Stanley Sarnoff - Founding The Sarnoff Fellowship Program

Founding The Sarnoff Fellowship Program

As STI prospered financially, Sarnoff was inspired to encourage young medical students to pursue cardiovascular research. He believed that a medical student could conduct his own research, defend his findings and participate in the work of the lab as a full time scientist thereby allowing the student to yield great benefit from the lab environment. After discussions with Ellis Rolett, the Chair of Cardiology at Dartmouth, in 1979 Sarnoff agreed to meet four young medical students. He was so impressed by their enthusiasm that within one month Sarnoff writes a ten-thousand dollar check to Dartmouth to fund the first fellow.

It was a revolutionary action. At that time, there were no other well known fellowships for medical students. In fact, the Sarnoff fellowship would form the basis for programs such as the AHA Student Research Scholarship program and the Howard Hughes NIH Research Scholars program, or cloisters program, which would not begin until 1984. For Sarnoff, what began with a single medical student fellow in 1979 would spread to hundreds more.

Based on his experience with Myron Weisfeldt, Sarnoff established a set of simple rules for the fellowship: the medical student would leave school for one year, work in the laboratory of a prominent cardiovascular scientist conducting his own research and participate as if he were an independent researcher. At the conclusion of his year, the student would report his findings to his mentors. As the fellowship grew, students would attend a yearly meeting and present their findings to their peers and to the Sarnoff Cardiovascular research community of mentors, advisors and past fellows. A major emphasis of these meetings was on Dr Sarnoff's question, "Did you have fun?"

Sarnoff wanted the fellows to be caught up in the joys of scientific research and discovery. The year was intended to expose students to the rewards of scientific research bu it was more than that; it was a way to encourage the students to examine other ways of thinking, other career paths. No project was a failure if the experiment failed because failure opened the way to other findings. If the student learned something about himself and his choices than he had succeeded.

Alan Kono, the first Sarnoff Fellow, began a year study with Myron Weisfeldt, who was one of Sarnoff's first students, at Johns Hopkins thus bringing the fellowship full circle.