Research in Residency Programs: What You Need To Know w/ Saeed Soleymanjahi MD

Transcript

Speaker A: Welcome to the rounds to Residency podcast, brought to you by Med Ed University. Gain residency insights and tips to prepare for your externships, research and professional development in healthcare. We interview preceptors and physician educators who will prepare you for your rotations and improve your clinical experience. Now here’s your host, Chase DeMarco.

Speaker B: Welcome back everyone. Today we have a great guest. I’m really excited to talk about this program. So we have Dr. Saeed Solomon Jahi, who is a past research fellow at Washington, resident physician at Yale, and the founder of the Triple R program. Welcome, Saeed.

Speaker C: Hi everyone. I really appreciate Chase and this wonderful rounds to Residency podcast program to having me today. I’m too excited to share all my experience during this long journey. So thanks so much.

Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, I know we’ve talked about it a bit in the past and we actually have so many questions here, some from students, some from you, some from me. So I guess we’ll just jump into it and start discussing all of these different topics, revolving research and the triple R project, and potential opportunities for our listeners to join into these research programs. Since I know that’s a question we get all the time, how can I find research? So should we just jump into it?

Speaker C: Absolutely. So definitely, research has changed its concepts during a time, I think back in time, research was defined as some isolated people or group of people doing their own research at their own labs, nobody know about, and they would just do research until they find something very important, at which time they could probably announce that and people may or may not hear that. But now research has significantly different concept and it’s moving towards a network and collaboration concept and successful research teams definitely are people who do multidisciplinary research with definitely more than one expert groups in the team addressing different aspects of a research question moving forward. So I think anybody who considers research now or at their future, they should also consider skills to have great networking. And that is inevitable from research. Definitely. When I started my medical school, I always thought that research will be something that I have to keep going all the time. And it keeps me excited and happy because we read all these lessons and learn all these books and stuff. But what if you are the one who contribute to advancement of these literature? You add few lines to these books, you author a few articles on literature. That was so much more exciting for me. So I thought, okay, I definitely have to be part of this process. I tried to reach out to mentors during my medical school and was always happy that cross paths, wonderful mentors and they really helped me walk through it. So I did a bunch of projects there, and then I reached out to many people that we can definitely discuss in more details how I did that. And I found another great mentor at Washington University, offered me a postdoctoral research fellow there. Then I started my residency at Yale, kind of keeping the same motivations and concept for research, and I will definitely consider that in my future. And it was surprising that even at an institute like Yale, tons of resources for doing research, there was not a good structure for networking. So that’s why I thought we need to have a systematic and well organized structure to connect people together to optimize research process. So that’s why we started Yale R program, which I can definitely discuss more what it does, but it has reached a lot of tension so far in less than two or three weeks of its kind of announcement.

Speaker B: Yeah, it seems like you have a lot of different experiences from several different schools. You have your MDMph from Tehran. You continued research as a research fellow at Washington. Now you’re doing research at Yale. So you have a great diverse experience there. You can see the differences a lot more than someone that might have just done one program at one school and continued on. And to your point, with the networking, that’s like I said, something that a lot of students reach out to us about is, where can I find research? And everyone that goes to a us school generally says, okay, just talk to your preceptors there and see who has research and join it. But sometimes that’s difficult. If you come from a small school or a foreign school, you don’t have those networks. You don’t have necessarily physicians that are doing research, and that is a big part of residency. Well, some residencies anyway, is having to do research, but not just that, but do research in a specific specialty. And if you don’t have any options, let alone specific options like that, it can be very nerve wracking. And you’re worried about not getting into residency because of a lack of these research opportunities. So your network sounds like something that, especially as it develops, could reach a lot of students in a lot of places and offer a lot of support to researchers out there that might need some help to get their projects off the ground or to move faster.

Speaker C: Absolutely. I think I kind of started from my first networking attempt when I first my mentor in Tehran University, trying to convince him to let me join his lab or research team. He gave me a task that was my first networking attempt. So he basically asked me to go talk to all the faculties in the cancer department of Tehran University, listen to their research projects and document them, and then finally take them all back to him, discuss all the projects and decide which one I should select. And I did that and it took me a good time, but I was actually very happy that I did because I picked up a project that ended up doing five years. It was a five year cohort project we did in Iran and ended up introducing a prognostic importance for a biomarker in gastric cancer for the first time. And that project actually paved the way for me to move next to the next phase of my career. So I think that little networking attempt back in time still keeps me moving. So I thought, okay, I should just keep doing the same thing. So I graduated MD Mph from Terra University and I thought United States will be definitely a good place to move to given my kind of goals and plans for the future. So I basically reached out, I think, to about 150 or 200 faculties. And you would be surprised to hear that I had a fair amount of research by that time. But I guess my first interview offer happened at my 150th email and my second interview offer happened on 152nd email. So I had nothing until 150 email. And then all of a sudden the next two emails brought up two interviews. Yeah, exactly. All I’m just trying to say is just persistence and kind of continuing to do your networking. Try to reach out to people and don’t give up. Of course you will tune your reach out kind of scope depending on your background on your cv. I was basically trying to reach out to senior faculties who had higher level of position at their institute. So that was a different scope. But again, I had to reach out about 200 people until I found my mentor, Dr. Davidson, who is the chief of the GI at Washio.

