Mentorship is the key to great scholarship.
This idea was the basis for START@Yale, says Laura R. Ment, M.D., the program’s director and professor of pediatrics and neurology. For the past six summers, START—which stands for Summer to Advance Research Training—has provided an early research experience for incoming first-year medical students that is built around mentorship. A dozen or more students have participated each year since 2012, working closely with a faculty member on a small research project and meeting weekly with fellow students and mentors.
Ment says the commitment by faculty is outstanding, with more than 50 faculty members having volunteered as mentors since inception.
The goal of START is to expose students to research early in their medical school careers in the hopes of augmenting the pipeline of physician-scientists who will pursue academic careers. It gives participants a head start on exploring topics for their thesis work. And for students with little or no previous exposure to the culture of academic medicine, START provides a quick primer on how an academic center works. START also provides an introduction to Yale and the surrounding area before school begins.
“This gives entering students a chance to get to know New Haven and get to know each other, so in a way they have a head start not only on their research but also on becoming a medical student,” said Peter Aronson, M.D., the C.N.H. Long Professor of Medicine and associate director of START.
“Having a lab community that I connected with over the summer—including a PI who is a doctor and several MD-PhD students who had been through the curriculum—was just a great opportunity to receive general advice on how to approach medical school,” said June Criscione, a first-year student who participated in 2017.
Criscione is one of several START students featured in new videos on the program’s website: https://medicine.yale.edu/education/research/start/ and the YSM channel on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/YaleMedicine.
“We try very hard to assign the students to a lab in their area of interest and to a mentor who has excellent experience with mentoring.,” says Ment, who is also the medical school’s associate dean for admissions and financial aid.
Anna Lynn, another first-year student who appears in the videos, spent her summer in the lab of Mark Saltzman, Ph.D., Goizueta Foundation Professor of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering at Yale.
“We're looking at glioblastoma, which is one of the most common and most aggressive forms of brain cancer,” said Lynn. “What we're trying to do is come up with a nanoparticle delivery system so that we can deliver a chemotherapy and then an anti-microRNA that is meant to help suppress tumors.” The goal is to deliver both agents directly to a brain tumor in hopes that this approach will give better distribution and better efficacy of the drug.
“I'm really interested in this lab project and I also really like the fact that when you're working in a lab you're really working as part of a team,” said Lynn. “You can be doing something that you're really passionate about but also you can be doing that with a bunch of other people who have the same goal, all working together to do something that will help other people.”
Having a lab community that I connected with over the summer—including a PI who is a doctor and several MD-PhD students who had been through the curriculum—was just a great opportunity to receive general advice on how to approach medical school
June Criscione, MED '21
Individual videos, produced by Noah Golden in the YSM Office of Communications, may be viewed here:
What is START? https://youtu.be/_6KXBVeODgo
START Stories
Michael Mercier: https://youtu.be/5f8WNR8D6Cc
June Criscione: https://youtu.be/IpoNPlFkd9Y
Anna Lynn: https://youtu.be/R76xnJEfU-c
Lucy Gao: https://youtu.be/oCunT4D7T3A
For more information about START@Yale, including ways to support the program philanthropically, please contact Michael Fitzsousa at 203-436-8526 or michael.fitzsousa@yale.edu.