Boston University School of Medicine

Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine is dedicated to the educational, intellectual, professional, and personal development of a diverse group of exceptional students, trainees, and faculty who are deeply committed to the study and to the practice of medicine, to biomedical research, and to the health of the public. We, as a community, place great value on excellence, integrity, service, social justice, collegiality, equality of opportunity, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Chobanian & Avedisian SOM is a social justice medical school. This emphasis on social justice is evident in our curriculum and extra-curricular activities for students, in our faculty’s areas of research and expertise, and in the patients we take care of. Curriculum and Student Activities Our curriculum was updated several years ago to emphasize patient context and social determinants of health. In the classroom, our patients are never simply a patient with a disease, they are a person with a family who lives in a specific place and does a certain type of work…in the clinical setting, our students learn to address each patient’s upstream health needs as well as their acute medical needs; because we’ve learned that the best medical care in the world will fail to make patients healthier if they still lack food, housing, etc. Outside the classroom, our students’ most common activity is to participate in some of the 17 or so service learning groups, which range from the “Outreach Van” street medicine initiative to the “Teen and Tot” facilitated support group for young parents to the Socially Responsible Surgery Club which allows students to visit surgical patients pre-discharge to ensure their understanding of their surgical problem and procedure and plan for follow-up. Faculty Research and Expertise A unique feature of our social justice medical school is that we are in the context of a Tier 1 research university. While our research enterprise is very broad, you see the social justice mission thriving there as well. Examples include the Grayken Center for Addiction, which supports research, education and treatment in addition medicine, in the Health/Care Disparities Research Program within internal medicine, and the Boston SOAR (Surgical Outcomes Analysis and Research) which investigates inequalities in surgical care. 85% of our medical students engage in Research during their time at Chobanian & Avedisian SOM. Patient Population Chobanian & Avedisian SOM’s primary teaching hospital is Boston Medical Center, which serves a primarily under-served and extraordinarily diverse patient population. More than half of our patients are from vulnerable populations who rely on Medicaid and/or medicare for their health insurance; and 32% don’t speak English as their primary language. Through our 12 affiliated neighborhood health centers, we reach deep into the communities of Boston to find the patients that need us the most.