Dartmouth Medical School Department of Microbiology and Immunology Borwell Building One Medical Center Drive Lebanon, NI-I 03756-0001 Tel: (603) 650-4919 Fax: (603) 650-6223 Vail Building Hanover, NH 03755-3842 'rei: (603) 650-1613 Fax:(603)650-1318 September 29, 2011 To the Admissions Committee for Dartmouth Medical School: I wish to support Farzand A. Syed's application to Dartmouth Medical School for the MD/PhD program. Ido not personally know Mr. Syed, but he has been a participant in the Harvard spin- off Biomedical Science Careers Program (BSCP) since 1994, and Ican speak to that. There are over 8,400 students, student advisors, teachers, guidance counselors, administrators and community organizers who are part of the BSCP network. Initiatives include the biennial BSCP conference, the Skills Workshops Program, the Career Development Series Conferences, the New England Resource Directory, and HOPE Scholarships (www.bscp.org/initiatives.asp). I have been involved with BSCP from its inception (1991-1992) as a mentor representing OMS, as requested by Bill Green when he was Director of the Immunology Program at Dartmouth. Our goal was to have more diversity in our application pools at Dartmouth in order to qualify for NIH funding of large projects. BSCP has since developed, under Dr. Joan Reede's capable guidance and vision - she is now Harvard Medical School's Dean for Diversity and Community Partnership, into a premier diversity-enabling organization for students of every race/ethnicity and gender, and at all levels from high school to faculty. Indeed, BSCP has taken the art of mentoring to a whole new level, where an intricate web of novel and enabling methods allows mentors tofocus on individuals and help them strategically develop their talents. It is out of this BSCP cauldron that Farzand Syed comes. He is originally from Pakistan, and in 1989 his father brought him at age 15 to the US to get a better education. (Farzand entered Brighton High, Brighton, MA, in loth grade. His father was an assistant professor of math in Pakistan, and a Lecturer of math at Northeastern University for over 10 years.) Farzand obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology in addition to a Master of Arts in Biotechnology in a dual degree program at BU, both in 1998. Concurrently, he was a Research Assistant at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Institutes of Medicine from 1996- 1998 studying in a post baccalaureate program with Dr. Chaker Adra, who at that time was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has 3 publications from his research with Dr. Adra, two in the journal Genomics and one in the journal Clinical Genetics, all of good quality. My interviews with Mr. Syed indicate he had a substantive role in these projects, all of which focused on disease related genes. In 1998, Mr. Syed was invited to BSCP's Evening of Hope as aguest of the President and CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation, Susan P. Pauker, MD, whom he had first met some years earlier. Dr. Pauker had run asummer enrichment program at Harvard University called the IMAGE Program (Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation). She had arranged medical observershi ps for him between 1991 and 1995 in general, vascular and orthopedics surgery, and other specialties (among other clinical specialties) at both Children's Hospital Boston and Mount