Mellon Foundation's Program Triples M.D.-Ph.D. Students' Options

While an undergraduate at Princeton University, Darren Orbach found himself faced with a dilemma. He had always envisioned being a physician, yet at Princeton he had also become fascinated by theories about the mind, which led him to an interest in investigating the workings of the brain's visual cortex. But how was he to pursue a career in basic research and be a physician, too? Like many aspiring researchers who feel a pull in the clinical direction, Orbach chose to enter a joint M.D.-Ph.D. p

Written byBruce Silver

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Typically, students accepted into an M.D.-Ph.D. program are committed from the start to one particular institution for their doctoral work. But thanks to a $1 million grant from the New York-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Cornell, Orbach has a choice of three institutions, in essence tripling the advantages of an M.D.-Ph.D. program. Using the Mellon funds, Cornell teamed up with Rockefeller University and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in March of this year to establish a course of study known as the Tri-institutional Medical Scientist Training Program. All three institutions are contiguously located on York Avenue on Manhattan's East Side.

The new program, which supports three M.D.-Ph.D. students a year for each of the next six years, provides not only a wide range of resources for the students, but also time for them to decide how to make the best use of those resources. Orbach and the other ...

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