Professor Utz is the Director of Stanford’s Autoimmunity Center of Excellence (ACE), the Director of the Stanford MSTP MD-PhD training program, and the Founder of the Stanford Institute of Medical Research (SIMR). He has an active involvement with the education of the medical leaders of the future and has a love for the field of medicine.

Despite his tremendous success and being an authority in his field, Professor Utz comes from a humble background, growing up in a low-income household from Scranton, Pennsylvania (coincidentally the same city from the popular Netflix show, The Office!). Despite being educated in a high school where the vast majority of students did not attend college, Professor Utz still pushed in his academic pursuits and attended at King’s College with appreciable amounts of financial aid, where he later went on to pursue an MD at Stanford University. Due to this background, he stresses the importance of getting young, high school students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, actively involved within the field of medicine. He believes that early exposure to these fields gives students a valuable experience to profit from, irrespective of their future career trajectories.

This was one of the driving forces behind his founding of the Stanford Institute of Medical Research (SIMR) Program that now provides paid internships for high school students to work under Stanford Faculty and pursue undergraduate, and in some cases, even graduate level work without any prior exposure to the field.

Junior Medical Academy is allying with the Stanford Institute of Medical Research , in an efforts to provide free and accessible BioEngineering/BioEntrepreneurship education to elementary school students from disadvantaged backgrounds. SIMR BioEngineering Staff have been kind enough to provide JMA with the entirety of their High School Internship Curriculum for educational use.

Throughout this interview, Professor Utz provides valuable insight into how students from disadvantaged backgrounds should see importance in pursuing a medical education and shouldn’t feel discouraged because of their circumstances.Professor Utz goes on to provide advice for and encourage students that are racial minorities or members of the LGBTQ+ community to pursue medicine because the medical community stands to greatly benefit from their diverse thoughts and experiences.

Professor Utz’s words of advice provide unique insight into how students from disadvantaged backgrounds should approach their future educational path and why STEM/Medicine can be an impactful part of their journey.

Professor Utz’s full Bio can be found here: profiles.stanford.edu/paul-utz

Professor Utz’s Research Lab website can be found here: utzlab.stanford.edu