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Medical Innovators Development Program

Year 1

Your M1 year is all about getting accustomed to the challenges and rewards of med school, as well diving into the rich community of the MIDP.

The MD Foundation: Curriculum 2.0

Welcome to your first year in Foundations of Medical Knowledge. This stage of the curriculum, which lasts about 13 months, introduces you to the array of concepts and cases you’ll need to thrive in clerkships. The next three years will all build on this strong foundation of medical knowledge.

During this year, you’ll how to:

  • Conduct history and physical exams
  • Interview patients
  • Use medical databases
  • Evaluate case studies

Read more about our innovative and rigorous Curriculum 2.0 and check out the list of your first-year courses.

Meanwhile, in MIDP: Innovation Forums

Join the entire MIDP cohort once a week for a Wednesday seminar and lunch with a speaker from academia, industry, or entrepreneurship.

Innovation forums continue through all four years of MIDP, and they’ll be your touchpoint for reconnecting with your colleagues and MIDP leadership every week. Besides hearing incredible talks from speakers, you’ll network with interdisciplinary leaders and stay up to date with what’s going on in medical innovation.

2024 Innovation Forums

Forum season was particularly exciting this spring. As is our tradition, our fourth year students took forum time to speak about their residency application process and their work in Industry Immersion. We also had 5 remarkable speakers from Vanderbilt Medical Center and beyond:

 

Colleen O’Connor, PhD. After many years at Duke University, Dr. O’Connor accepted a position as the Senior Associate Dean for Medical Affairs at the new Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. Her presentation about building a new medical school and creating a new curriculum that fits into the landscape and culture of Bentonville, Arkansas was truly incredible.

 

Bryan Marascalchi, MD, an anesthesiologist with Vanderbilt Medical Center gave an incredible talk detailing how to get a new product off the ground. With an expert knowledge of patents, clinical trials and looking for gaps of obvious need, showed our students the possibilities of invention while working as a full time physician.

 

 

 

Keith Obstein MD, MPH spoke to our students about his work with new technologies in gastroenterology. His innovation has been funded by the Department of Defense Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. His work with Capsule Robots and Image Guided Technology is changing the work and perspective of the traditional colonoscopy.

 

 

Finally, the MIDP had a great conversation with Ellis Aune and Pieter Wijffels, two team members from the European investment firm called NLC. Their remarkable work involves accelerating early stage projects by providing expertise and capital to help get innovations in health care off the ground. One of the questions often asked around innovation is “where is the money to get it off the ground?” The work of NLC shed light on this question and connected our students with a firm that they can look to for advice and funding in the future.

 

Past Innovation Forums

A woman in business attire stands with arms crossed outside

February 16, 2022

Vanderbilt University School of Law Research Professor of Political Science and Law Samar Ali spoke to the MIDP about work centered on positive compromise through promoting conflict-resolution, best practices among people, and polarization among communities and nations as to better inform innovations in health care equity.

Man in glasses and a blue and white striped shirt

February 9, 2022

Nick Bartelt, MBA, shared his expertise on visioning goals, rediscovering passions, and exploring strengths. His backgrounds in electrical and biomedical engineering and business administration provided invaluable insights for future medical innovators.

Larry Van Horn, PhD, MBA, MPH

November 10, 2021
Larry Van Horn, PhD, MBA, MPH

Eric Keller, MD
November 3, 2021
Eric Keller, MD

Laura Paulsen
October 20, 2021
Laura Paulsen
Life at a Mid-Stage Orthopaedic Med-Tech Startup

Dave Owens

October 13, 2021
Dave Owens
What Vanderbilt’s Wond’ry Has to Offer

Arie Nettles

October 6, 2021
Arie Nettles
How We See the World

Meet an M1: Clay Baker

Clay Baker started his innovation journey in high school, where he co-founded a non-profit that provided personalized math tutoring to elementary students across North Carolina via interactive video platforms. During his undergraduate studies at Duke, Baker continued tutoring at DukeGIVE, a program partnered with GED/HiSET students at the Durham Literacy Center. Serving as President, Clay leveraged his previous virtual tutoring experience to help DukeGIVE successfully navigate the pandemic and serve their tutees with meaningful, virtual learning content.

Motivated by his own journey with Celiac Disease, he also joined Duke’s Bohórquez Laboratory to explore the gut-brain circuit. Clay used his undergraduate studies in computer science to establish a machine learning pipeline that analyzed behaviors in mice elicited by different gut stimuli.

Throughout college, Clay worked for a student-run bed rental company, Bull City Beds. The experience of managing core business operations, which included scheduling and executing hundreds of bed move-ins and move outs, fueled his entrepreneurial interest, leading Clay to intern at CliniSpan Health, a health tech startup focused on improving clinical trial diversity.

Upon graduating, Clay worked at UnitedHealth Group, spending time as a DevOps engineer and a clinical cybersecurity analyst through their Technology Development Program. Gaining exposure to engineering and cybersecurity shaped Clay’s perspective on care delivery optimization.

Since starting his first year in MIDP, Clay has enjoyed building relationships across Vanderbilt, especially with other MIDPers, and learning from their different backgrounds and experiences. He has appreciated the opportunity to engage with different faculty and speakers through the weekly forums. Clay currently serves as one of the Honor Council representatives for his class, along with working as a Finance Committee member for the Shade Tree Clinic. Clay aspires to have a career focused on innovation at the intersection of healthcare and technology to improve patient outcomes and is currently exploring surgical specialties.