Resources to help advance your research career

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is a pleasure to be talking with you today. I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to me today. I'm excited to share with you some resources that got me started on my research journey. I will tell you that when I first started in my early career transitioning from fellow to faculty, I didn't realize how much growth in career development or professional development I would need to do.

1:31 I had no idea. I mean, you know, you're going through the motions of your training and you're just, you know, hitting all the milestones, right? As a medical student, there are all these milestones you meet and then you graduate and then same for your residency and your fellowship. So you're always progressing. When you get to your faculty career, one thing that happens that I didn't immediately recognize is that I became responsible for my growth and development as a faculty member. And I don't think I really appreciated how much it was dependent on me to figure that out. And so a lot of the resources that helped me in my transition, that helped me get started on my research journey, really came to me to some extent serendipitously.

2:17 I didn't really intentionally create these opportunities. At least I, in retrospect, I could have been more intentional about creating them. And so I want to share some of them with you because, you know, I think it's important for you to recognize how many opportunities there are. And look, I will tell them any of the opportunities I'm going to share with you today are actually specific to hematology. I'm a hematologist. I in general have looked for career development awards and career development programs that have enhanced my ability to be a great hematologist, my research areas in hematology. And so that's why I look for opportunities in hematology. So I'm going to share some examples of resources that I personally experienced that have helped me.

3:02 But these are not necessarily focused, or at least my goal is not to tell you what hematology resources are available. My goal is to give you a sense of all the resources you should be looking out for that could possibly help you advance. And so these are, that's kind of my disclaimer as I get started sharing these episodes with you. So I will tell you that my very earliest career development or professional development workshops were doing residency. Actually, I take that back. They were doing fellowship because fellowship was the time at which I started thinking about, OK, moving on to the next phase. You know, when you go to fellowship, you're taking what's already a specialty and you're going deeper.

3:45 You're doing a subspecialty. And you've kind of decided that you're going to do something a little bit, well, I shouldn't say unique because in all of medicine, what we do is unique, even when it's general. So even when you're a general internist, you can see a unique population. You don't have to be a subspecialty fellow, or you don't have to do a subspecialty fellowship to be able to do that. But when you do do a subspecialty fellowship, you're kind of, you know, you're narrowing down the focus quite a bit. And so you think a lot more about your career and you think a lot more about opportunities. And because of the way ACGME, and that's the Association of Colleges and Graduate Medical Education, I believe, if I'm wrong, please just show me grace, I will put the right abbreviation in the show notes.

4:35 But the ACGME is, I mean, they've got specific requirements, right, in fellowship. And so we do, you know, a set number of months of clinical training, then a set number of months of research, if research is part of your fellowship. And so there is flexibility in that. It's to some extent a lot more elective time than you probably had in residency. And it's not really elective time like elective time as much as it's really research elective time. So it's opportunities to grow in research. So anyways, during my fellowship that I first did a very focused trainee workshop. It was the Hemostasis and Thrombosis Research Society trainee workshop, HTRS workshop.

5:17 And this workshop was done at least twice a year at that time. One of them was before a major animal meeting. It wasn't even research focused. It was really just about thinking about clinical cases and hematology. And I'm not even sure why I applied, but there was an opportunity that came across my desk and I thought, oh, this would be great. I think at the time, they probably paid for you to go to the animal meeting. I don't recall all the benefits, but you know, there were benefits that I thought were interesting to me. I was not thinking, let me go here and advance my research career. That was definitely not my thought at the time. I was very focused on, you know, I get to go to a meeting and someone's going to pay for something and I'm going to, you know, connect with others.

6:01 So it was just an opportunity. And I went. And at the time, I didn't recognize how helpful it was. But now in retrospect, I can say anything that brings you outside of your institution and connecting with people at other institutions is beneficial to your professional development and your career. Anything that brings you in contact with other faculty at other institutions who do things differently from the way you do them at your institution, it is always of great benefit to your career. And so even though I cannot trace my research growth to that experience, at least not that I recall, I do know that it was an important milestone in just practicing taking opportunities that expose you to other people.

