Supporting Third Stage Academic Medicine Physicians

Warning: this gets into the weeds of funding late career academics.

The career of the academic medicine doctor nicely breaks down into three parts. The first part, beginning right after training, is spent honing a craft and working to establish an academic niche: clinical excellence, research, education, or administration. In phase two, that early work pays off. The assistant or associate professor becomes a respected clinician, an educator developing or directing courses, a funded and published researcher, or an administrator with leadership roles within a department, university, or medical center. In phase three faculty members may continue in their niche or leverage their experience in creative endeavors. Academic medical centers should support the latter, for the good of the physician, the junior faculty, and the field.

I know, given the current state of affairs, it is a strange time to write about funding. I was inspired to write this by three wildly disparate people.