Hopkins GIM has a robust research enterprise with over $20M in annual direct costs. That doesn’t even include grants led by GIM faculty members that go through the School of Public Health or the Berman Bioethics Institute.

That’s more grant funding than in many entire schools of medicine. This enterprise gives our Fellows an unusually broad range of fields, methods, and mentors to choose from. Take a look at the variety of research centers affiliated with GIM—you’ll see breadth and depth there, too. Hopkins GIM also includes the Sections of Palliative Medicine and Biomedical Informatics and Data Science. And unlike most GIM divisions, we win a lot of funding from NIH—that gives our brand of GIM research a strong clinical and biomedical flavor, ranging from implementation science to clinical trials of treatment and prevention down to molecular and genetic epidemiology with immediate clinical ramifications. In fact, our range is so broad that we don’t insist our GIM Fellows choose a mentor and project during the application process as do some peer institutions. We prefer to recruit the best talent available and let them survey the Hopkins research landscape for six to nine months while taking first-year coursework.

We take mentorship very seriously at Hopkins. In the GIM Division, it’s one of our core values. We match Fellowship candidates with potential mentors during the interview visit. Our curriculum includes programming for Fellows on choosing and working with mentors. And we monitor first-year Fellows to make sure they’ve connected with mentors who are personally committed to their success. Typically, Fellows identify one senior mentor who takes overall responsibility for their research training and career trajectory and other mentors who provide content expertise, offer methodological insights, give career and job advice, or provide wisdom about work and life. As mentors, we’re proud of the many mentorship awards our faculty members have won from the Department of Medicine, the School of Public Health, and the University. But we’re more proud of our track record of producing successful academic internists who share our values and stay connected with us throughout their professional lives.

The Hopkins fellowship program is small enough offer individualized mentorship and attention but also large enough (around 6 fellows) to encourage a sense of community.  Through daily interactions, weekly conferences, and special events (e.g., picnics, karaoke), fellows get a chance to know and learn from one another.  First-year fellows are paired with senior fellows to encourage cross-year dialog.  Fellows learn from others who remember what it was like to first start a research project or go on the job market.  The result is a community invested in each other’s success.

Hopkins GIM has a 45-year track record of producing leaders in academic GIM with continuous training grant support from NIH and other federal sources. Our alumni have held posts across the US, including at Harvard, Tufts, Yale, UPMC, Mayo Clinic, UCSF, UCSD, UAB, Wake Forest, Duke, UT Southwestern, Case Western, U of Chicago, Columbia, NYU, NIH, AHRQ, and CMS. Five of our alumni are Deans/Vice Deans and four are GIM Division Chiefs. This Hopkins alumni network is invaluable for our Fellows when it comes time for job search. We keep the network alive with periodic emails and news postings, and with the annual Hopkins GIM Dinner at SGIM—with over 80 attendees annually, it’s by far the biggest alumni gathering in GIM nationwide.

With over 80 full-time faculty members, Hopkins GIM represents an alliance of general internists dedicated to research, teaching, primary and preventive care, palliative medicine and bioinformatics, all connected to a single hospital on a single campus. That’s an alliance that’s stronger than at many peer institutions, where researchers are separate from clinician-educators, where the fellowship program sits apart from the GIM division, or where different hospitals on different campuses compete for talent, resources, and recognition. Although the primary focus of our Fellowship is research training, we value clinical and educational excellence and we’re proud of alumni who lead clinics and housestaff training programs.

Hopkins GIM is closely tied to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health—the nation’s oldest, biggest, and (we like to think) best school of public health. Many of our faculty members hold active joint appointments in Epidemiology or in Health Policy & Management; others in International Health; Health, Behavior & Society; Mental Health; or Population, Family, & Reproductive Health. And over 25 faculty members in the School of Public Health have active joint appointments in GIM. GIM has similarly close ties to the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing which excels in patient-centered research. All three schools—medicine, public health, and nursing--sit side-by-side in East Baltimore. That means that our Fellows not only enjoy the benefits of superior formal coursework and degree programs in population science and public health, but also enjoy an expanded network of mentors with methodologic expertise in multiple disciplines. This contrasts with many peer institutions, where the academic medical center is the only game in town or where other schools are physically or organizationally remote.

We have close ties to (1) Johns Hopkins Community Physicians--the largest primary care network in Maryland, staffed by over 100 part-time GIM faculty; (2) the Johns Hopkins Precision Medicine Center of Excellence for Primary Care which takes a learning health system approach to improving care for our >300,000 primary care patients; and (3) Johns Hopkins Health Plans, LLC-- a major regional health insurer that includes a Medicaid Managed Care Organization, Medicare Advantage plan, and employer-based insurance plans. Few peer divisions enjoy these kinds of ties.

Hopkins GIM treats the Fellowship as the jewel in its crown. That’s consistent with prevailing Hopkins culture which places a high premium on recruiting and mentoring young talent. We offer two noon conferences weekly and we provide lunch at each in-person conference. We cover health insurance for individuals and families. We facilitate on-campus moonlighting and institutional consulting gigs. We maintain a Methods Core that gives Fellows access to methodologically astute PhD faculty from the GIM Division and to graduate research assistants from the School of Public Health. We create a three-member advisory committee for every Fellow and fund substantial effort for our Fellowship Director. The Division Chief is actively engaged in Fellow selection, training and career development. Most important, we treat each new Fellow as a potential Hopkins faculty recruit. In fact, 24 Fellowship alumni are on our full-time faculty at Johns Hopkins Hospital.