David Muller, MD, is the Dean for Medical Education and Professor and Chair of the Leni and Peter W. May Department of Medical Education at Mount Sinai. He is a co-founder of the Visiting Doctors Program, the largest academic home-visit program in the nation.
Reimagining Medicine Beyond Barriers
The medical profession has without a doubt entered a new era. Genomics, digital medicine, AI/machine learning, CRISPR, immunotherapy, the astounding public health and vaccine technology responses to COVID: all are ample evidence that our profession is clinically and scientifically poised to embrace the future of biomedicine.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) annually funds more than $440 million of research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), 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.
Mount Sinai faculty members teach, conduct research, and provide care in a patient-centered model of clinical care, with more than 2,000 physicians who are able to rapidly translate research breakthroughs in our labs to deliver the most advanced treatment of disease.
And yet, outstanding clinical care and research are not going to be enough to meet society’s needs for the next 100 years. They do not define our aspirations as Mount Sinai physicians and scientists who will be the next generation of leaders.
These advances have unearthed many gaps and shortcomings, each of which provides us with an opportunity to think better, work smarter, and collaborate more closely across areas of specialization. Chief among these gaps is the impact of racism and bias on every aspect of health care, from research advances and scientific racism, to clinical care and disparities in quality and access, to the nation’s failure to achieve equitable public health outcomes for communities and people of color.
Racism and bias have always been organizing principles of American medicine. We have long accepted the premise that some people are more worthy of care and attention than others, some people are more entitled to become physicians than others, and outcomes, whether clinical or academic, are expected to be inequitable.
At the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, we refuse to feel hopeless or helpless. We have rolled up our sleeves and chosen to be proactive and anti-racist in taking on every aspect of this centuries-long national crisis.
Join us and be part of the solution by applying a lens of equity and anti-racism to all your endeavors.
We are leading 11 medical schools in a three-year Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education project, funded by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. We are one of seven institutions nationwide to receive the inaugural NIH FIRST Cohort Cluster Hiring Award to accelerate inclusive excellence at our institution. We launched the Mount Sinai Biomedical Laureates Program—the first in the nation—to bring outstanding Black and Latinx research faculty to our institution. And Icahn Mount Sinai is partnering with historically Black medical schools to address racism and bias in the basic sciences and increase diversity and inclusion in science and medicine.
We invite you to bring your talent, intellect, values, and passion to ISMMS; align them with what you will learn from our educators; and apply that powerful combination to your clinical practice, service to our communities, and medical research.
We want to partner with you in redefining medicine forever.
Our potential is limited only by our imagination.
David Muller, MD, FACP
Dean for Medical Education
Professor and Marietta and Charles C. Morchand Chair in Medical Education