Overview | FAQ | Faculty | Requirements
Course Overview
Peds 231 Medicine for Innovators and Entrepreneurs is an interdisciplinary, project based, single-quarter, 3 to 4-unit course where medical students and graduate students in biosciences, bioinformatics, biodesign and bioengineering work together to learn concepts and principles required to propose solutions to medical problems. Students will learn about the key concepts in the various disciplines. The curriculum will focus on diabetes mellitus as a paradigm for learning about any disease. Presenting faculty are drawn from a variety of disciplines throughout the School of Medicine, as well as Engineering, Humanities and Sciences and Law. In addition to the planned lecture topics, students will have the option to visit various clinics at the Stanford Medical Center as well as biotechnology companies.
Course directors include: Tandy Aye, MD, Assistant Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology and Betsy Mellins, MD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics. Presenting faculty are drawn from a variety of disciplines throughout the School of Medicine, as well as Engineering, Humanities and Sciences, and Law. For a full listing, visit our Faculty page.
Class meets every Tuesday and Thursday from 1:15-3:15 pm in Room 4105 CCSR (4th floor/North of the Center for Clinical Sciences Research Building). The first 90 minutes are typically reserved for lectures. The link "Course Sessions and Events" contains a list of this spring's lecture topics and planned out-of-class events, which are designed to provide exposure to clinical, laboratory, and industry environments.
Projects involve identifying a problem area in diabetes research and/or clinical practice, researching the state of the art in this problem area, and proposing a practical improvement based on students' knowledge of medicine.
Educational Goals
After completing the course, the learner should be able to:
- understand how medical knowledge is organized
- appreciate the concerns and tools of the various scientific fields and clinical disciplines within medicine
- identify quality sources of medical information
- gain some familiarity with medical language
- learn specific information about human physiology and pathophysiology
- identify opportunities to apply his/her primary discipline to unsolved medical problem
For additional information, please see our answers to frequently asked questions on our FAQ page.