Speaker B: Let me do some quick math here. Let’s say there’s 20 to 30,000 medical students searching for research right now, and each of them sends 150 cold emails out to research physicians. That’s a lot of emails. That’s a lot of inefficiency and just sounds ridiculous. And yeah, we don’t have like a repository of available research that I’ve been able to find anyway, so it sounds like your RRR program and potentially as this expands and maybe networks with other schools, other universities, we could have something a little closer to this coming up.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. You are really reading my mind. So I was giving all this background to kind of explain and justify why I thought triple r will be a good structure and everybody know that. Anybody hear that? Our post in Twitter was seen by 25,000 people in one day just inside Yale community. And I was like, oh, my God. Everybody knew this is important, but nobody knew what they needed. So I thought that was unheard, unwritten need or question that everybody kind of thought about, but nobody was like, what we should do for it. But now they say, oh, this is structured, so let’s just use it. And definitely, as you mentioned, I think we have a stepwise approach to our program. We are definitely focusing on Yale community for now, trying to connect residents, especially our residency residents at internal medicine and other departments like surgery, radiology, to wide range of wonderful research mentors at Yale. But definitely moving forward, once we settle more definitely we’ll extend our scope beyond Yale to other institutes at United States, or even we can definitely connect it to volunteers and applicants outside the United States. So we actually have discussed this with our program leadership, and we are planning to discuss with our dean office as well. But because we just want to be very careful as any other organization with the pace of kind of extension and development, but that’s kind of our big picture and big mission.

Speaker B: Got it. And I do want to just kind of dangle this out there for the audience. We have a special announcement towards the end of this show of how you might be able to find some research yourself outside of Yale. But you’ll have to listen to the end of the episode for that. So keep listening. So we have your background quite a bit here. You reached out to all of these different programs. It was a hassle. A lot of students can probably relate to that. There are a lot of questions that learners ask a lot, and maybe you, with all of your vast experience here, can help answer some of these questions, and a lot of them have to do with where to find research, which we kind of went over. It’s difficult right now. There’s not a great way. You just kind of have to slug it out and keep at it. Persistence. But also, once you do find research or if you’re going into a certain specialty, there are some tips and tricks, too, right? So how much does research matter in certain specialties? But also, what’s the different type? I know in our past discussion, you discussed different types of research, so can you maybe go into that a little bit more?

Speaker C: Absolutely. I think this is very important question. I think for now, we are basically considering that this question is directed to people who are planning to pursue a clinical residency at the United States at some point and how they should consider doing research, moving towards their goal or plan. As you mentioned, research has different importance and different specialties. Some specialties who are considered research heavy definitely require good research cv in their applicants as well, like internal medicine, radiology, some surgery specialties, ophthalmology and dermatology are among the specialties that definitely need a great research background and their applicants. But how this could be built up, I think in the United States will do undergrad first and they do medical school, and after graduating medical school they either stay one extra year as a medical student or they graduate and they do some postdoctoral years and then they apply to clinical residency. So all this time is a great opportunity to start building up their research background. I think they should be kind of smart in selecting what type of research they should do at what time. So let’s say if they are starting undergrad and probably beginning is a little bit busy hours that they have to do a lot of readings and studying. So it might not be a great time for them to do a lab based research which needs more time compared to a clinical research or a systematic review or metaanalysis. So that’s kind of based on their schedule and how much time they have, they can select which type of projects they should be connected to. But very important thing is that they should never lose time because clock is just moving ahead and basically they should be very conscious about their time and how efficiently they can use it. So selecting the right type of research at the right time of their career is a key. Keep building their research cv and let’s say if they graduate medical school and they want to do a postgraduate or postdoctoral research, that is a better time to do more extensive projects, like a lab project, which needs more time. But at the same time, it is a very valuable experience for any investigator, so I can kind of review my path. So I basically did more clinical research and clinical studies during my medical school. We did cohort studies, we did a randomized clinical trial, and I also did a systematic review and metaanalysis for my graduation. And once I graduated, I knew that I will do a few years of postdoctoral research so I could be more dedicated to research and extend my experiences and my exposure to different aspects of research. So I decided to join Dr. Davidson lab at Washington University, which is basically experimental projects. But that was definitely invaluable experience for me to expand my research insight from clinical pure insight to experimental and lab based research insight and hope that helps. As we were discussing nowadays, research is multidisciplinary. So if somebody has insight on both sides on both fields, they can generate great questions to do research. They can find right people to connect to because they have right questions for them to connect to. And eventually they can get great projects done in a great network. So kind of getting different types of research experience and insight at different stages of their career just builds up to the same, I would say, package of research that they are building up. And that is invaluable tool for them for future networking and advancing their research career because they can easily connect to people, they can have conversations that people will listen to and that expedites and easens their network possibilities. And that’s what matters in research.

