What Makes Us Unique?

Our Objectives: The Georgetown Systems Medicine program provides proficiency in computational sciences, data analysis, and the application of “-omics” technologies to any biomedical or clinical challenge.

Integrative Curriculum: Our entire curriculum is focused on the integration of computational sciences and “-omics” technologies, based on systems biology principles.

Practical Experience: Our program offers practical training components, such as internships, research projects, and collaborations with industry partners, health care providers and leading scientists.

Facilities and Resources: Students enjoy access to specialized informatics facilities and to laboratories with cutting-edge technologies, computational resources and bioinformatics tools. They gain experience in applying computational tools and systems approaches to real-world scenarios and problems.

Faculty Expertise: Our faculty are world leaders who are highly accomplished in their respective fields. Their backgrounds include computational sciences, systems biology, policy, entrepreneurship, engineering, statistics, biomedical and clinical research.

Individualized Advising: As a Georgetown Systems Medicine student, you will get one-on-one attention from faculty and mentorship from the program director, who will personalize your academic journey and support you in meeting your career goals.

GPA Boost: If you are willing to work hard, you are guaranteed to get a great boost. The program director works with you to make sure this happens for you!

Career Prospects: Graduates choose a variety of career paths including medical school, PA school, nursing, PhDs, research assistants, data analysts, bioinformaticians, clinical coordinators, curators, software engineers, consultants, regulatory and policy experts, and data scientists. They play specific roles in personalized medicine, biomedical research, pharmaceutical companies, health care consulting, and academia.

Who Is Our Program For?

Have you ever encountered or wondered about any of these scenarios?

• Two people go out to dinner and have the same meal; one ends up in the emergency room with food poisoning, but the other does not.
• The seasonal flu runs through an entire family, except for one individual who remains healthy.
• A case of mono can be a bad memory for one person and turn into a death sentence for another.
• Why do some people never get Covid?
• Why do some people who get Covid die even if they don’t have any underlying comorbidities?
• How and why could two boys with the same genetic mutation have such different degrees of disease, with one ending up in a wheelchair at a young age and the other remaining highly mobile?

Do you want to join us in changing the way medicine is practiced and carry out data driven research Do you want to understand and investigate the “Why” in the above scenarios? Do you want to help find the right treatment for the right person at the right time, as a physician or a researcher or a data analyst?

If you answered yes, then you are in the right place! This program is the perfect fit for you.

What the World Leader Has to Say about Systems Medicine:

“Medicine needs digitalization, but even more so it needs a fundamental paradigm shift. Currently, we hardly understand any disease. That’s why we name diseases only by a symptom in an organ and therapeutically can only alleviate symptoms, which is not only ineffective and imprecise but makes also many diseases chronic.

“There are many reasons for this innovation roadblock. However, the biggest conceptual error in Medicine was to split up the human body organ by organ, including organ-specific clinics, specialists, and research disciplines. We believe we can define a disease by looking at one organ; any symptom in a different organ must be a different disease. Really? Rare diseases tell us, no!

“A big data-driven, holistic approach integrates all medical knowledge into Systems Medicine to overcome this silo thinking through data science and bioinformatics. It revolutionizes how we define diseases. Descriptive disease phenotypes are replaced by mechanistic definitions based on small cellular signaling modules that have become dysfunctional. Upon diagnosis of these in a patient, precise and effective therapeutic intervention is achieved by targeting several points in these networks at low doses, with fewer side effects and high efficacy. For this, we don’t even need new compounds. In most if not all cases, we can repurpose already registered drugs, obviating the need and costs for classical drug discovery, and speeding up the clinical translation and patent benefit. Thus, how we practice medicine will radically change, from treatment to cure and ideally prevention.”

Prof. Dr. Harald H.H.W. Schmidt, M.D., Ph.D., Pharm.D.
Professor and Chairman, Department of Pharmacology and Personalised Medicine, Maastricht University (Netherlands)
Author of The End of Medicine as We Know it – and why Your Health Has a Future

We are building the future of personalized health care.