Albert Einstein College of Medicine

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Albert Einstein College of Medicine opened its doors to 56 students on the 12th of September 1955, in a building that was not yet finished. The school sat in the Bronx's Morris Park neighborhood, far from Manhattan's prestigious hospitals, on land chosen partly because a municipal hospital was already going up next door. It was the first new medical school in New York City since 1897, and the first in the country opened under Jewish auspices. The physicist whose name it bore had died just months earlier, on the 18th of April 1955, never seeing the institution dedicated. That absence haunts the founding story in a particular way, because Einstein had not wanted to lend his name at all. What changed his mind, who persuaded him, and what he said when he finally agreed at his 74th birthday gathering in March 1953 are the threads that pull this story open.

• 2. A Name Hard Won

  ›

  Samuel Belkin, president of Yeshiva University, began planning the new medical school in 1945, a full decade before the first class walked through the door. He pressed Yeshiva's Board of Trustees to negotiate with the New York State Board of Regents for the authority to grant MD degrees, and that expansion of the university's charter was not finalized until December 1950. Approaching Einstein for the naming rights proved even harder than navigating state regulators. Einstein had recently turned down Brandeis University's request to use his name, and had declined the offer to become the second president of Israel. When Belkin came calling, Einstein's first instinct was to suggest naming the school for the medieval Jewish physician Maimonides instead.

  Two years of diplomacy followed. In 1951, Einstein wrote Belkin a letter that acknowledged the school's significance to American Jewry and praised its commitment to welcoming students of all creeds and races. Then, at a gathering held on the 14th of March 1953 to mark his 74th birthday, Einstein relented and agreed to attach his name to the institution. That birthday event was notable in itself: it was his only public appearance in 22 years at the Institute for Advanced Study. Speaking to The New York Times at the gathering, Einstein remarked that physics had favored medicine by giving civilized man confidence in the scientific method. He became an honorary chairman of the medical school campaign, joining former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, New York Governor Thomas Dewey, and Richard Nixon. The college marked his 75th birthday by gifting him a Festschrift with contributions from ten Nobel laureates, Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, and President Harry S. Truman. Then, in 1954, the college sponsored that year's Albert Einstein Award, which went to physicist Richard Feynman.

• 3. Building the Bronx Campus

  ›

  Planners had considered tying the new school to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, but the Morris Park site in the Bronx won out for practical reasons: there was room to build, and a large city hospital was rising on the adjacent land. Construction of the first medical school building began in October 1953; that structure, built of steel and concrete in a contemporary style, is now called the Leo Forchheimer Medical Sciences Building. Adjacent to the campus, New York City erected a 1,349-bed hospital at a cost of $37.5 million. Mayor Vincent Impellitteri and Belkin agreed that this facility, now Jacobi Medical Center, would serve as Einstein's teaching hospital. Jacobi is today part of NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest municipal health system in the United States.

  The campus grew steadily through the 1960s and 1970s. The 12-story Ullmann Research Center for Health Sciences opened in 1964. In 1965, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation donated $1.45 million to establish a center focused on human development and mental disabilities; the Rose F. Kennedy Center opened in 1970 with 200 staff scientists. That same year the college started construction on the 15-story Charles C. and Beulah Bassine Educational Center, devoted to public health. Beginning in 1971, with the help of a five-year federal grant of $12,157,000, Einstein experimented with a three-year MD pathway and enlarged its class sizes.

  In 1966, New York City Mayor John Lindsay presided over the opening of a 375-bed private teaching hospital on campus, now known as the Jack D. Weiler Hospital. Then in 1990, after cumulative donations of $8.5 million by Bronx businessman Jack Resnick, the campus as a whole was designated the Jack and Pearl Resnick Campus. A decade-long building campaign culminating in 2008 brought the $225 million Price Center, which doubled the total campus footprint to nearly 40 acres.

• 4. Landmark Research

  ›

  Robert H. Goetz led the team at Einstein that performed the first successful coronary artery bypass surgery in 1960. The Annals of Thoracic Surgery later described that procedure as one of the most significant surgical achievements of the 20th century. Research at Einstein has repeatedly intersected with diseases that were either poorly understood or entirely new at the time of discovery. In 1966, thymosins were discovered in Abraham White's laboratory. In 1968, Samuel Rahbar, working with Helen Ranney, confirmed elevated hemoglobin A1c in a diabetes patient and produced the first structural characterization of A1c; that measurement is now the primary tool for managing diabetes worldwide. In 1979, Susan Band Horwitz identified the mechanism of taxol, a compound listed among the World Health Organization's Essential Medicines.

