“Our goal is to have medical students gain the skills they need to become good physician scientists and researchers,” says Yasmin Kamal, MD-PhD ’22. Including a need to understand and effectively communicate scholarly literature.
Kamal is referring to Geisel School of Medicine’s Science Scholars program, which a few years ago she and fellow student Marek Svoboda, MD-PhD ’24, formalized and restructured—taking it beyond a student interest group to a preclinical elective within the curriculum.
Their journey is described in a paper, “Science Scholars Curriculum: Integrating Scientific Research into Undergraduate Medical Education through a Comprehensive Student-Led Preclinical Elective,” published today in MedEdPORTAL. Lead authors Kamal and Svoboda, and senior author Roshini Pinto-Powell, MD, professor of medical education, and Science Scholars advisor, layout the benefits of familiarizing future physicians with the scientific method.