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Faculty Roster

AAMC initiated the Faculty Roster in 1966 to support national policy studies by collecting comprehensive information on the characteristics of faculty members at accredited U.S. MD-granting medical schools.

U.S. Medical School Faculty Report

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When individuals are first appointed to faculty positions, medical schools submit educational, employment, and demographic data to the Faculty Roster; updates are made as needed. Institutional participation in the Faculty Roster is voluntary at each of the nation's LCME-accredited medical schools. The Faculty Roster has grown to contain records on approximately 185,000 active full-time faculty. More than 300,000 inactive faculty are retained for research purposes or in case of reactivation.

The Faculty Roster user interface and data infrastructure called FAMOUS (Faculty Administrative Management Online User System) allows medical schools to submit information online or through batch uploads. Constituents at participating medical schools can readily access and customize Faculty Roster web reports, including retention, promotion, alumni, educational, departmental, and demographic reports. For benchmarking purposes, many reports enable constituents to compare institutionally aggregated counts to nationally aggregated counts. Other reports show data for one's own medical school only. School-based constituents have helped to design these school-specific reports to meet day-to-day operational and management needs. Access to person-level data is granted only to individuals with responsibility for maintaining faculty and administrator data at the given institution. Access to aggregate institution-level or national reports may be granted to medical school faculty or staff at the discretion of the representative at the medical school.

Please refer to the FAMOUS User's Guide (PDF) for comprehensive instructions on using FAMOUS. The guide is also located within the FAMOUS application.

Request Custom Data

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Resources

The FAMOUS application allows users to access aggregate data on faculty and chairs in a variety of ways over time, such as by department, degree, rank, tenure status, sex, age, and race/ethnicity. There are institution-specific reports as well as national reports. Among the reports are alumni reports, retention reports, promotion reports, demographic reports, and educational reports. If you are interested in access to aggregate FAMOUS reports, please contact your medical school's Faculty Roster Representative. These individuals will work with you to determine how best to meet your information needs, whether by granting you independent access to FAMOUS or pulling the information for you from FAMOUS. For a complete list of Faculty Roster Representatives by medical school, please refer to the Member Directory for Roster Representatives.

Faculty Roster staff can conduct special reports for noncommercial purposes for individuals whose needs are not met from existing reports. Special reports may vary from simple analyses requiring minimal programming to complicated analyses requiring significant time and effort. The charge for a special report depends on the length of time to complete the analysis.

To request a special report, click the Request Custom Data link above. This link will take you to a form where you should enter the specific information that you are requesting and how you intend to use the information. Be aware that submitting this form does not guarantee that the AAMC will fulfill your request. Factors related to whether the AAMC fulfills a request include, but are not limited to, availability of data, AAMC resources, AAMC membership status, human subjects research protections, and data privacy and release policies.

In a cost-sharing arrangement with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under contract 75N94019C00007, the NIH covers selected expenses for certain AAMC staff associated with the Faculty Roster. The AAMC staff listed below are supported, in part, by this cost-sharing arrangement. The AAMC devotes additional resources from its full-time computer programming staff to develop the user interfaces and the data infrastructures for Faculty Roster applications.

Hershel Alexander, PhD, Senior Director, Data Operations and Services

Yolanda Gener, DMD, Research and Data Analyst

Tai Pham, Research and Data Analyst

Rae Anne Sloane, Lead Research and Data Analyst

Stefanie Wisniewski, Manager, Data Operations and Services

The NIH uses the Faculty Roster to help inform a variety of policy decisions, often through the merging of Faculty Roster data with NIH data on grants, trainees, and fellows. Over the years, the merged data have assisted the NIH to address a variety of issues, such as the aging of faculty, the recruitment of new assistant professors, the proportion of faculty pursuing scholarly activity, and the representation of IMG faculty versus other faculty among NIH principal investigators. In addition, the NIH has utilized Faculty Roster staff for special reports on topics such as the percentage of neuroscience trainees becoming faculty members; the percentage of "Yellow Berets" becoming deans, chairs, or faculty; and the proportion of surgical faculty receiving NIH awards.

The Faculty Roster has served as a popular resource for a variety of analyses outside the NIH as well. The current bibliography of Faculty Roster citations contains over 300 publications on topics such as minority and female faculty representation, faculty attrition, foreign-educated faculty, postdoctoral versus nonpostdoctoral career paths, and faculty research activity.

Other benefits of the Faculty Roster include complimentary web reports to aid management and planning activities. These reports are available to the Faculty Roster representatives at each participating medical school. Among the reports are continuously updated alumni reports that show the number of graduates from each medical school who have become faculty members or chairs.

To help inform national policy decisions and to aid institutional management efforts, the AAMC Faculty Roster has been collecting data on faculty at U.S. MD-granting medical schools since 1966. Examples of this data include a faculty member's name, medical school of employment, department, rank, rank start date, rank end date, nature of employment (full-time, part-time, volunteer, emeritus), degree, sex, and birth date. A comprehensive description of the collected data is in the FAMOUS User's Guide (PDF). Each medical school maintains the information for its own faculty, and each medical school may edit its own faculty only.

Faculty who wish to review their information should contact their respective Faculty Roster Representative. If there are modifications to make, the representatives will work with the faculty to make them.

Occasionally, the AAMC permits research on faculty information. As part of a contract with the AAMC, the NIH receives a snapshot of data to address a variety of issues, such as the distribution of faculty across departments, the proportion NIH trainees who become faculty, and the age of faculty. Other research must be reviewed by Institutional Review Boards to ensure that faculty will not be harmed.

This policy has been effective since March 1, 2005. Refer to this web page for changes to the policy.

Member Directory

Use this directory to search for members of an AAMC governance body or professional development group by member name, location, or institution.

View the Member Directory (sign-in required)

Contact Faculty Roster

If you have questions about FAMOUS or the Faculty Roster, please contact FAMOUShelp@aamc.org.