MudPhuds in North Carolina

Every 2 years for almost 2 decades, the MD/PhD students and some faculty in the social sciences and humanities get together to share their research and support each other through the weird, wonderful, sometimes abusive, yet also privileged academic experience that is pursuing a dual degree. It's perhaps my most favorite meeting, because these are birds of my feather. This year the conference in Chapel Hill abutted our long-planned trip to Greece, so I missed the end of it. (I missed the beginning of it, too, tracking down a cellphone repair shop to replace the screen that was annihilated by a kamikaze leap onto the tiled bathroom floor the night before I left, but that's another story.) I wasn't planning to go, but several of the old-timers convinced each other to attend, and 3 of us who had gone to grad school together also shared a hotel room like we were broke students again. Best company, however.

Two of my friends gave excellent keynote talks, I heard some interesting research presentations, and I did a little mentoring as well. One of the reasons I agreed to come was because I organized a panel on "What Does It Mean to Have an MD/PhD?" as an extended riff on both the answer to this question on the NIH webpage as well as a book I recently reviewed for the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. My co-panelists talked about the history of the American Physician Scientist Association and about how doing research in the history of psychiatry illuminated her own complicity in structures of power as a future psychiatrist. The punchline to my presentation was a re-writing of the NIH's answer to the question to be more inclusive:

“Dual-degree programs provide training in medicine / nursing / dentistry / public health / veterinary science and research for students who want to become clinician-scholars. Graduates often go on to become faculty at universities, join research institutes, or start businesses. Trainees are prepared for careers in which they will combine research, teaching, activism, and/or patient care. It is a challenging career that offers opportunities to benefit many people by advancing knowledge of health and illness, developing new products or programs, and inventing new approaches to clinical problems.”

MD/PhD (or DO/PhD, or MD/MPH, etc.) training certainly isn't for everyone--especially with the complete collapse of the academic job market outside medicine since 2008--but for those of us with niche or combined interests for whom it makes sense, we can support each other. In 2 years we'll be in central California on the UCSF or UC-Davis campus, and 2 years after that we plan to congregate in Philadelphia, with Ann Arbor maybe after that. And there's actually going to be a European-North America conference in Oslo in June 2025, so I've already put it on my calendar for good food, saunas, catching up with old friends, making new ones, and oh yeah, listening to some talks. I don't know if my book will be out quite that soon (deadline to turn in the manuscript is December 31), but we can celebrate all the same!