The Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, has awarded year-long research fellowships to sixty-six medical, dental, and veterinary students.

Participants in the HHMI Medical Research Fellows Program — an annual $3 million initiative designed to strengthen and expand the nation's pool of physician-scientists and medically trained researchers — will each receive $41,000 in grant support to spend a year working on basic, translational, or applied biomedical research project at an academic or nonprofit research institution in the U.S. Six of the fellows in this year's class will be funded by HHMI partner organizations — the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy, the Duchenne Research Fund, and the Society of Interventional Radiology Foundation.

In addition, thirteen fellows from the 2015 class will receive a second year of support, making it the largest class of second-year fellows in the program's history. The group includes a student who will be spending his additional fellowship year at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV, an independent research institute established in Durban, South Africa, through the collaborative efforts of HHMI and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

"The HHMI Med Fellows Program is one of the few in the nation that enables M.D. and D.V.M. students to engage in very high-quality research for an entire year," said David J. Asai, senior director in science education at HHMI. "This engagement is perhaps the best way for talented students at this stage in their training to understand the powerful opportunity that emerges at the intersection of medicine and laboratory research. We hope that each of the Med Fellows seriously considers pursuing a career as a physician-scientist."