Welcome to the Clinician Investigator Training Program

When you look closely at the Mayo Clinic logo, you find three shields locked together as one. They stand for the commitments that have defined this institution for more than a century: clinical practice, education, and research; three missions most of medicine treats as parallel tracks.

We see them converging, and we believe the most consequential medicine of the next fifty years will be made at the intersection of the three shields. That convergence is why the Clinician Investigator Training Program (CITP) exists.

If you are an internal medicine resident who finds that the most interesting moment on rounds is not the diagnosis but the why behind it, you already understand something essential about the physician-scientist. Our combined pathway fuses the clinical maturity you are gaining in internal medicine with the rigor and independence of a working investigator, so that you graduate not as a clinician who dabbles in research, but as a leader who lives natively at the intersection of all three missions.

What sets this program apart is that we do not ask you to forestall your future to pursue science. When you join, your path forward at Mayo is secured: you are guaranteed a fellowship position in your chosen subspecialty.

From residency, through dedicated research training, and into fellowship, Mayo commits to advancing you here, continuously, until you are ready to launch as an independent physician-scientist and enter the job market on your own terms. We protect your time, pair you with established mentors, and give you the structure to build a real research program and cement the foundations of a career.

The platforms you train on are extraordinary. Mayo offers a bench-to-clinic arc that few places on earth can match. You will work in laboratories advancing translational medicine, extracellular vesicle biology, and genomics, where discoveries move from a flask to an investigational new drug application to a patient; often within the same city block. This ecosystem is increasingly intelligent: Mayo has pioneered clinical AI, from imaging to pathology to algorithms that detect disease invisible to the human eye on a routine ECG to models that surface risk before symptoms appear. You will not study these tools from a distance; you will build with them and keep human judgment at their center. We aim to not make you just ready for the medicine of today, but for the medicine you will spend your career inventing.

Underneath all of it sits the value that anchors this institution: the needs of the patient come first. As William J. Mayo understood, the sick should have the benefit of advancing knowledge, and to deliver it, a union of forces is necessary. The three shields are that union; as a clinician investigator, you become its living expression.

We are looking for the future leaders of medicine; those who cannot stop asking why and who want their careers to bend the curve rather than ride it. If that describes you, you belong here.

Welcome to the Clinician Investigator Training Program; I look forward to discovering what you will build.

Warm regards,

Atta Behfar, M.D., Ph.D.
Program Director

Abdallah El Sabbagh, M.D.
Associate Program Director