Dean’s Message

The greatest gift in life is to be able to heal.  To be able to use our knowledge and talents to promote health and to cure illness, both physical and mental.  And to use those talents to advance science and seek for 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 the high-tech three-dimensional anatomical software (Z-space).  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.  And the best is that they 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.

Our medical students have the opportunity to 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 research journals and present in prestigious national meetings.  Most of them continue post-doctoral training at renowned institutions in the USA.

Throughout our 41 years in Ponce, we have graduated more than 2,000 physicians, biomedical scientists and masters 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.