March 29, 2007

Dear Colleagues:

Once again, well-deserved congratulations are in order for faculty and staff whose brilliance and hard work helped maintain The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s elite ranking in U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of top medical schools in the nation.

It is an honor to be rated # 2 among U.S. medical schools. We are in the best of company. All of our peer institutions who attained high rankings deserve credit and we applaud their achievement.

In addition to the outstanding performance of our faculty and staff, the magazine’s list recognizes a number of specialty school departments highly ranked by medical school deans and senior medical faculty.

This year we again ranked #1 in internal medicine and moved from # 2 to #1 in geriatrics. We moved from #2 to #3 in AIDS (behind University of California-San Francisco and Harvard) and from #1 to #3 in drug/alcohol abuse (behind Columbia and Yale and tied with Harvard and University of California-San Francisco). We moved from #3 to #4 in pediatrics (behind University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and University of Cincinnati). In addition, women’s health moved from #3 to #5 (behind Harvard, University of California-San Francisco, University of Pennsylvania and University of Pittsburgh). Among engineering specialty programs, we again ranked #1 in biomedical/bioengineering.

In the biological sciences we moved from #5 to #6. In specialties we moved from #5 to #3 in neuroscience/neurobiology and moved from #4 to #5 in immunology/infectious disease. We tied with Rockefeller University for #7 in cell Biology and ranked #8 in genetics/genomics/bioinformatics, microbiology (tied with University of California-Los Angeles and University of Pennsylvania) and molecular biology (tied with Princeton and Yale).
The magazine says it bases medical school rankings on a combination of two reputational surveys (one of deans/senior faculty and another of directors of intern-residency programs) and objective data (such as research grants, student selectivity and faculty resources).

For 2007, the magazine’s top 10 medical schools overall are Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, University of California-San Francisco, University of Washington, Stanford University, Duke University, Yale University and Baylor College of Medicine.

These results affirm what we already know - that Johns Hopkins is a special place. Its unique, collegial environment allows great minds to accomplish great things. I am extremely gratified that others recognize your unflagging commitment and dedication to producing the very best in your chosen fields, particularly in an era of intense public scrutiny, lagging government funding, and rapid changes in biomedicine and health care delivery. I thank each and every one of you for your extraordinary efforts.

Edward D. Miller, M.D.
Dean of the Medical Faculty