By Grace Niewijk
Medical school is a notoriously challenging experience filled with textbooks, exams and clinical rotations. So it might come as a surprise that most students at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine have another big pursuit on their to-do lists: publishing their own research.
And the work is appearing in world-renowned journals like JAMA, Nature and Science.
“Not a week goes by that I don’t hear about a Pritzker student doing amazing research,” said Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP'03, Dean of Medical Education. “Sometimes, mentors reach out to me with exciting milestones, but other times I just stumble across our students’ names on plenary speaker lists or in top journals.”
This wave is fueled by the Scholarship & Discovery component of the medical school’s curriculum, in which every student participates in a four-year mentored research program. As a result, approximately 90 percent have published in a peer-reviewed journal by graduation, while 93 percent have authored an abstract or poster.
The achievement distinguishes Pritzker graduates from their peers, said Jeanne Farnan, MD'02, MHPE, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Medical Education, who noted that fewer than 70 percent of medical students nationally authored a peer-reviewed paper, oral or poster presentation.
Although medical students facing ever-steeper competition for residencies and fellowships might feel driven to pursue research just for their resumes, Arora says Pritzker students also care deeply about producing strong, valuable work and finding answers to the questions that interest them.
Laying the groundwork
During their first year, Pritzker students can enroll in the school’s Summer Research Program (SRP). As part of the effort, which includes a spring prep class and proposal submission, students receive guidance from a faculty mentor to conduct research and present their results at an end-of-summer forum. Grants from the National Institutes of Health and Pritzker funds provide stipends for students.
Through the SRP, Wendy Luo began researching pandemic-era trends in intentional adolescent acetaminophen overdoses, which culminated in her publishing a first-author paper in Hospital Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, during her third year.
“It’s really been a highlight of my career so far,” said Luo, who is now in her fourth year at Pritzker. “The mentorship and financial support I received helped me see it through from start to finish.”
The SRP isn’t the only opportunity. After taking the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) Step 1 in their second year, all Pritzker students have a dedicated block of time for research.
“Not everything works out the first time, so the second block gives people the chance to find a new mentor and start on a new project that will finish by their fourth year,” said Rachel Wolfson, MD’00, Assistant Dean of Medical School Research. “For other people, that extra time is what they need to finish up an SRP project or get it to publication.”
Like many of his Pritzker classmates have done, Liam Spurr, MD’24, accepted the challenge. In November 2022, he published two first-author papers about associations between tumor aneuploidy and cancer treatment response in the Nature family of journals on the very same day.
“I chose to devote time to research because that’s where my passions lie,” Spurr said.
Pritzker also sponsors the national Scholarly Concentrations Collaborative, which is led by Wolfson and composed of faculty leaders of medical student research programs across the US. The collaborative supports creating new programs, promotes discussions of challenges and opportunities for students, and has published original research on how residency program directors consider student research in the residency selection process.