CardioExchange Archive

Several Cardiology Fellows who are attending AHA.13 in Dallas this week are blogging for CardioExchange. The Fellows include Vimal Ramjee, Siqin Ye, Seth Martin, Reva Balakrishnan, and  Saurav Chatterjee. You can find the previous post here. For more of our AHA.13 coverage of late-breaking clinical trials, interviews with the authors of the most important research, and blogs from our fellows on the most interesting presentations at the meeting, check out our AHA.13 Headquarters.

Several early-career individuals have been confounded by the question of how to get a good foundation in the basics of handling and analyzing data to arrive at meaningful and relevant conclusions. Having been tormented by this difficulty and, to this day, needing more experienced and advanced counsel, I thought a primer on how to set oneself up for a career in clinical research would help other fellows.

I had the chance to talk one-on-one with Dharam Kumbhani, MD, SM, MRCP, of UT Southwestern in Dallas, who has dispensed similar advice over the years and who has had a productive career in outcomes research. He is also the Clinical Trials Team Leader of Cardiosource.org, the educational portal of the American College of Cardiology, where he  reviews many late- breaking clinical trials and presents his perspective on the pluses and minuses in a forum widely read by the academic cardiology community. He recently won the Junior Faculty award at the Northwestern University Young Investigator Forum.

In 2004, he had written an essay for Student BMJ suggesting formal training in quantitative methods before initiating clinical training — especially for folks interested in research. I think a few snippets of his advice may be of significant benefit for the “recently initiated.”

After graduating from one of the top medical schools in India, Dharam opted for a path less traveled — he decided to pursue a masters in epidemiology and quantitative methods from the Harvard School of Public Health. His years as a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard provided him with a solid grounding in outcomes research that enables him to analyze and produce high-quality manuscripts using large administrative and population datasets. This endeavor was ongoing during his internal medicine training at University of Pennsylvania, his cardiology fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic, and his interventional cardiology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. The rigorous training in epidemiology has enabled him to formulate search questions, identify potential datasets for testing the hypothesis, and collaborate with interested researchers across the country, efforts that have culminated in the production of widely read and cited manuscripts.

For early-career individuals interested in research, what do you find confounding in your career path? For more established clinical researchers, what advice do you wish that you had received?