Welcome from the Chair of the Department of Medicine

Thank you very much for your interest in our residency training program at Boston Medical Center and Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. I am delighted to share with you the highlights of this exceptional department and extraordinary institution.

Boston Medical Center is a ~500 bed tertiary care referral center that serves as New England’s largest safety net hospital. We pride ourselves on our department’s unique combination of high impact research with equity-focused clinical care for a diverse array of marginalized populations within Boston. Whether you are planning a career focused on research, clinical care, education, or advocacy, our residency program will equip you with the experiences and skills needed to develop into a physician who can excel in any academic or clinical environment. Here are some of the highlights that make Boston University Medical Center an outstanding place to train:

Clinical Experience: As a resident, you will be exposed to the most culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse patient population of any major hospital in the region. We care for any and every person who walks through our doors. Our primary care and continuity clinic experience include opportunities at Boston’s federally qualified neighborhood health centers, each of which serves a different local community, the West Roxbury VA, and Boston Medical Center’s Crosstown Clinic. In addition to outpatient generalist experiences, our residents learn and work with subspecialty experts in their outpatient clinics, including innovative outpatient care settings, such as low-barrier addiction care clinics and our immigrant and refugee health. On the hospital wards, your training will include rotations with academic internists and hospitalists, as well as disease-specific subspecialist-led teams in infectious disease, cardiology, hematology, oncology, geriatrics, and nephrology. In the intensive care units, you will be taking care of patients with critical illness, many of whom are transferred from across the region, with technologies including extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The rotations at the West Roxbury VA add yet another dimension to your inpatient training, and includes working alongside residents from other programs in Boston.

Involvement in Research: Our residency program provides robust opportunities for residents to develop and continue research interests in general medicine and medicine subspecialties. All residents are provided training in the principles of evidence-based medicine and are encouraged to be involved in scholarly activities. The NIH R38-funded Promotion of Research in Medical Residency (PRIMER) program and the ABIM research track provides structured research training for residents interested in physician-scientist careers. The Framingham Heart Study pathway offers selected residents unique opportunities for mentored original research in the world-renowned Framingham Heart Study. In addition, residents obtain mentorship from faculty conducting a wide-variety of groundbreaking research across our fourteen clinical and research sections, fifteen research centers, and four research cores. All senior residents present their scholarly work during the annual Senior Resident Academic Day.

Our department is steeped in a rich tradition of discoveries that have led to major breakthroughs in clinical medicine, including the development of angiotensin inhibition for the treatment of hypertension (H. Gavras), the understanding and classification of lactic acidosis from hypoperfusion in critical illness (W. Huckabee), the first description of the fibrillar nature of amyloid (A. Cohen), and the discovery of PLA2R as the major autoantigen of membranous nephropathy (L. Beck, D. Salant). The most important longitudinal study of cardiac risk factors ever conducted – The Framingham Heart Study – is based in the Preventive Medicine Section of the Department of Medicine. More recent work published this academic year includes papers on artificial intelligence for the differential diagnosis of dementia (Nature Med 2024), community-based cluster randomized trial to reduce opioid overdose (NEJM 2024), and generation of human alveolar epithelial type 1 cells from pluripotent stem cells (Cell Stem Cell 2024).

Innovative Clinical Initiatives: At Boston Medical Center you will be exposed to forward-thinking clinicians who have developed novel and nationally recognized approaches to care. The Immigrant & Refugee Health Program in the Section of General Internal Medicine provides comprehensive and culturally appropriate primary care services for over 750 individuals from 85 countries, including refugees as well as asylum seekers. The Grayken Center for Addiction is a national leader in clinical care, research, policy, and advocacy for patients with substance use disorders, and has multiple evidence-based clinical programs for addiction treatment that residents can rotate through. The Amyloidosis Center is internationally recognized for research as well as interdisciplinary care by a team of specialists. BMC’s Center of Excellence in Sickle Cell Disease cares for more than 600 patients annually, the most in the Northeast, and is the only center in New England that offers both FDA-approved gene therapies for sickle cell disease. These and other programs provide trainees opportunities to learn from to accomplished clinicians working at the forefront of their fields.

What I’ve listed above is just a small sampling of the exciting activities in the Department of Medicine. I invite you to learn more and even visit to see what makes this training program so unique. Please contact us if we can provide any additional information as you consider this next, very important step in your career.

Sincerely,

Sushrut S. Waikar, MD, MPH
Interim Chair, Department of Medicine