For the 15 Johns Hopkins faculty members who have recently been selected as CIM Next Generation Scholars, the news just keeps getting better. The award, which brings up to $300,000 in funding over three years, has enabled them to continue their innovative work — threatened by federal funding cuts — aimed at advancing medicine as a public trust.
Now, with the launch of the new Academy for CIM Next Generation Scholars, these top clinician-researchers will find valuable mentorship and community, acquire valuable communication skills, and explore new models for philanthropic support — all aimed at equipping them to succeed amid an ever-evolving funding landscape in academic medicine.
With six to 10 new recipients expected to be added to the ranks of the Scholars every year, the Academy is quickly becoming a vibrant force, equipped to forge lasting advances for patients at Johns Hopkins and beyond, says Theodore “Jack” Iwashyna, a critical care physician and health services researcher who has been tapped to lead the program.
Iwashyna joined Johns Hopkins in 2022 as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor (see sidebar). A central reason for his recruitment was his ability to contribute to Johns Hopkins recruitment and training of the absolute best in clinician-scientists. Thus his aim and CIM’s aim aligned: to prepare cadres of leaders to enact transformational change in health care systems in the U.S. and around the world.
“Our goal with the Academy is to work with the best and brightest of Johns Hopkins Medicine — clinician-researchers who are committed to humanizing medicine and advancing medicine as a public trust — to give them the support and knowledge they need to succeed in an academic world that’s been turned upside down,” he says.
“While there have been dramatic changes in the government-university partnerships — partnerships that have made American science and medicine the best in the world — the core values remain irreplaceable,” he says. “The world still needs Hopkins to invent new futures of medicine. The Academy is our laboratory to figure out how to ensure the geniuses of these great clinician-scientists fully flower.”
The Academy is one part. Next Generation Scholars are also all paired with senior Hopkins faculty members who will serve as valued mentors, sharing their hard-earned wisdom and opening doors to collaborators, leadership opportunities and potential new funding sources, notes Cynthia Rand, senior associate dean for faculty at the school of medicine and Mary Gallo CIM Scholar, who is acting as an adviser to Iwashyna.
“The world still needs Hopkins to invent new futures of medicine. The Academy is our laboratory to figure out how to ensure the geniuses of these great clinician-scientists fully flower.” – Theodore “Jack” Iwashyna
Key to these mentoring relationships will be helping young faculty to effectively communicate their research and its impact to a wide variety of audiences, including potential donors.
“Currently during the training of physician-scientists, they may learn to write an NIH grant or a scholarly paper aimed at other scientists, but there’s no point when they learn how to communicate their work to the world, writ large,” says Rand. “This kind of communication is crucial now more than ever.”
Iwashyna envisions a “bi-directional” flow of ideas and communication between the CIM Next Generation Scholars and interested donors, as they find areas of shared interest and identify ways that philanthropy can propel medical innovations forward for the greater good.
“We have always partnered with funding agencies,” he says. “We have learned over the last years how much better science can be when it is done in partnership with patients and families. In these new times, there are new opportunities and needs to build partnership between philanthropists and physicians much earlier in the physicians’ careers than has been traditional. We can invest in the future together.”
Through regular meetings and seminars, he also expects the Scholars to “build valued lateral networks” through which they become resources to one another in advancing their goals. “The community within the Scholars, and among the Scholars and Johns Hopkins broadly, is a unique resource,” he says. While the Scholars hail from a wide variety of disciplines and specialties — from lab-based science to addiction medicine to cardiology to infectious disease — all share a commitment to equity and justice in medicine, Iwashyna notes.
At a time when rapid advances in technology and other pressures risk dehumanizing health care for patients and their clinicians, says Rand, the Academy for CIM Next Generation Scholars aims “to keep the heart and soul in medicine, finding creative ways for young faculty to ensure biomedical science continues moving forward.”
