The @AAMCtoday released a report on a survey of career outcomes of MD-PhDs. Will dive into this and tweet more about it later. members.aamc.org/eweb/upload/AA…
And here we go! The National MD-PhD Program Outcomes Study was administered in 2015 as a survey of MD-PhD graduates over the past 50 years. 
74 pages, 22 figures (two supplemental) and 17 tables (10 supplemental). We might be here a while.
Intro: Describes physician research workforce as "small" and says "NIH database searches identified only 8,200 physicians who are principal investigators (PIs) on NIH research grants." For reference, that's about 27% of the unique PIs funded by the NIH: nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2018/03/07…
Intro: Age of independence of physician scientists mirrors general trends
Intro: perspective on size of the MD-PhD training pool. Size of total MD-PhD trainee pool is 5,200. The U.S. graduates >8,000 STEM PhDs each year.
Intro: Most MD-PhD students have tuition-free schooling and even a stipend, similar to grad students. But they soak up a lot of a medical program's money.
AAMC ran this as a survey, partnering with 80 institutions to identify >10k MD-PhD grads. Had a 64% response rate!!! That's really good for surveys.
Breakdown of respondents. Of those who responded to the AAMC survey, nearly 1/3 were postdocs/residents/fellows.
Section 1: Demographics starting with M/F
There were 159 MD-PhDs before 1975. 157 were men. 😕
Currently about 35% of MD-PhD grads are women, similar to the percentage in the applicant pool.
Of note, about 50% of med school applicants and matriculants are women
There were 159 MD-PhDs before 1975. 157 were men. 😕
Currently about 35% of MD-PhD grads are women, similar to the percentage in the applicant pool.
Of note, about 50% of med school applicants and matriculants are women
Fig. 3 data
Table 1: Breakdown of race/ethnicity of MD-PhD alumni. Still far away from parity, but some encouraging trends for diversifying the pool.
Some pretty astonishing stats re: employment. Of the nearly 5,000 post-training MD-PhDs, 1.3% have retired. This means, of the 159 MD-PhDs awarded before 1975, most are still working despite some of the youngest being 70+yo.
Fig. 5: ~60% of MD-PhDs have faculty appointments at med schools. Survey nonrespondents were less likely to be faculty members.
After looking through their data, assumption is that "80% of the survey respondents could reasonably be viewed as having primary workplaces consistent with the goals of the MD-PhD programs from which they graduated."
80% are researchers or clinicians.
80% are researchers or clinicians.
First and current work places of MD-PhDs broken out by decade.
Time to degree. I have to admit I don't fully understand this as the colors between the two panels don't seem to match up.
This is interesting, time from graduation to first permanent position. Can also be interpreted as length of post-grad training
Fig. 15: If you had to do it all over again, would you pursue an MD-PhD?
The rest of the report finishes up discussing sources of grant support (mostly NIH and foundation grants) and types of research.
Overall a well done report and some useful data. I have some questions re: using a survey and how that biases responses. Especially since nonrespondents seemed more likely to be outside academia. And here's the link! members.aamc.org/eweb/upload/AA… /fin
