Dear SMDP Community:

As you know, 2025 was a successful year for SMDP.  With the continued support and commitment of our industry partners, a total of 99 scholar/mentor pairs were sponsored for SMDP Biotech and we had 30 scholar/mentor pairs for SMDP MedTech. We are grateful to the SMDP sponsor companies for providing mentors and financial support which enables us to provide SMDP and its year round programming at virtually no cost to the SMDP scholars. You can see the full list of SMDP sponsor companies here:  SMDP Sponsor Overview.

We are now preparing for the launch of the 2026 SMDP training sessions which are scheduled to be held June 20-25 in San Diego for SMDP Biotech and October 16-21 in Boston for SMDP MedTech, October 16-21 in Boston.  We have been accepting applications for the 2026 SMDP programs since September this year and to promote the program we have been conducting outreach to our network of university partners as well as attending professional conferences. There is great interest in SMDP and our applications are tracking ahead of prior years. 

We have a limited number of sponsorship opportunities available for the 2026 programs ($12,000 per scholar/mentor pair).  If your company is not currently a sponsor, we welcome a conversation with you about how to get your company involved.  

If you would like to meet to explore this, then please email Scott May (smay@icpdprograms.org) a few times when you are free for a 30-minute virtual meeting.  Scott will follow with a virtual meeting calendar request.

Wishing you a wonderful holiday season, and thank you for being an important part of the SMDP family.