JHI sponsors international scholarship program for medical students

An international scholarship program for medical students from outside the United States to study at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is the institution's latest initiative aimed at nurturing the next generation of health care leaders. Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI), the global arm of the Baltimore, Maryland-based Johns Hopkins Medicine, is sponsoring this program. It will provide financial assistance to aspiring young medical students who were accepted at the school of medicine in Baltimore on the same basis as their peers from the United States but who are unable to acquire additional financial aid for their studies.

"We are pleased to offer this opportunity to our international medical students," says Steven Thompson, JHI's chief executive officer. "For more than 120 years, Johns Hopkins has been a recognized national and global leader in education, research and patient care. This scholarship is an important component of our core mission to help to raise the standard of health care around the globe."

International students currently at Hopkins, as well as those who will enroll in the Hopkins' medical program in the fall of 2012, may be eligible to tap into the newly established fund of $80,000, an amount that will be increased by $80,000 each year, reaching a maximum of $320,000 in 2016.

"This has been a long-standing objective for Johns Hopkins and our medical school," says David Nichols, M.D., vice dean for education at the school of medicine. "We hope that it will encourage talented young people who chose a medical career but who don't have substantial personal resources to come to Baltimore and learn at one of the world's most established medical schools. We trust that it will also help us to nurture a new and diverse generation of leaders who will transform medicine around the world and improve the health of the global population."

The new scholarship builds on a foundation of other significant Hopkins initiatives in the area of international medical education. In 2011, Johns Hopkins inaugurated the Johns Hopkins Dr. Mohan Swami Institute for International Medical Education, which uses the new Genes to Society curriculum as its core platform and provides services globally. And, in 2010, Hopkins officials signed an agreement in Kuala Lumpur to help Malaysia develop its first fully integrated, private, four-year graduate medical school and teaching hospital.