Few things crystallize one’s priorities like a sick parent. When Haley Clark’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, the Texas A&M medical student knew she wanted to pivot into biomedical engineering.
That started Ms. Clark’s transformational journey into medicine. So far, she’s traveled with an ophthalmologist to Honduras, lived in a lab to develop better women’s sanitary products, and obtained provisional patent approval on a device for fetal lower urinary tract obstructions.
“[Getting a patent] is one of my life’s goals, and I can’t believe I’ve already gotten to that point,” she said.
An Austin native but “a full Aggie,” Ms. Clark is the ideal candidate for one of the newest dual-degree plans offered by Texas A&M University, a new-frontier arrangement offered by the Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine in partnership with the A&M College of Engineering and Houston Methodist Hospital.
Dual-degree plans have long been a part of Texas medical schools’ curriculum. For example, medical schools in Texas have offered students a chance to earn a doctor of medicine (MD) with a master of business administration. It made sense: physicians needed to know how to run a practice from a business perspective. Medical degrees paired with a doctorate in jurisprudence are offered for physicians who want to study legal concepts such as patent work or health care policy.
Now, combined engineering and medicine programs aim to foster technological advancement in the medical industry. In the case of the Texas A&M program, students train in a clinical setting at Houston Methodist, gaining valuable experience that will inform future medical innovation.
Texas A&M offers students an MD along with a master of engineering while training in a world-class laboratory at Houston Methodist Hospital – an eye-popping combo for future physicians wanting far more than gross anatomy.
Together, A&M calls the combination “EnMed.” School officials are already planning to make EnMed, which formally launched in 2019, a stand-alone entity within the Texas A&M University System. The combination would be a first-of-its-kind medical school in Texas.
“I think medicine on its own has similar aspects to engineering,” said Ms. Clark, who projects to graduate in May 2027. “EnMed is the right program for somebody who wants their career in research to be supplemented with innovation.”
Timothy Boone, MD, was named EnMed’s dean in January after a year as interim to further advance the next phase of the program’s strategic direction. He previously served as chief education officer at Houston Methodist Academic Institute. Each year, EnMed hopes to graduate 50 students with an enhanced skillset in integrating medicine, scientific inquiry, and creative problem-solving to tackle major health care challenges while operating in team-oriented settings.
Through the partnership with Methodist, EnMed students are standing at physicians’ shoulders and watching everything unfold. Why does this problem exist? How can this be addressed? “Those are the skills that every physician can develop,” said Maham Rahimi, MD, a vascular surgeon at Methodist.
“Innovation is not always about inventing something new for the sake of inventing,” Dr. Rahimi said. “It’s about making the procedure safe and more effective.”
Pending accreditation and the availability of adequate resources, EnMed would have its 50 students, and then the Texas A&M College of Medicine would backfill those 50 slots, officials said. This is happening as Texas A&M University System Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents offer full support to the school’s medical initiatives, according to Amy Waer, MD, dean of the Vashisht College of Medicine.
“Instead of the same old way of teaching medical students, we really wanted to change the paradigm,” Dr. Boone told Texas Medicine. One of these students will find a true breakthrough, he believes. “I don’t know what they’re going to do, but it’s going to be big. And it’s going to help medicine in Texas.”
‘It depends on their wants’
EnMed student Gogol Bhattacharya, who was a double major in bioengineering and electrical engineering at the University of California at Riverside, is interested in radiology.
“I don’t think this physician-engineer concept really works without you being an excellent physician first,” said Mr. Bhattacharya, who plans on graduating in May 2027.
As chair of Texas Medical Association’s Council on Medical Education, David Lakey, MD, said dual degrees add an extra dimension to a student’s education but are not mandatory.
Medical schools all over Texas offer innovative, evolving curricula, and, as Dr. Lakey points out, spending extra time on extra degrees may delay the start of a physician’s career. In the end, “it depends on their wants,” he said.
For example, Baylor College of Medicine offers a dual-degree path that pairs a medical degree with a PhD through the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. It’s an educational path for those who wish to become physician-scientists, according to the school. Baylor also partners with the University of Houston Law Center for those wishing to study health law and intellectual property.
The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School provides a host of dual options, offering master’s degrees in education, public affairs, public health, and biomedical engineering, among others. The Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University recently announced a new partnership with The University of Texas at Arlington for its own MD/PhD program in biomedical engineering.
The Sam Houston State University College of Osteopathic Medicine is getting into the game with a new master of science (MS) in an applied biomedical sciences program slated to start this fall.
UT Health San Antonio Long School of Medicine pairs a medical degree with an MS in artificial intelligence, which can be completed in five years. UT San Antonio is developing AI tools that mimic patients, along with an online Socratic tutor nicknamed “Dr. Socrates,” a sort of online warehouse for all teaching materials. It sounds like the future has arrived in the Alamo City.
“This is a standardized meta patient that appears on a video avatar that sits in an artificial office on the exam table and talks to you as if you were the physician,” said Ronald Rodriguez, MD, who oversees the dual-degree plan at the Long School of Medicine.
“The idea is to run the students through a bunch of simulated patients who come in with specific problems who may have very different cultural backgrounds or abilities to express what their problems are and get the students probing and figure out how to home in.”
As great as it sounds, Dr. Rodriguez says his university must react to market pressures. Some students simply don’t want to make the extra year commitment for another degree. “We’re developing certificate programs now that are smaller in scope, with 15 hours rather than 30,” he said.
In Lubbock, the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine offers dual degrees, including one with an MS in bioengineering. But one of the most unique degree tracks is something to appeal to financially conscious students – a pathway to complete medical school in just three years.
Texas Tech’s Family Medicine Accelerated Track, known as FMAT, is an advanced three-year medical school curriculum that leads to a family medicine residency in Lubbock, Amarillo, or the Permian Basin. “We can get these students streamlined right into residency and hopefully into a rural area that needs their help,” said Felix Morales, MD, senior associate dean of admissions.
“For a candidate, we definitely need to see something on their application that shows a willingness to serve underserved populations,” Dr. Morales said. “They demonstrate that through community service and who they’re shadowing.”
In FMAT, the first year of medical school is traditional. There is stepped-up coursework the following summer, and when the second year begins, students participate in a family medicine clerkship rotation. TTUHSC offers scholarship help for the third year, “so essentially they can reach graduation with half the loan debt of their peers,” he said.
On average, TTUHSC produces 10 to 12 FMAT graduates annually.
Several medical school officials told Texas Medicine they continue to be impressed with the type of candidate seeking admission. Many students are seeking to get as much knowledge as possible, something that can only bolster the future of Texas medicine.
“Medical school admissions, it’s just harder to get in nowadays,” Dr. Morales said. “What young people are doing with servants’ hearts, it’s just amazing to see.”