Dr. Mary Catherine Beach, professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine, has been named the inaugural director of medical student research and scholarship for Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Dr. Beach developed the Scholarly Concentrations course in the Genes to Society curriculum and has directed the course since 2009. It is a required component of the M.D. curriculum, and it that provides the infrastructure and faculty mentoring necessary for all medical students to produce a scholarly project in an area of interest. It also encourages development of attitudes and skills for self-directed, lifelong learning and scholarship. In the additional role as director of medical student research and scholarship, Dr. Beach will organize and align medical student research in one office, creating “one stop shopping” both for medical students pursuing research and scholarship activities and for faculty members interested in mentoring them.
Dr. Beach received her M.D. from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and completed a residency in internal medicine there before coming to Johns Hopkins for her M.P.H. and for fellowship training in general internal medicine. She also completed the Greenwall Fellowship Program in Bioethics and Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.
Dr. Beach is a world-renowned expert on relationships and communication between health care providers and patients. She has published more than 165 peer-reviewed articles and is a principal investigator for three current National Institutes of Health grants focusing primarily on this topic. She is also the principal investigator for an NRSA Training Core at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.
