Avedisian School. We cannot do it without your support. Your giving can launch or sustain critical programs or keep a world-class education affordable for aspiring physicians and scientists. You can help a team of physicians and scientists make an important discovery in an area of medicine important to you or your family. You can honor a loved one or recognize a peerless teacher. We will connect you with the right opportunity, one to which you are as deeply committed as we are.

Please come meet our faculty, staff, and students, see our campus, and hear our stories. Please join us on the front line of medicine.

Karen H. Antman, MD Dean, Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine Provost, Medical Campus

Supporting Scholarships

It’s a well-known fact: Medical school is expensive. Today, annual tuition at the Chobanian & Avedisian School exceeds $68,000—a sum that sounds high but is comparable to peer schools and far less than the true cost of the education we provide. To offset tuition, we maximize scholarships, partnering with our donor community to provide about $7 million in need-based financial aid each year.

But many still have to borrow, and our graduates’ average debt load is $222,000. Also, since we proactively recruit medical students with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds—representative of the communities they will go on to serve—our students’ average need is high. “Scholarships have to be one of our highest priorities,” explains Dean Antman, “because many very qualified applicants who would be the best physicians—who would have the most empathy with patients and be able to relate to them—can’t go to medical school because they can’t afford it.”

High debt loads are particularly challenging for graduates who choose careers in primary care rather than in more lucrative specialties. We want general scholarships for people who would make great doctors but come from families that can’t afford it. And we also want, at the last minute, to make the debt of those who are going into primary care somewhat less. Donors can help us achieve this by endowing scholarships for loan forgiveness, awarded after a student matches for a residency in pediatrics or primary care.

Undoubtedly, donors have helped us make tremendous progress. We have doubled our endowment for scholarships in the past five years. And following the landmark $100 million gift from the late Edward Avedisian (CFA’59,’61, Hon.’22) that renamed our school in 2022 and gave us a new $50 million scholarship endowment, we will be able to meet more need, for more students. But even this remarkable gift will not enable us to meet the full need of our entering classes.

To meet the full financial need of our current four classes, we estimate that we would require an additional $335 million in scholarship endowment. There is a long way to go, but the benefits are clear—at the school, and in communities. We ask for your strong support.

Supporting Top Pediatricians

Stephen R. Karp (CAS’63)

In 2013, Stephen R. Karp established the Karp Family Scholarship, an endowment that has since provided debt relief to more than 26 extraordinary pediatricians. The program is an unequivocal success and has three distinct effects. First, it helps graduating students and their families, enabling them to pay off debt sooner and pursue other meaningful goals, such as buying a home and starting a family. It makes the Chobanian & Avedisian School a more appealing option for aspiring pediatricians. And it helps society by incentivizing young people to become pediatricians. In 2022, the Karp Scholarship Fund forgave $110,000 in loan debt—$22,000 each for five pediatrics graduates, including three who matched at Boston Children’s Hospital.

More than 1,700 students come to the Chobanian & Avedisian School from different backgrounds and plan distinctive pathways forward in their medical careers, but they share their training in Boston. When asked about what sets the school apart, some highlight the commitment to serving the under-resourced; others reflect on the warmth and engagement of the faculty. All speak of the strength of the community. And while donors make major contributions to facilities, professorships, and research, the students who receive the direct support of scholarships personally understand the value of a gift. Removing the stress of excessive debt enables these students to focus on their studies and become better physician-scientists. In many cases, these scholarships are their only means to afford medical school. Pictured left to right, above, are four scholarship recipients at the Chobanian & Avedisian School: Austin Snyder (CAMED’23), Dominic Tran (CAMED’23), Tatyana Dunn (CAMED’26), and Yoel Benarroch (CAMED’23).