The University of Virginia, where James Donovan is an Adjunct Professor, will begin offering a new dual-degree option for a JD and MD starting this fall. The program is a partnership between the School of Law and the School of Medicine and it will be one of 15 dual degrees offered at UVA Law.
As Richard Bonnie, the Law School’s adviser to the program, said “I think most such people want to be, for at least some part of their career, practicing physicians. That group of people, I’m predicting, will use the process of legal education and the skills they get from having their law degree to help them become successful policymakers and leaders of health care.”
The first student accepted to the program, Austin Sim, plans to specialize in radiation-oncology. He doesn’t know how the law degree will come into play, but he says that he could do policy work in Washington, D.C., or hospital administration.