noteworthy

Office for Community Centered Medical Education opens

Last fall, HMS launched the Office for Community Centered Medical Education. Its aim: to better support students who want to work with community-based organizations and community health centers in the Roxbury, Mission Hill, and Jamaica Plain neighborhoods near Boston’s Longwood area. The office and its staff will serve students at HMS and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

According to Nancy Oriol, MD ’79, faculty associate dean for community engagement in medical education, students who seek out the office want community engagement to play a central role in their education.

“The students understand that it’s when you engage with the community that you get to actually understand the context of the lives of the people for whom you will provide medical care,” she said. “It’s seeing community engagement as a relevant part of academic medicine and expanding the ability of doctors to care for all their patients.”

The office serves as a central source of information and resources for students who are interested in community-engagement efforts and as an academic home for faculty who wish to work with those students. In addition, said David Duong, MD ’15 (fig 1), director of the newly launched office, it builds on the efforts of the HMS Center for Primary Care, which for more than a decade has worked and partnered with local community health centers to strengthen primary health care delivery services.

The office has already made curricular strides by bolstering existing HMS courses and electives on community health, creating a new community-engagement track, adopting a community-engagement clerkship, and developing a track for doing a scholarly project.

“Whether a student is going to be a primary care doctor, a cardiothoracic surgeon, or the director of the NIH, they will have to relate with people who are different from them,” said Duong. “Our office provides students with meaningful opportunities to do that.”

HMS withdraws from U.S. News &World Report rankings

In mid-January, Dean George Q. Daley, MD ’91, announced that HMS would no longer submit data to U.S. News & World Report “to support their ‘best medical schools’ survey and rankings” (fig. 2). In his letter to the campus community, Daley wrote that he has been considering this change since becoming dean six years ago, but reached his final decision following “careful consideration and consultation with colleagues and stakeholders across Harvard Medical School and beyond.”

Although Daley noted that educational leaders have long criticized the methodology used by the media company to assess and rank medical schools, he said his concerns, and those expressed by others, were more philosophically based and rested “on the principled belief that rankings cannot meaningfully reflect the high aspirations for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster in our medical education programs.”

Daley wrote that HMS will continue to make information about the School available on its admissions website and that comparable details for HMS and other U.S. medical schools remain available in their raw and unweighted form in the medical school admission requirements (MSAR) section of the Association of American Medical Colleges website.

HMS was the first medical school to announce this decision but has since been joined by twelve other schools, including Stanford University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Building C to become the Bertarelli Building

Swiss biotech executive, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Ernesto Bertarelli ( fig.3) has pledged $75 million to advance basic scientific discovery, therapeutic science, and a culture of entrepreneurship at HMS. Bertarelli is a graduate of Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA in 1993. This gift is the latest in more than a decade of support to HMS and the University from the Bertarelli family.

The gift will set in motion plans to transform the outdoor courtyard of Building C into a skylighted atrium that will serve as convening and collaboration space for occupants of the building as well as the broader HMS community.

In recognition of this generous commitment from the Bertarelli family, Building C will be named the Bertarelli Building upon completion of the construction.

“Ernesto Bertarelli is an ardent supporter of both fundamental and translational research at Harvard Medical School,” said Dean George Q. Daley, MD ’91. “He understands that to improve the health and well-being of patients, we must first support observations in the lab and then nurture and orient them toward interventions in the clinic. It is therefore fitting that the Bertarelli name will be inscribed in the marble of the building that personifies our commitment to both basic and therapeutic science.”

The building houses the departments of cell biology and of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology; serves as a hub for the HMS Therapeutics Initiative, which aims to advance therapeutics research and translation of discoveries into medicines; and is home to the Blavatnik Harvard Life Lab Longwood, which provides collaborative workspaces for early-stage, highpotential biotech and life sciences start-ups founded by members of the Harvard academic community.

The atrium project, anticipated to begin in 2023 and be completed in 2025, includes enclosing the building’s existing outdoor courtyard, situated between the wet lab and dry lab arms of the Blavatnik Life Lab.