6:48 And this really is the theme of many of the many of the resources that I am sharing with you today. The first, the first was Hemostasis and Therambosis Research Society trainee workshop. And it was my first of many experiences around moving forward and just thinking about my career in light of not just one institution, but really in the bigger picture of academic medicine. The second one also is an hematology focused one, and that was the Hematology Fellows Consortium. And this was actually run by a wonderful physician named Craig Kessler. He may still be doing it right now. It's been a while since I've thought about it. But it was a really great opportunity for us as fellows to bring a research question and get guidance in expanding that research question.

7:40 And you know, as clinicians, I feel like we understand research and we recognize that there are many questions to be answered. I think what we don't recognize, or at least for me what I didn't recognize, is how big the gap was in terms of the things that I should have known and the things I did know. I did not recognize how big that gap was. And so it seemed, you know, straightforward that I would go for this two to three day workshop and I would come back with a project that I could execute. And to some extent, maybe the program was ambitious, or maybe I was the one who was thinking that this two to three day program would change everything about research. The reality is it takes time to really get involved in research, to really grow research program, to really narrow down a question.

8:29 And two to three days doesn't help you get there. But two to three days is a helpful start because when you start to accumulate two to three days of different workshops that help you continue thinking about your problem, it really, really, really does go a long way. And so the Hematology Fellows Consortium was really the first opportunity I had to bring a research problem that I wanted to address. One of the challenges with my attendance of that program at the time is that what I wanted to do was still evolving. And I think that's a challenge. But it's okay. It's okay because you learn tools that are applicable no matter what your research project is.

9:11 But it would go so much further if you were very clear what population you wanted to contribute to and how you would contribute to them and what resources are available to you. So I would say that I wish I was in a more mature place at the time to take advantage of all the goodness that came from that program. But I was not. I learned from it still. I wish I had a project that I was going to continue longitudinally. But I definitely learned from it. So I would say that programs like that are helpful. They help you think about your research. They help you focus on your research. But it is important to recognize that these programs are limited in how far they can take you because of how short the period is.

9:53 And so many times at these programs, they'll say, you've got to go back to your mentors. And to be honest, it's real. You get help and then you go back to the help that you should already have on ground. And if you don't have it on ground, then you think about how do I build it? And so definitely the Hematology Fellows Consortium run by Craig Kessler was a really great resource. It was a starting point for me really thinking about my project and thinking about bringing other people in to help me think deeply about my project. OK. So that, again, was another Hematology focused opportunity. The third Hematology focused opportunity I want to share is the ASH Clinical Research Training Institute. That's the American Society of Hematology Clinical Research Training Institute.

10:36 And this was another one of those, which at this time was actually a year long program. We had a two week workshop. It was either one or two weeks in La Jolla, California. I think it was a week. And we would develop our projects alongside a cadre of outstanding faculty and biostatisticians helping you really think deeply about your project. And again, this was one of those, you know, a little bit longer than the Hematology Fellows Consortium. And it was one of those opportunities where you could just sit with your project that you're working on and really get help to, like, enhance it and ask the right questions and narrow down your research question and, you know, make the scope smaller.

11:24 And again, for me, it was very helpful. I got to connect with mentors. I got to connect with classmates. In fact, one of my peer mentors and I wrote a paper as a result of that program. So it was really, really useful. And I also wish I understood what I really wanted to do, what the opportunities were for me, because I ended up not being able to take that project forward. And for that reason, it felt like that time was wasted. The time is never wasted. So it felt to me at the time that it was wasted, but it's never wasted because every time you take a project and think through how to make it better, how to narrow the question, how to narrow the focus so that you can more easily answer it, it's a skill that you will always apply to your research over and over again.

12:13 And right now in retrospect, I can say I'm not sure how much I got out of that. But part of that is because there are many foundational steps to your growth as a clinician researcher or as a clinician scientist. And sometimes you forget what pieces came together to help you be who you needed to be, right? You forget. You forget that the alphabet used to be super hard at some point. You forget that some special songs that your parents sang with you allowed you to really learn it in a way that now you're like, what? You mean there was a time I never knew the alphabet? Huh? Wonder what that was like. It's kind of the same experience. It was like, I don't think that was helpful, but it was helpful. It's just hard for you to say that on the other side of your experience where now you have so much experience accumulated, you're not even sure which experience really contributed to really moving you forward in a big way.