Speaker B: So it sounds like once you’ve already done some research, or if you’re doing postgrad research, first off, it’s a lot easier to find new research opportunities because you’re already in that environment, you’re with a lot of colleagues that might have something to work with. Plus you already have your MD credentials, so you can reach out to colleagues at other institutions and potentially do some work with them.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: I think one of the big problems is for students. Like I can give an example from my school. We had a research project for graduation, but it wasn’t very in depth and the school didn’t lead it to publication. So a lot of students that are in similar boats are wondering, okay, I don’t have anything through my school. What can I do now? Does it even matter? What if I apply to residency with no research? Can I do that? Or should I just publish to whatever will take my money to publish it? Which are generally pretty predatory journals, but at least it’s something on my cv which might be better than nothing. So of those options, what are the students to do? What are they supposed to think in those scenarios?

Speaker C: I think these are two different questions and I will answer them one by one. I think the first question is, do they really need research or not? So if, let’s say somebody wants to do a specialty that is not research heavy, or they don’t want to go to institutes that kind of require that much of research, they can definitely start their residency at any program that don’t require that much of research. Of course those programs may not be very high ranked, but still they can move forward on their career. Let’s say somebody really doesn’t need to stay in academic situation in their future and they just want to get their training done and then move on to a private practice and just do clinical practice. That case, I would say they shouldn’t really worry about having research. So that’s one question anyone should try to answer. How they see their future and what kind of trajectory they are drawing for themselves. But if they think that given their goals, they need to do research, as you mentioned, it is not easy to start it. It’s kind of old cars that need to overcome static inner sea at the beginning and you try and you try finally kicks in and finally cars turns on and then you just push the gas pedal and it just moves on. Right?

Speaker B: The newer generation might not realize this because they just push a button on the car and it starts. But yeah, it used to be hard to turn them over sometimes.

Speaker C: Exactly, the old car. So that is a great example and definition of how you start research. So they should be motivated enough, they should have high interest to overcome that static energy at the beginning. And that is definitely possible. I usually give this example to my audience, that research trend is not linear. So research trend, you will be in a plateau line for a good amount of time, and then all of a sudden you pick up. So a lot of people who are in this plateau line, they give up. There’s a huge dropout. But those who stay on all of a sudden see this pick and those are definitely successful and they will see all the. So I started research classes. A lot of my friends at the same medical school, at the same class, but probably six or seven out of ten who were on the same track dropped out because they thought that research is linear. And by day one or day two, they should see the effects of what they are doing, but that’s not the case. So they will be on a plateau line for a while and they should be persistent on that. I think smart strategy is the key here. If you are in an institute that you don’t have a lot of access to, experienced mentors or extensive research projects, you might do something on your own to attract attention, even from outside your institute. So let’s say if you are interested in cardiology research, and you don’t really know who you should work with, you can start with an easy project, like a case report, a systematic review, which doesn’t need any platform, it doesn’t need any funding, it doesn’t need any lab. So you just need to have the interest in that field and say, okay, I saw this patient was interesting, I want to write up this case with an attendee. That’s it. So you write that case up, you publish it, and that will be your first paper, your cv you can refer to as your first research activity. As simple as that. Or you can say, I want to do a review on, let’s say, new medications for heart failure or pathophysiology. Of heart failure. So you read a bunch of papers, put them together as a review, and just find somebody to mentor you, and that’s it. And once you have that first step that really helps you move forward, then you can reach out to another person outside your institute, outside your country, say, this is my interest, and this is the proof of my interest. Now, I have done this, which is aligned with what I was planning to do. It doesn’t come out of blue like, oh, I’m interested in cardiology research, but what is my c. I have done nothing. Right. So you have to show some little things that support your interest and your kind of motivation. And then you will send out a lot of emails, of course, but then you will find this next person, and once you did that, that’s basically gone.

: Oh, and don’t you hate when we.

Speaker B: Leave you on a cliffhanger like that?

: But it’s for good reason. We did cover so many useful topics in this episode and have so much more to say, including the details of the triple r program. And we’re going to have to continue that on the next episode. So bear with us and we will see you next week with some very special treats as well.

Speaker A: The rounds two residency podcast is powered by Med Ed University. Join us at Med Ed University and tune in next week for more research and rotations resources to help you on your residency journey.