As the year comes to a close, the Office of Communications is rerunning some of the most significant stories posted in 2024. You’ll read about the Nobel Prize received by a UMass Chan professor; the opening of a new building designed for collaboration on gene therapy, neuroscience and molecular medicine research; and the first students to enroll in our second regional campus, a partnership with Lahey Hospital & Medical Center. This story was originally published on July 23.
The T.H. Chan School of Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School is best in the Northeast and among the top 15 medical schools nationwide for primary care education, according to the U.S. News & World Report 2024 Best Graduate Schools rankings.
Additionally, UMass Chan ranks in the second of four tiers of medical schools for research nationally.
“Our campus community is united together in the collaborative spirit of advancing medicine and science to change the course of the history of disease,” said Chancellor Michael F. Collins. “This recognizes what we continuously strive for: training the next generation of physicians, nurse leaders and scientists and improving the health and wellness of the people throughout the commonwealth and around the world.”
New this year, U.S. News sorted medical schools into four evaluative tiers for primary care education and research in lieu of ordinal rankings, with tier 1 being highest performing and tier 4 the lowest.
The report evaluates schools on research activity and primary care output. The research rankings include measures of research productivity, including how impactful faculty were in medical research based on publications and citations per medical school.
In new data shared by U.S. News, the Medical School also ranked in the top 50 medical schools for number of graduates practicing in health professional shortage areas and number of graduates practicing primary care.
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UMass Chan has consistently ranked among the top medical schools for primary care education since U.S. News first published its rankings more than 25 years ago, reflecting the Medical School’s core mission. This year, 80 students, or nearly 50 percent of the T.H. Chan School of Medicine’s graduating class, went into residencies in primary care and related specialties, including internal medicine, family medicine and pediatrics.
To continue to meet the growing need for physicians, the T.H. Chan School of Medicine will increase its class size to 225 medical students with the incoming Class of 2028.
“This ranking validates what we all know to be true: That our graduates are transformed by their education and through the real-world expertise they gain at UMass Chan,” said President Marty Meehan. “The lives of countless people across the Commonwealth and around the world will, in turn, be transformed through biomedical research and incredible patient care.”
In addition to its educational mission, UMass Chan has built a reputation as a world-class research institution, attracting more than $300 million annually in research funding. According to the Blue Ridge Institute for Biomedical Research, UMass Chan received $177 million in National Institutes of Health funding in fiscal year 2023, ranking second in New England and 37th nationally in NIH funding among 144 medical schools, public and private, that receive NIH funding.
The new nine-story, 350,000-square-foot education and research building at the center of the UMass Chan campus in Worcester, which opened in June, will be home to more than 70 principal investigators focused on accelerating research into new therapeutics for some of the most challenging diseases that humans face. Designed to achieve LEED Gold certification for energy efficiency and sustainability, the building also features educational and conference spaces to support the missions of all three graduate schools at UMass Chan.
The first cohort at the new regional campus, UMass Chan-Lahey, will begin in August. This regional campus was established in partnership with Lahey Hospital & Medical Center, part of Beth Israel Lahey Health in Burlington, Massachusetts. UMass Chan-Lahey will offer the innovative LEAD@Lahey track, where students will follow the core curriculum of the T.H. Chan School of Medicine with an added focus on leadership, health systems science and interprofessional education.
UMass Chan-Lahey will build on the success of UMass Chan’s first regional campus at Baystate Health established in Springfield in 2015, which is home to the Medical School’s Population-based Urban and Rural Community Health, or PURCH, track.
