Adam Myers: GUMC’s Maestro of Graduate Education
.jpg "Dr. Myers instructing his students")
As stepped-up competition for shrinking research dollars continues to challenge academic medicine, tuition revenues become increasingly vital. Fortunately, GUMC has established a strong and growing graduate education program. For more than 25 years, Adam Myers, PhD, has been instrumental in building that capability. Two years ago, he was named associate dean for graduate education.
Since 1984, Myers, a cardiovascular physiologist who still “dabbles in research,” has taught in the Georgetown Experimental Medical Studies (GEMS) program, which prepares students from disadvantaged backgrounds for success in medical school. More than 85 percent of GEMS graduates are accepted into medical schools, a record Myers attributes to the way individual students are valued in Georgetown’s program. “One thing I learned real early is that instilling a positive attitude in students—empowering them, encouraging them, giving them lots of personal attention—goes a long way to ensuring their future success.”
For a dozen years, Myers also directed and led the expansion of the nationally recognized Special Masters Program (SMP), a sort of “boot camp” for promising college graduates who didn’t have the grades to be accepted to medical school. “The students we get are remarkable, from great schools such as Berkeley, Chicago, and Duke,” says Myers. “They come here and do really well in our program. It was the first one of its type, still the largest, and I would say academically the strongest. We’re very successful placing them in medical schools across the country, and in fact the average student in our program has higher MCATs than the average medical student nationally.” The SMP continues to thrive and grow under the directorship of Susan Mulroney.
Myers was also instrumental in the creation of the popular and unique masters program in Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). “Our program is the only academic research program that confers a graduate degree in CAM,” he says. “We’re in our sixth year, and it’s been very successful. Our graduates are out there addressing a societal need—the public is spending lots of money on non-conventional medicines and treatments, so we have to have scientists capable of looking at alternative and complementary medicine with the same critical eye we use to evaluate prescription therapies.”
“Together, these two masters programs have 210 fulltime students,” says Myers, “which adds up to more than $7 million in tuition revenue.” He notes, “There are very few, if any, medical centers like GUMC, with significant positive income resulting from grad ed.”
As much as he recognizes the importance of a fiscally sustainable balance of research and education, Myers remains focused on students and teaching. “As soon as I became involved in the administrative side of things, I had to go back to where my heart lies, which is that you have to be doing this for academic reasons. The programs have to be excellent and further the academic vision of the medical center.”
Myers is currently involved in the planning of a masters program in systems medicine, which will focus on the biological networks that underlie health and disease, a departure from the traditional medical curriculum based on the anatomical paradigm. This holistic approach is in keeping with tenets of GUMC’s guiding principle of cura personalis, care of the whole person, and better prepares students for interdisciplinary team science, which is the future of medical research.
To Myers, a key part of that team structure remains the student. “Having graduate students in the lab helps sustain the fresh vision in all of us—things grow old if you don’t look at them with a fresh eye, and students provide that eye.”
By Frank Reider, GUMC Communications
