The faculty career track system at the Feinberg School of Medicine exists to accomplish several goals:

• Provide a pathway for career development and promotion that will help Feinberg/Northwestern University attract the best and brightest recruits capable of contributing to the different missions of the medical school (i.e., education, research, and clinical care).
• Provide clear expectations of faculty at the time of appointment within each career track.
• Align faculty with the mission of Feinberg and Northwestern University.
• Provide a clear path for faculty career development and promotion regardless of the focus of a faculty member’s academic activity.
• To have a mechanism wherein the various contributions of our faculty to the academic mission of the school can be recognized.
• Establish clear standards of academic productivity and professional accomplishment for promotion on a career track.
• Stimulate academic productivity by the faculty by establishing a promotion system that is realistic and achievable.

The faculty career tracks at Feinberg are as follows:

Investigator Track

Tenure eligible with a defined probationary period.

• Scientist Pathway

• Reserved for investigators (primarily PhDs) without clinical responsibilities

• Physician-scientist Pathway — reserved for investigators (primarily MDs, MD/PhDs, or other clinical degrees, e.g., DPT) whose activities include modest clinical responsibilities

Clinican-Educator Track

Generally non-tenure eligible but tenure possible for highly accomplished faculty with clinical responsibilities at the time of promotion to professor.

• Faculty eligible for this track include MDs with significant clinical responsibilities, PhDs or other professional degrees with significant clinical responsibilities (e.g., psychologists, physical therapists, etc.), and PhDs who provide expertise important for the education and research missions of the institution but are unlikely to establish an independently-funded research program but likely to serve primarily as a co-investigator on multiple grants (e.g., biostatisticians, bioinformaticists, etc.) and/or have significant teaching responsibilities
• This track will be available to both full-time and part-time faculty
• For the contributed services faculty, the title 'clinical' will be added to the professorial level (e.g. assistant professor of clinical medicine)

Health System Clinician Track

• Rankless track
• Reserved for faculty whose primary site of work is geographically substantially separate from core McGaw locations (NMH/CMH/RIC/VA)

Information Guide for Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure (APT)

To learn more about academic career tracks at Feinberg, download the Information Guide for Appointments, Promotion and Tenure.