Research Program
Residents are strongly encouraged to do research during their elective Area of Concentration (AOC) time. Most residents who elect to do research choose a mentor and project either at the end of the PGY1 year or the beginning of the PGY2 year. To help them find the right mentor and project, residents can review a database of previous resident projects and will meet with Dr Strewler or Dr Mukamal. Working with their mentors, residents prepare a formal proposal of elective research. These proposals are reviewed by the Physician Scientist Training Committee and the IRB to help iron out problems and teach about grant writing with feedback to the resident. A major block of elective time for research is made available in the PGY3 year, but most residents get their research started in the PGY2 year. A list of resident research topics from the 2008-2010 academic year can be found
here.
To fulfill our mission to teach residents how to do research, we have created a course entitled Research for Residents, directed by Kenneth Mukamal, MD, MPH, MS. Residents planning to do research first choose a mentor and a project, and then take this two-week course early in the PGY2 year. The Course is extremely popular: three-quarters of residents in the Categorical Internal Medicine Residency program will take the elective this year. It prepares residents for clinical, translational, education or health care quality research.
Research for Residents is a brief but rigorous introduction to research methods, grant and paper writing, and mentorship. Residents come to the course with an abstract of their project idea. The course is built around working on these proposals in workshops which are supplemented by seminars on study design and cutting-edge translational research methods. The course is designed around a brief textbook written at the resident level, Hulley et al, Designing Clinical Research, 2nd Ed. At the end of the course, residents will present their proposals in a seminar. Besides showing residents how to apply research methods to designing their own projects, Research for Residents will introduce them to people key to their progress: biostatisticians, experts in study design, the directors of core facilities in genomics, proteomics and imaging, the staff of the General Clinical Research Center, and administrators of the Institutional Review Board for human studies. The schedule for the 2009 course can be found
here.
In addition to the Research Course, there is considerable infrastructure available to support resident research. The Resident research program pays part salary of an expert biostatistician as a consultant to residents and provides the EndNote bibliographic program to all residents. Core facilities in genomics, proteomics and imaging are fully available to residents. The General Clinical Research Center is committed to supporting resident research with clinical, laboratory and statistical resources and has underwritten the costs of recent resident projects.
The remarkably high quality of research by our residents is evidenced by their
publication record. From Jan 2008 to present, residents published 70 original papers in journals as distinguished as JAMA; 18 residents were first author of 25 papers.
