Jan. 15, 2026
Not Just Neighbors
Together, Pitt and Carnegie Mellon train tomorrow’s biomedical leaders.
Designs on Aging-Ready
By Strategic Communications
Joshua Tashman couldn’t divorce himself from his passion for engineering as he explored medical schools nearly a decade ago. So, he decided there was only one way to round out his formal education: He’d marry medicine and materials science.
That choice led him to Pittsburgh, where the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon University run the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), through which he earned his PhD in bioengineering in 2021 from Carnegie Mellon and his MD from Pitt in 2022.
“The real benefit here is that they’re different schools with different expertise,” says Tashman, grateful that he had the chance to learn from and train under brilliant faculty at both universities.
The universities share broad research interests and overlapping expertise in several fields—think neuroscience, robotics and bioengineering—and partner in programs beyond MSTP.
Carnegie Mellon graduate student Kendra Noneman has a Pitt faculty advisor through the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, where researchers at both universities investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms that give rise to biological intelligence and behavior. Working with J. Patrick Mayo, assistant professor of ophthalmology, Pitt School of Medicine, gives her a chance to see clinical research firsthand as she studies where animals are looking based on neurons in the cerebral cortex.
Emily Lopez, another Carnegie Mellon student co-advised by Mayo, was excited that the partnership with Pitt connected her with a broader neuroscience community in Pittsburgh.
And of course, Pitt and Carnegie Mellon share a neighborhood. Many faculty say they can’t immediately name another instance of having one of the country’s best medical schools sitting a few blocks from a top computer science school.
“It just increases the amount of and types of research I am exposed to and the people I can meet, which makes for a richer graduate student experience,” says Lopez, whose optogenetics research is part of a collaboration between Mayo and her Carnegie Mellon advisor, Matt Smith, professor of biomedical engineering, Carnegie Mellon, and codirector of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. “In all honesty, I tend to lose track of which professors and students are from Pitt and which are from CMU; we are often mixed together at various events and even within labs.”
Together, the two universities are nurturing the next generation of biomedical leaders as their faculty pursue life-changing research.
“I think that over the years, the two universities have collaborated effectively to attract the best students to the city because of their complementary research strengths,” says Saleem Khan, associate dean for graduate studies and academic affairs and professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, Pitt School of Medicine. “This is a great thing because it helps both universities attract and recruit faculty and expands the breadth of their research.”
He says it also gives faculty bargaining power in attracting grant funding. Today, research projects at the School of Medicine involve collaborators from Carnegie Mellon more than any other institution outside of Pitt. In fiscal year 2023, their collaborations included 65 principal investigators and spanned 48 awards with a total worth of more than $15.8 million.
Theresa Mayer, vice president for research at Carnegie Mellon, notes that, overall, “the University of Pittsburgh is by far and away CMU’s most frequent and deepest partner in research. Research at CMU is supported from funding awarded in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh more often than through any other source, outside of direct funding awards from major federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense.”
And of course, Pitt and Carnegie Mellon share a neighborhood. Many faculty say they can’t immediately name another instance of having one of the country’s best medical schools sitting a few blocks from a top computer science school. In the Boston area, you’ll find a close case in Harvard Medical School and MIT. Yet those schools sit roughly two miles apart.
James Faeder, associate professor of computational and systems biology, Pitt School of Medicine, and Pitt’s program director for the joint Carnegie Mellon–University of Pittsburgh PhD Program in Computational Biology (CPCB), says there are intangible benefits to the universities’ proximity, as well.
Faculty from the two universities don’t just work in the same neighborhood; they often live in the same neighborhoods and socialize outside the lab. And on the student side, he points to the pride they take in their joint education: “Our students view themselves as alumni of both schools.”
The serendipitous geography has made it easy to forge alliances that maximize complementary strengths in medical research. Dozens of Pitt students as well as dozens of Carnegie Mellon students are enrolled in formal programs between the universities.
Examples include the aforementioned MSTP and CPCB programs; the Molecular Biophysics and Structural Biology graduate program, where students can pursue research in disciplines ranging from cellular biophysics to virus structure and nanomachinery; plus the Program in Neural Computation, where computationally minded students can move seamlessly among neuroscience labs at both universities. And there are more informal collaborations than you can shake a pierogi at.
“This is a special part of the Pittsburgh community,” says Douglas Weber, Akhtar and Bhutta Professor in mechanical engineering and neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon. “There are elite institutions that are unable to collaborate between departments. But we’re able to do that here across institutions.”
An emerging generation of physicians and scientists has taken advantage of this city’s extraordinary academic offerings to enrich health care—not only in Pittsburgh but well beyond.