13:04 Okay. So up until this point, I've named three that are very specific to hematology. I am going to go ahead and I'll talk about others that are not specific to hematology, but I want to say also that whatever your subspecialty or your primary specialty, there's always an interest group available that wants to support clinicians who are making this transition to research. And so your societies have them. Actually, it's mostly societies because I think these are three that are specific to societies that I've been part of. Though the one by Craig Kessler, the Hematology Fellows Consortium was actually supported by industry, was not necessarily tied to a specific foundation, though it partnered with foundations as well.

13:47 So you probably have a couple of these through your medical societies, whether your state medical societies, through industry funding as far as partners in industry, but you definitely have access to these and I recommend that if you don't know about them, you go looking because they definitely exist. And yes, you may be thinking, oh my gosh, they're so competitive. You are competitive. And that's why you should go out and pursue these opportunities so that you can get them and get started on your research journey. Okay, those were three specifically focused in Hematology. The fourth one was not. So the fourth one was an NIH diversity supplement.

14:27 And this was my first major award as a faculty member. And it was a major award because it was the first award that actually bought me protected time. That's why it was a major award and that's why it was a really, really, really important award. So protected time is so critical to the emerging researcher, whether you are a PhD researcher, an MD-PhD researcher, or an MD-only researcher, protected time is critical because when you don't have protected time, it means that you are mostly focused doing clinical work if you're a clinician teaching, maybe if you're a PhD researcher, but you're focused doing other things other than your research.

15:10 So protected time buys you time during your workday to be able to move your research forward and to do your research training. And so that's why some of the most important awards are really awards that give you, like cover part of your salary so that your daytime hours can be spent growing in the research that you want to do, moving the research forward and then growing as a researcher as well. And so the NIH diversity supplement, which I got as part of a mentor's R01 grant, was so critical because it was the first time I actually had time during the day to move research forward. It was such a pivotal grant and there are many opportunities for diversity supplements and what you really need to do is connect with a mentor who already has an other R01 equivalent or higher grant and carve out a project within the larger grant and then it's usually at least at the time was an administrative review.

16:12 So it's not the typical grant that goes in for like a major peer review where things can get triaged. It generally I think has a higher likelihood of funding as long as you have a reasonable project that fits within the landscape of the project of the parent grant. And so an NIH diversity supplement was one of the most important first steps for me as far as like a stepping stone towards really moving forward in research in a way that was substantial. Okay. The fourth, that was the fourth one. Okay, the fifth one, it was an NIH K-12 award. Now again it was an NIH award and this was an institutional award.

16:54 And so a K-12 award typically is a career development award that's given to institutions, not to individuals. And institutions have their own processes for how to put individuals on it and usually they are reserved for faculty who want to get more training and research. And I don't think they're limited to PhD versus MD. I think as long as you are a faculty member who is moving forward in a research program, the NIH K-12 could be an opportunity for you. Now there are different K-12s. At the time I was on a hematology focused K-12. It's a hematology and transfusion medicine focused K-12. There are other K-12 programs at different institutions.

17:36 And so think about your institution. Does your institution have a K-12 award? And inquire as to what it takes to apply to be a K-12 scholar. Now some institutions have a lot of scholars applying for the same awards and some institutions have few scholars. And so the competition is really mostly internal and it's important to talk with whoever is the director of the K-12 or the PI of the K-12 to think about how you potentially could submit a competitive application so that you can take advantage of the K-12 award. So that was an institutional award that usually is administered by PI within the institution and so candidates are selected through an internal process.

18:26 And that was a major award for me because it further protected my time and now really allowed me to start to conceive and move my projects forward in a way that I had not until this point. Another Career Development Award that I want to highlight is the AAMC Minority Faculty Leadership Development Seminar. Now this is not necessarily a research focused seminar but it was really helpful for me to think about my career. It was in a sense it was stepping back from oh I'm trying to do research, I'm trying to get grant funding, I'm trying to do manuscripts to really thinking about and conceptualizing my career is a big thing which is important.

