at Harvard Medical School

Benefactor Report

December 2025

Four-Year Transition

In 2026, the HST faculty plan to roll out an HST-specific pilot at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Their long-term goal is to grow HST into a true four-year program. HST faculty are developing an HST-specific Principal Clinical Experience (PCE) that both consolidates the curriculum students have completed so far and builds the skills they need for graduation, residency training, and their impact on patients and science.

Innovations include:

• Creating common exit and re-entry points for all HST students, regardless of educational track, to build a coordinated and intentional curriculum;
  
• Introducing a “Maturation of the Physician–Scientist” course in the first quarter of the PCE that deepens the skills needed to bring concepts from science to medicine and back;
  
  
• Designing an integrated HST radiology clerkship that builds on the “Principles of Biomedical Imaging” courses in the HST pre-clinical curriculum;
  
  
• Establishing a capstone clinical clerkship during the final quarter of the PCE that includes “Immersion in Medicine,” “Engineering in Medicine,” and “Catalyst” components—each of these educational experiences dovetails with a cohort of HST Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) PhD students in their own “Introduction to Clinical Medicine” course; and
  
  
• Increasing placement of HST students at specific clinical sites and within specific clinical teams to provide in-depth exposure to physician–scientist faculty and to avenues of medicine at the forefront of innovation and discovery.

AI for Health

The HST program introduced a new “AI for Health” course, which runs for a month in August, with a one-month follow-up course in January. The January course requires collaboration between computer science graduate students and HST MD students, who work jointly to solve real-world problems using clinical datasets.

This course introduces medical students to fundamental concepts at the core of artificial intelligence (AI) as applied to clinical challenges. The goal is to provide health care practitioners with skills that will help them: 1) recognize what clinical problems AI, and machine learning (ML) in particular, can solve; 2) critically evaluate the growing literature that applies ML in a clinical context; and 3) appreciate the limitations of AI/ML when used to inform clinical decision making. Specific topics include deep learning for clinical risk stratification, explaining complex machine learning models, bias and fairness in clinical machine learning, large language models, and Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models. The course explores both the opportunities and the challenges that arise when clinicians apply these methods.

Josh Ziperstein, MD, is overseeing the changes to the PCE curriculum. He is a member of the Core Educator Faculty for the Internal Medicine Residency Program at MGH and associate director for clinical education at the HST program, where his broader remit is the development and implementation of novel clinical training paradigms for clinician–scientist and engineering students.

He received his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from Brown University and subsequently worked in the Mass General Brigham AIDS Research Center, developing rapid HIV diagnostics for point-of-care use. He then attended Emory University School of Medicine and undertook internal medicine residency training at MGH. After residency, he started work as a full-time hospitalist in MGH’s Hospital Medicine Unit; he joined the Core Educator Faculty in 2016 and now serves as a clinical teaching attending on the inpatient general medicine and consultative services.

In 2022, Dr. Ziperstein designed and launched a ten-week “Introduction to Clinical Medicine” course for six PhD students in the MEMP program, which he has co-directed annually since. In 2025, HMS appointed him as one of the inaugural Core Faculty for internal medicine at MGH, a role in which he provides clinical observation and coaching for students on the Medicine Core I clerkship.

Dr. Ziperstein previously served as the associate program director for inpatient medicine for the internal medicine residency; lead for education in the Hospital Medicine Unit; and faculty advisor for both the Residents Interested in Medical Education group and the Resident as Teacher elective course in the residency program. He is a graduate of the Harvard Macy Institute’s Program for Educators in the Health Professions and SHM’s Academic Hospitalist Academy. His clinical and research interests include medical education, technology in education, inpatient rotation design, clinical hemodynamics, and inpatient management of end-stage liver disease.

Darshali Vyas, AB ’14, MD ’19, is the new course director for the spring Integrations course in the HST program, succeeding Sanjat Kanjilal, who took a position in the Netherlands. She is a pulmonary and critical care medicine fellow in the combined Massachusetts General Hospital/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center program and holds a T32 Research Training Grant at the BIDMC Smith Center for Outcomes Research.

Dr. Vyas graduated from Harvard College, where she studied political and social theory with a secondary concentration in health policy. Her senior thesis involved field work in rural Gujarat, examining how modernization and industrial development interact—and sometimes conflict—with traditional models of health care delivery. After graduation, she went to Madrid as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching high school students and helping develop a Global Classrooms curriculum on world affairs and debate.

She attended Harvard Medical School and completed a residency in internal medicine at MGH, where her research examined inequities stemming from race-based clinical algorithms. Her work, published in high-impact journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, informed congressional advocacy and contributed to changes in multiple risk-prediction tools.

Following her residency, Dr. Vyas served as chief resident in internal medicine before completing subspecialty training in pulmonary and critical care. Clinically, her interests include interstitial lung disease and sarcoidosis. Her current research evaluates how social safety net policy affects pulmonary health among low-income populations in the United States.