In 2019, before Dean Anderson’s arrival, Scott Oakes, Ivan Moskowitz, and Sonia Kupfer began a grass-roots effort to provide common programming for physician-scientists in training across Pathology, Pediatrics, and Medicine. While there has been a long tradition of training physician-scientists at UChicago, this had previously been somewhat siloed and was more developed in some Clinical Departments compared to others. They felt that a unified approach would help all boats to rise for recruitment & training of physician-scientists and could encourage inter-Departmental collaborations and mentorship. With Dean Anderson’s arrival, the group of three, along with Marcus Clark and Yun Fung, crafted a proposal to formalize this grass-roots effort as a formal Divisional program dedicated to building the number of successful physician-scientist trainees across the BSD... thus was born the Community for Advancement of Physician-Scientists or CAPS in the fall of 2024.
CAPS will serve as an umbrella program that builds on the long-standing tradition of exceptional research by physician-scientists at the University of Chicago spanning from training through faculty levels and will foster opportunities for horizontal and vertical community-building and mentorship.
