Dean’s Message

The greatest gift in life is to be able to heal.  To have the knowledge and skills to promote health and cure illness; both physical and mental.  And to use those talents to advance science to achieve the best diagnostic and therapeutic modalities.

Ponce Health Sciences School of Medicine is a Scientific Home. Here, students learn interactively through our dynamic classroom.  You combine the traditional anatomical sciences cadaver lab with high-tech three-dimensional anatomical software.  They interact daily with seasoned successful researchers in the areas of Neurosciences, Infectious Diseases, Cancer, and many others.  And they study in a warm, cozy environment where faculty and staff know our students and are continuously watching for their wellbeing.  An enhancement of our main campus in Ponce is that students are trained in a bilingual (English-Spanish) academic environment that prepares them to serve both the Puerto Rican as well as the growing Hispanic population in the USA. Students at our St. Louis campus are likewise in a truly diverse environment that enhances cultural competence and prepares them better to serve underserved communities. They also have the opportunity to learn Spanish through our Language Support Program.

Our medical students do their clinical rotations in diverse settings:  from rural clinics to tertiary-care hospitals, both in Puerto Rico, as in the USA.  Our biomedical sciences students publish in widely known peer reviewed scientific journals and present in prestigious national meetings.  Most of them continue post-doctoral training at renowned institutions in the USA.

Throughout our more than 46 years in Ponce, we have graduated more than 3,000 physicians, biomedical scientists and master in science in medical sciences.  The vast majority of them are successful practitioners and scientists either at Puerto Rico or the USA.  This is evidence of compliance with our mission to educate bilingual ethical professionals who provide compassionate, culturally competent health care and generate high impact research to reduce health disparities in the populations we serve in Puerto Rico and the US, through high quality education in a diverse environment.