1. Office of the Dean
Message from Dean

Message from the Dean

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is proud to be an international leader in biomedical and scientific education, research, and patient care. Through a culture of excellence, innovation, collaboration, and inclusive diversity, Icahn Mount Sinai educates and nurtures the next generation of exceptional clinicians, researchers, teachers, and leaders; conducts groundbreaking research; and delivers the most advanced compassionate care with an unwavering commitment to health equity.

Among the nation’s top medical schools, Icahn Mount Sinai is unique. We are independent, having grown from a hospital, not a university. We lead the effort to eradicate racism from medicine and medical education. We are collaborative in our quest to advance science, medicine, and health care delivery for the benefit of humanity; entrepreneurial in our efforts to generate new therapeutics and improvements in care; and resilient, exemplified by our courageous response to the first wave of COVID-19, which put Mount Sinai at the epicenter of the epicenter of the pandemic.

As the medical school of the Mount Sinai Health System, Icahn Mount Sinai is seamlessly integrated with the Health System’s eight hospitals, including The Mount Sinai Hospital, ranked among the nation's best, allowing us to serve and learn from one of the largest and most diverse patient populations in the United States.

At Icahn Mount Sinai you will find a school buzzing with intellectual rigor and energy. Scientists and clinicians working on the frontiers of biomedicine, recruited from around the globe, teach our students and trainees to become creative and compassionate clinicians, researchers, and health care leaders. Our talented students pursue MD, PhD, Master’s, and dual degrees, while clinical and research fellows undertake postdoctoral training. Icahn Mount Sinai’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences trains students and fellows to become innovators and leaders in biomedical research and health care. We offer three PhD programs, in Neuroscience, Clinical Research, and Biomedical Sciences, and 10 master’s degree programs encompassing basic, clinical, and applied science; public health; health administration; and health care delivery leadership

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) annually funds more than $440 million of research at Icahn Mount Sinai, placing the School 14th among all medical schools in the United States in NIH funding and in the 99th percentile among U.S. private medical schools in research dollars per principal investigator. Three Mount Sinai basic science departments—Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Microbiology, and Neuroscience—rank among the top five nationwide in NIH funding in their disciplines, as do three clinical science disciplines, Emergency Medicine, Public Health/Preventive Medicine, and Psychiatry. Ranking among the top 20 in NIH research funding are Anatomy/Cell Biology, Pharmacology, Physical Medicine, Neurology, Orthopedics, and Radiology

Through investments in focused research institutes, Icahn Mount Sinai pursues important avenues of discovery. We have aggressively pursued our research portfolio in the past few years in such areas as addiction science, biomedical engineering and imaging, women’s health, cardiovascular disease, genomic health, health equity, and more, including how artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming all that we do in the lab, clinic, and classroom. And most importantly, Icahn Mount Sinai is an international leader in conducting science that leads to discoveries that change the lives of patients throughout the world.

Beyond internal initiatives, Icahn Mount Sinai remains passionate about collaborating with our expanding list of external research partners. In March 2023, alongside our long-term partners at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, we opened the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine, a nexus of interdisciplinary investigation focused on developing new precision technologies, focused on cell and tissue engineering and repair and on innovative means of controlling the human nervous and immune systems, designed to revolutionize patient care. I am proud to say that we will offer multiple degree programs through the Center, as it fulfills its dual mission as a research powerhouse and a training ground for future translationally-focused scientists.

The fascinating work our researchers and clinicians are pursuing was recently featured in a Science magazine supplement.

We have invested heavily in massive computing power to generate insights that can solve biomedical puzzles and transform patient care. The Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health, the first of its kind within a medical school in the United States, will apply machine learning and AI-driven decision-making across the Mount Sinai Health System’s hospitals and ambulatory clinics to create a “learning health system” that can continuously elevate quality of care and efficiency.

To house the Department and our genomic medicine programs, we are building a state-of-the-art facility that will include high-performance computing and cloud computing database capabilities, as well as advanced imaging modalities such as virtual and augmented reality.

Mount Sinai Innovation Partners (MSIP) facilitates the application and commercialization of our research discoveries into new products and services that can benefit patients and society. MSIP licenses intellectual property, negotiates joint ventures, and starts new companies, some of which have successfully gone public.

Mount Sinai faculty members teach, conduct research, and care for patients. Our multispecialty Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice, which emphasizes a patient-centered model of clinical care, includes more than 2,000 physicians who are able to rapidly translate research breakthroughs in our labs to deliver the most advanced treatment of disease for our patients’ benefit.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York in 2020, when our Health System confronted a tsunami of severely ill patients, our faculty, staff, and students rose to the challenge. Clinical faculty stepped forward to the front lines to save patients’ lives, as our researchers worked tirelessly to understand SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, and determine how best to treat it.

Our students demonstrated their dedication to service by organizing the COVID-19 Student Workforce to support physicians, researchers, and the staff of the Mount Sinai Health System, providing more than 2,000 volunteer hours a week.

Integral to our commitment to social justice is Icahn Mount Sinai’s national leadership in combating racism in medicine and medical education. We are leading 11 medical schools in a three-year Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education project, funded by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and are one of seven institutions nationwide to receive an inaugural NIH Award to accelerate inclusive excellence in the biomedical sciences. Our Institute for Health Equity Research is developing solutions to the longstanding disparities in health and health care that are pervasive in the United States. Additionally, Icahn Mount Sinai is partnering with historically Black colleges and medical schools to address racism and bias in the basic sciences and increase diversity and inclusion in science and medicine.

I welcome you to learn more about Icahn Mount Sinai. Explore our website and speak with our faculty and students. The expertise, creativity, enthusiasm, and commitment you encounter are certain to persuade you that Icahn Mount Sinai is the place you want to be.

Dennis S. Charney, MD
Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
President for Academic Affairs
Mount Sinai Health System

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