  The 1980s brought a different kind of urgency. The Bronx was among the hardest-hit communities in the early HIV/AIDS crisis, and Einstein researchers produced some of the first descriptions of pediatric HIV/AIDS, documented mother-to-child transmission, and traced links with substance abuse and men who have sex with men. William Jacobs Jr. was the first scientist to genetically manipulate Mycobacterium, the bacterial genus responsible for tuberculosis and leprosy. The large family of strains his lab developed carries names drawn from Einstein's mass-energy equivalence formula, E = mc2, so the strains run names like mc2155. Oliver Sacks, who taught at the college for over 40 years, collaborated with Paul Alan Cox to propose that Lytico-bodig disease among the Chamorro people might stem from the consumption of flying foxes that had ingested cycad neurotoxins. Faculty member Isabelle Rapin, described as a founding mother of autism, helped establish the term autism spectrum disorder. In 2019, Einstein researchers mapped the complete nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans, a widely used model organism.

• 5. The Yeshiva-to-Montefiore Shift

  ›

  Yeshiva University's financial position worsened steadily from the late 1960s onward. As early as 1969, financial strain led Yeshiva to contract operation of the Jack D. Weiler Hospital to Montefiore Medical Center. In 1980, Einstein's Department of Medicine merged with Montefiore outright. By the 2010s, the situation had become critical. Among the pressures was a $110 million loss Yeshiva suffered in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in 2008. In 2015, Yeshiva transferred ownership of the medical school to Montefiore under an arrangement that gave Montefiore 51 percent ownership and Yeshiva 49 percent. Montefiore assumed all operational and financial responsibility. The transaction's full terms were kept largely private.

  Yeshiva continued to award Einstein's degrees until 2019, when the school secured its own independent degree-granting authority. In 2021, the two institutions launched a joint BA/BS-MD program for students entering Yeshiva. Einstein's parent organization, Montefiore Health System, was founded in 1884 and named for Moses Montefiore, a British financier who also served as Sheriff of London. Today the system encompasses 15 member hospitals, operates the busiest emergency room in New York City, and ranks ninth busiest in the United States. Einstein's chief academic officer carries the title of Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean, a position held by Yaron Tomer since 2023.

• 6. The Billion-Dollar Gift

  ›

  Ruth Gottesman joined Einstein's faculty as a professor and eventually became chair of the board of trustees. In 2024, she donated one billion dollars to the school with the specific condition that tuition be eliminated for all MD students in perpetuity. The donation also required that the college never change its name. The New York Times described the gift as likely the largest single donation ever made to a medical school. Following the donation, every MD student at Einstein now holds the Gottesman Scholarship, which covers full tuition. The average cost of attendance across all four years, after the scholarship, is $138,000, covering living expenses rather than tuition.

  The gift reshaped what it means to gain admission. Einstein's MD program already carried an acceptance rate of 1.85 percent in 2024, with 789 medical students enrolled as of 2025. New York residents make up 44 percent of that student body. Student housing sits in three 28-story towers constructed in 1970, offering studio, one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments and three-bedroom penthouses. Gottesman's stipulation that the name remain unchanged gave the institution a form of protection it had not possessed before, anchoring both the Einstein name and the tuition-free policy together into the school's governing structure.

• 7. Notable Alumni and Faculty

  ›

  Alumni George Kuo and Rudolph Leibel each made discoveries central to modern medicine: Kuo co-discovered the hepatitis C virus, and Leibel identified the hormone leptin. Raymond Vahan Damadian invented the nuclear magnetic resonance scanning machine and is credited by some with the broader invention of MRI; he received the National Medal of Technology in 1988 and the Lemelson-MIT Program's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. Alumnus Ronald J. Ross was first to use an MRI scanner in a clinical setting. Charles S. Peskin, whose mathematical models describe blood flow in the heart, received a MacArthur grant in 1983. Lucy Shapiro received the National Medal of Science in 2011 and the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science in 2025 for work on bacterial genetics that helped establish modern developmental biology.

  Psychiatry alumnus Rick Strassman conducted early clinical research on DMT at a time when it represented the first Food and Drug Administration-approved psychedelic research in over 20 years. Howard Dean, a Vermont governor, 2004 presidential candidate, and Democratic National Committee chairman, is an Einstein graduate. On the faculty side, Berta Scharrer, considered a co-founder of neuroendocrinology, received the National Medal of Science in 1983 for establishing the concept of neurosecretion. Harry Eagle received the same award in 1987 for developing Eagle's minimal essential medium, a cell culture medium still in wide use. Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch, a genetics professor, became a Royal Society Fellow and received the National Medal of Science in 1993. Oliver Sacks, who spent over four decades at the college, published Awakenings in 1973 documenting his work with encephalitis lethargica patients in the Bronx; the book was adapted into a 1990 film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. In 2024, the school received $192 million in NIH funding, and its more than 200 laboratories continue to produce research across clinical, basic, and translational science.