New director at M.D./Ph.D. Program

Barbara Kazmierczak, M.D., Ph.D., has been named director of the School of Medicine’s M.D./Ph.D. Program. She succeeds James D. Jamieson, M.D., Ph.D., who has directed the program for much of the last four decades and remains on the faculty as professor of cell biology.

Kazmierczak, associate professor of medicine (infectious diseases) and of microbial pathogenesis, received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Chicago and her M.D./Ph.D. from the Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan-Kettering Tri-Institutional Program. She completed residency and fellowship training at the University of California, San Francisco, where she began studying the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

She was recruited to the Yale faculty in 2001 and has served as director of graduate admissions for the microbiology track and associate director for basic science of the M.D./Ph.D. Program. She has continued her studies of P. aeruginosa, focusing both on bacterial factors important for establishment of disease and on host responses to infection.

Kazmierczak has received numerous awards. She was named a Hellman Family Fellow, a Donaghue Investigator, and an Investigator in Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. She is a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.

Jamieson has been the driving force behind the program for most of its existence. The program was established in 1969 and graduated its first students in 1971. Jamieson was its second director, and he led the program from 1974 to the present, except between 1983 and 1992, when he served as chair of the Department of Cell Biology.

Under Jamieson, the program has increased from about 10 new trainees per year to its current level of 20. For the 246 individuals who have completed their training, 192 hold full-time academic positions and about 75 percent of those have or have had research funding.