19:10 It's really thinking about hey I know you're very focused on this aspect of your career whether that's clinical or whether that's just research but think about your career in the big picture. This was like a two to three day award but it was helpful because at that time I had been a faculty member for at least a couple of years and it was helpful to step into that space having now a framework of what it meant to move my own career forward and having people give me insight and advice on how to really take my career to the next level. So this was not necessarily a research focused career development opportunity but it really was a career development opportunity focused on my career as a whole and it really helped me think strategically about how I was building my career making sure that I was moving in the direction I wanted to move in.

19:56 So in our faculty jobs we will always be moving in a direction whether it's direction you want to be moving in or not is what is up in the air. So the AAMC Minority Faculty Leadership Development Seminar was very helpful for me. Now I will say that the AAMC puts out a bunch of these leadership development seminars. Some of them are for mid-career faculty, some of them are for early career faculty. There are different ones and they will change over time but definitely look at AAMC opportunities to really advance your career development. One that I have done really recently is C-Change and that is I think C stands for culture so culture change and that comes out of Brandeis University and it's led by a wonderful woman named Linda Palloli and I came to the C-Change Institute, gosh I can't say serendipitously because many of these things I guess they could be serendipitous but usually you're either on a listserv where people are sending you information and if you're not you should get on one or you have colleagues who participated and they are sharing their insights or they said it was a great program and so you start to think about it.

21:10 This was definitely one of those that was very, very helpful. It was a group of about 16, they take 16 faculty a year. I think our group was a little bit smaller than 16 but really it's just really thinking about your career, conceptualizing your career as a whole and I think it's especially relevant for mid-career faculty where there's almost like a mid-career slump, kind of like a mid-career crisis, right, where you start as an early career faculty and people know you need help and they're directing a lot of resources at you as opposed to, you know, when you get to the senior level where you just know what you're doing or you're very connected, you know about things before everybody else knows about them, the mid-career can be a place where you don't have as many resources targeted towards you.

21:56 So it was really helpful because it gave us an opportunity to stop and say, well, you know what, we've accomplished some successes up until this point of mid-career but what's next? Where do we want to take this? How far do we want to go? Is this what we want to be doing? And so it was a really, really powerful experience of thinking about our careers in a really amazing way and I actually just finished that program this year and it's been really awesome and life-changing. Okay. So those are seven resources that really got me started on my research journey or have enhanced my research journey over time. I'll summarize the seven, the Hemostasis and Therbosis Research Society Training Workshop, Hematology Fellows Consortium, and ASH Clinical Research Training Institute.

22:42 That's the American Society of Hematology Clinical Research Training Institute. Those are three examples of various subspecialty-specific opportunities which you probably have in your own subspecialty if you're not a hematologist. And then other ones that are not necessarily specific to hematology are the NIH Diversity Supplement which is available really to all faculty at eligible institutions, NIH K-12 Award which sits within institutes, centers, or departments and are administered internally, and then the AAMC Minority Faculty Leadership Development Seminar as an example of many, many AAMC offerings that are available.

23:24 And then C-Change, Culture Change coming out of Brandeis University with Linda Pololi. So those are really, really great resources. I will say that I've just listed a few. These are not an exhaustive list of the resources I've taken advantage of in my transition from clinician to research leadership, but these are just a smattering that I wanted to share with you. I imagine that especially if you're not in hematology, you've had access to a couple of other career development or leadership development workshops or opportunities that I have not mentioned. I would love to hear about them. Please send me a DM, leave me a voicemail on the podcast website, or even send me a message through the podcast website so that you can also be a part of it, or at least you can share with me experiences that you've had in your forward motion in your career.

24:13 All right. It's been a pleasure talking with you today. I did want to announce, if I haven't already, that I have another webinar coming up when you don't have a research mentor, and that's happening December 20th, and it's happening at noon Eastern. I hope that you will sign up. Information about it is on our podcast website, ClinicianResearcherPodcast.com, or you can find it at CoagCoach.com slash events hyphen one. If you just look for events, you can find it. All right. It's been a pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you for listening. I look forward to hearing about your experiences as you take advantage of career development resources to move your career forward. Have a great, great day, and I'll see you again on the next episode.

25:05 Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do healthcare.