Predoctoral Clinical Research Training Program
Summer Research Experience
This program provides summer clinical research experiences for medical students at Johns Hopkins. These opportunities are intended to expose students to clinical research. This is made possible through a new NIH Roadmap funded Pre-doctoral Clinical Research Training Grant directed by Drs. Neil R. Powe and Edgar R. Miller.
The short-term training experience includes 8 weeks of working during June and July with a clinical researcher and his/her team on a project. The trainee will attend research team meetings of the investigator and undertake a specific activity related to a project including literature review, data collection or data analysis. They will also complete a set of readings provided by the program that will build upon the syllabus from the Clinical Epidemiology Course. Students will be required to attend group seminars on a weekly basis during the summer months to expose them to other clinical researchers, topics in clinical research and share their experiences working on their research projects. Each student will receive a stipend of $3500 for an 8 week experience. The program has funding for 12 students.
2007 Summer Research Experience Trainee
Rahn Voong and her mentor Dr. Joseph Herman
Clinical research has a three-part definition:
(a) Patient-oriented research. Research that is conducted with human subjects and involves material of human origin (such as tissues, specimens and cognitive phenomena) for which an investigator (or colleague) directly interacts with human subjects in an outpatient or inpatient setting to clarify a problem in human physiology, pathophysiology or disease. This area of research includes:
- Mechanisms of human disease (e.g. role of inflammation in development of diabetes)
- Therapeutic interventions (e.g. comparison of techniques of home hemodialysis for ESRD)
- Clinical trials (e.g. randomized trial of different surgical procedures for spinal stenosis)
- Development of new technologies (e.g. role of epigenetic markers in colon cancer)
(b) Epidemiologic and behavioral studies. Studies that deal with the causes, distribution, and control of disease in populations; and research in which the actions and reactions of humans (e.g. patients or health care providers) in response to external and internal stimuli are studied through observational and experimental methods. Examples of this kind of research include:
- Studies of biological, psychological or social risk factors for acquiring a disease or for disease progression (e.g., quantifying the risk of lung cancer among smokers; the risk of obesity among individuals who are sedentary; the risk of heart disease among individuals with depression; the risk of mental illness among individuals exposed to violence or trauma)
- Studies of the impact of behavioral interventions on the risk of developing a disease or its complications (e.g., the impact of dietary or physical activity interventions on the development of high blood pressure or diabetes in a group of research subjects)
(c) Outcomes research and health services research. A multidisciplinary field of scientific investigation that examines how people get access to health care, how much care costs, and what happens to patients as a result of this care. For clinicians and patients, outcomes research provides evidence about benefits, risks, and results of treatments so they can make more informed decisions. For health care managers and purchasers, outcomes research can identify potentially effective strategies they can implement to improve the quality and value of care. Outcomes research seeks to understand the end results of particular health care practices and interventions. These end results may include mortality, physiologic measures, clinical events, equity of services, as well as effects that people experience and care about, such as symptoms, functional measures (quality of life), and patient experiences with care. Examples of outcomes and health services research include:
- A study that develops a way for clinicians to determine which patients with pneumonia can be treated safely at home, an option that not only reduces Medicare costs but is preferred by many patients.
- A study that identifies and addresses the barriers to better care for myocardial infarctions — for example, through development of a tool to help doctors know which patients with suspected heart attacks will benefit from thrombolytic treatment.
- A study of the impact of a quality improvement program for depression on depression symptoms, functional status, and patient satisfaction with care.
