From AI to Surgical Robotics: Illinois MD/PhD Students Are Tackling Medicine’s Toughest Challenges

Carle Illinois College of Medicine’s MD/PhD program is preparing an elite group of Physician Innovators equipped to lead the fight against disease in the research lab and at the bedside. The Medical Scholars Program (MSP) offers unique engineering-informed medical training through CI MED’s MD program, and world-class scientific research experience through the PhD programs at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The program’s earliest trainees are already building solutions to advance how we diagnose and care for patients with heart and kidney disease, neurological injury, and limited access to care.

MD candidates interested in pursuing a dual degree may apply to become MSP candidates any time after their first year of medical school. For the PhD portion of their program, students must be admitted to one of the U. of I.’s more than 70 doctoral programs. After completing their PhD program, students return to CI MED to complete the requirements of the MD program. This includes the major clinical training phase. Starting in 2027, applicants will be able to apply directly to the MD/PhD program during the medical school application process.

“CI MED’s location within a premier research university is a major differentiator: trainees can learn medicine while simultaneously gaining the technical depth to invent what medicine needs next,” said MSP Director Dr. Dan Llano, a Carle Health physician who earned his MD/PhD from the University of Illinois College of Medicine, which ended its operations on the Urbana-Champaign campus in 2022. 

Parallel Preparation

Llano says cross-disciplinary training produces innovative clinicians who are also trained as research scientists. Their unique skillset will equip them to build solutions ranging from new devices and diagnostics to data-driven clinical tools and scalable health innovations.

“Dual-degree trainees gain the ability to identify unmet clinical needs at the bedside and then develop mechanistic or technological solutions to those needs. I expect CI MED’s MSP trainees to become clinicians who are also builders — people who can practice excellent medicine while driving discovery and innovation in parallel,” Llano said.