About Us

Welcome to the Boston University Medical Center Primary Care Academic Fellowship.  Our program represents a collaboration between General Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, the General Pediatrics Academic Fellowship and the Preventive Medicine Training programs. Our mission is to train highly motivated primary care physicians to serve as educators and investigators, with a focus on topics relevant to medically under-served communities.  We have an exciting mix of educational curricular choices in epidemiology and health services research, and experiential learning opportunities in public health.  Our program will give you tools for a successful career in academic medicine.

As you explore this website, I hope you gain an understanding of the depth and breadth of research, educational and clinical opportunities in our program, and please don’t hesitate to contact us. Detailed information can be found in our Fellows Handbook.

General Description and History

In 1980, Boston University’s Division of General Internal Medicine (GIM) began offering a high-quality program for training primary care internist academicians, and in 1998, the program was extended to include the training of future family physician academicians, following the establishment of a new Department of Family Medicine (FM) at Boston University that year. In 2012 the joint program formally expanded to include the Fellowship in General Academic Pediatrics. From the outset, the Academic Primary Care Fellowship Program has emphasized training in research and educational techniques with trainees devoting 80% time to these activities. All fellows enroll in a master’s degree program at the Boston University School of Public Health to provide the tools and perspective necessary for a successful academic career.

Since the start of the program, nearly 90% of graduates have entered careers as primary care faculty and over 80% are faculty in the nation’s medical schools with the remaining holding high level research or administrative positions in health care, public health or government. The program owes much of its success to the mentoring relationships of each fellow and a senior faculty mentor who have strong professional track records of success as academicians and as fellow mentors.

VA Boston

The fellowship program has strong ties with both the Boston and the Bedford VA hospitals. The Boston or Bedford locations all are sites where fellows may participate in clinical work as well as have numerous research opportunities, including working with MAVERIC.

Clinically, the Boston VA is comprised of the Outpatient Primary Care site at Jamaica Plain, the Inpatient facility at West Roxbury, and outpatient and long-term care site at Brockton and six community-based clinics in the greater Boston area. The VABHCS serves over 50,000 patients with over 603,000 visits per year.

The Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital in Bedford is a 400 bed hospital that emphasizes geriatric and long-term care. Patients suffer from a high prevalence of alcoholism, substance abuse and psychiatric disease. The hospital hosts the Center for Health Quality, Outcomes, and Economic Research (CHOIR), a VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence. CHQOER, with its diverse faculty of over 25 investigators including health economists, medical sociologists, statisticians, and epidemiologists, serves as a major center for fellows to conduct supervised research. Fellows work on projects that take advantage of unique databases that allow the combining of diagnostic, functional, and pharmaceutical data on large numbers of VA users. Fellows also interact with other trainees funded through VA post-doctoral fellowships in health services research.