2. General Information and Contacts

About Harvard Medical School (HMS)

Harvard Medical School was established in 1782 in Harvard Hall on the Cambridge Campus.

Harvard Hall

First site of Harvard Medical School, October 7, 1783

Faculty members have been making paradigm-shifting discoveries and achieving “firsts” in medicine and science since 1800, when HMS Professor Benjamin Waterhouse introduced the small pox vaccine to the United States. Their accomplishments are recognized internationally and, fifteen researchers have shared in nine Nobel prizes for work completed while at the School.

The Faculty of Medicine includes more than 11,000 individuals working to advance the boundaries of knowledge in labs, classrooms and clinics. The school’s main quadrangle in Boston houses classrooms where medical, dental and graduate students begin their training as well as the laboratories of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in basic and social science departments, referred to as the “preclinical” or “quad” departments.

Links below connect to the basic and social science departments that reside on the quadrangle, with the exception of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, which is a joint Department of the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and is based on the Cambridge campus:

• Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology
• Biomedical Informatics
• Cell Biology
• Genetics
• Global Health and Social Medicine
• Health Care Policy
• Microbiology and Immunobiology
• Neurobiology
• Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology
• Systems Biology