David Muller, MD, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
For more than 25 years, David Muller, MD, has dedicated himself to ensuring that learners become compassionate and well-rounded 21st-century physicians by emphasizing humanities and professionalism education in addition to strong scientific foundations.
Early in his career, Dr. Muller demonstrated his keen aptitude for teaching and leadership as chief resident, and today is one of the most respected educators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). In his early roles as an educator, he trained internal medicine house staff and medical students on the wards, in the clinics, and in the community.
In 1995, Dr. Muller co-founded the Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors Program, with an embedded trainee curriculum, to provide primary and palliative care to homebound seniors in East Harlem. Today, the program continues providing care to nearly 2,000 patients throughout Manhattan and serves as a national model.
Dr. Muller’s teaching talent contributed to ISMMS appointing him as dean for medical education and the Marietta and Charles C. Morchand Chair in Medical Education in 2005. He continues to teach, acting as clinical preceptor for the Art and Science of Medicine course, the Longitudinal Clinical Experience, and the Inter-Clerkship Ambulatory Care Track.
“In all these teaching roles, Dr. Muller has earned the highest possible evaluations year after year, in every single venue. The consistency of his teaching over so much time, by so many different levels of students and across so many teaching roles, is likely to be unmatched by any of the teaching faculty at our institution,” says Dennis Charney, dean of ISMMS.
Under Dr. Muller’s direction, ISMMS launched FlexMed, an expansion of the school’s Humanities and Medicine early assurance admission program. FlexMed students will soon make up half of the ISMMS entering class.
“FlexMed allows talented students with lots of initiative to ‘flex’ their intellectual, creative, humanistic, and scientific muscles during college,” says Dr. Muller.
Dr. Muller has received numerous awards and honors as an educator, including the Jacobi Medallion, the highest honor awarded to Mount Sinai alumni, and the AMA Foundation Pride in the Profession Award. As dean, he has focused on enhancing diversity in medical school admissions, the variety of training experiences that are available to medical students, and the importance of reward and recognition for outstanding teachers at ISMMS.
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Dr. Muller received his BA from Johns Hopkins University and his MD from New York University School of Medicine. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center.