At the core of the Medical School are its educational and research programs. The student body is composed of 650 men and women in the MD program; 440 students in the PhD program; and 145 in the joint MD-PhD programs, part of which is sponsored in collaboration with MIT. For its medical students, Harvard has inaugurated the New Pathway curriculum, a problem-solving, case-method approach to learning, offering the opportunity to come in contact with patient cases early in their studies.
The Medical School has nine departments in basic- and social-science disciplines: Cell Biology, Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Genetics, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Neurobiology, and Pathology, and the Departments of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Health Care Policy, and Social Medicine. In 1992, a new state-of-the-art research building was dedicated to house Neurobiology, Genetics, and Pathology. With this new building, virtually all of the Medical School's research and educational facilities have been renovated or newly constructed in the last eight years.
Most of the heads of the above departments have been appointed within the past five years. In turn, they are in the process of recruiting exceptionally strong, world-class faculty members to enhance and expand the current complement of faculty. The Medical School is the largest of Harvard's graduate faculties and has traditionally been a trend-setter for many University-wide initiatives.