Making medical education more accessible
A drive to ease the barriers to a medical degree inspires a new scholarship from Melissa Harris and John Harris, MD, PhD'05
Date Posted: lunes, febrero 03, 2025
Melissa Harris and John Harris, MD, PhD'05, have endowed a scholarship at UMass Chan Medical School to bring more opportunity to aspiring physicians. Established in both of their names, it honors the couple’s shared life, a joint dedication to John’s prolific career as a dermatologist and physician-scientist, and their belief that a student’s financial situation should never prevent them from pursuing a medical degree.
Their journey together began when they met as students at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. After they both graduated in 1998, John began his seven-year graduate education at UMass Chan, through which Melissa worked to support them while he trained in the MD/PhD program. This included several years working at UMass Chan as a grant accountant in the lab of the late Aldo A. Rossini, MD, former chief of the Division of Diabetes, where she was responsible for tracking grant expenditures, setting up grants and grant renewals, ensuring that progress reports went out on time and assembling budgets for the school and clinical sides of the division.
John joined the faculty in UMass Chan’s Department of Dermatology in 2010, taking the helm as department chair in 2021. He is also founding director of both the Vitiligo Clinic and Research Center and the Autoimmune Therapeutics Institute, and was recently invested as the Lambi and Sarah Adams Chair in Genetic Research.
"We want to make medical education more accessible to people who may not consider that career path due to personal circumstances. It's about making it easier for others."
—Melissa Harris
The Harrises are grateful for the opportunities provided by UMass Chan, both to John and to the wider community. Melissa observes how the Medical School fosters a nurturing environment that is accessible to students with the talent and drive to pursue a medical degree, regardless of their background. She also appreciates the “smaller city vibe” of Worcester that contributes to a welcoming atmosphere on campus.
John adds that the UMass Chan community is “small and intimate, with departments and research units that are collaborative instead of siloed.” He compares the development of the Medical School as a young, scrappy breeding ground for innovative thinking to the United States emerging as a new country after the American Revolution.
“It’s embedded in our DNA at UMass Chan. We decide what we’re going to do, and then we do it better than anyone else,” John said.
John is considered one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the treatment and study of vitiligo, with patients referred to the Vitiligo Clinic from all over the world, including the major Boston hospitals who recognize that expertise is greatest to the west. He came to the specialty by way of a serendipitous encounter that is common to the UMass Chan experience.
“My mentor, Dr. Rossini, introduced me to one of his patients who had type 1 diabetes, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, pernicious anemia and vitiligo,” John said. “It occurred to me that the skin hosts many diseases that parallel others in the body, but it is much easier to study because of its accessibility. I decided there and then that I would work to cure autoimmunity by becoming a dermatologist and studying vitiligo.”
While John’s career and raising three teenagers keeps them busy, the couple is now exploring how they can use their financial resources and life experience to bring positive change to the wider community. From the outset, they knew an important part of their philanthropic strategy would be “supporting UMass Chan, the school that we love so much and have deep connections to.”
The newly endowed scholarship is an opportunity for the Harrises to support aspiring physicians, particularly those with limited financial resources, or first-generation college students. John is himself a first-generation college student, and he and Melissa are aware of the many factors that can impact a student’s ability to both pursue and persevere through a medical education.
Their drive to assist deserving students extends beyond financial support to mentoring. Indeed, endowing a scholarship at UMass Chan comes with meaningful opportunities to connect with student recipients. An annual scholarship celebration on the Medical School campus is always a poignant, highly anticipated event, and donors and scholarship recipients often go on to develop longstanding relationships.
Having successfully charted a physician-scientist career path for almost three decades, the couple has much to offer by way of guidance. For example, Melissa observes how a professional path such as John’s involves intensive planning and continual navigation to reach key milestones.
“When you’re in it, you’re constantly focused on what comes next,” said Melissa. “You adjust as needed along the way to meet each milestone. At one point we moved five times in five years. In the beginning we didn’t know any physicians or scientists to look to for guidance.”
Ultimately, the couple hopes that by easing the financial burden of a medical degree, scholarship support will attract an increasingly diverse range of students to medicine.
“We want to make medical education more accessible to people who may not consider that career path due to personal circumstances. It’s about making it easier for others,” Melissa said.