Young Clinicians Benefit from Research Grants

CIMIT knows how challenging it is for clinicians to both develop a practice and pursue research interests. So it has worked to develop a program to provide grants to promising doctors who also want to engage in research.

Johnson & Johnson stepped up as the lead sponsor last year, and the J & J Young Clinician Awards have provided grants so that top clinicians can be productive in the lab. This generous educational program has helped them to move forward in their careers.

Past recipients of Young Clinician Awards include Yolonda Colson, MD, PhD, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Michael Davidson, MD, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; James Ellsmere, MD, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Daniel Kohane, MD, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital; and Audrey Chung Marshall, MD, Children’s Hospital Boston.

For Dr. Ellsmere, the grant was crucial for him to pursue a dual career goal of clinic and research.
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“The tendency for junior surgery facility is to become heavily loaded with clinical care responsibilities, and put their research interests on a back burner,” said Dr. Ellsmere, who was working on a novel device to effectively manage the care of patients after gastric bypass surgery. "The Young Clinician funding enabled me to set aside time to focus on device development, and I look forward to several future projects building on the success of this work.”

Dr. Marshall is developing a positioning device to enable minimally invasive, in utero, cardiac intervention for babies with congenital heart disease.

“The Young Clinician Award has given me the resources to make it easy to pursue the ideas that I’ve had, in a very exploratory way,” said Dr. Marshall. “Because I am usually with patients, the grant has provided flexibility in terms of time and budget. And it has made it easier to find collaborators and attracte others to pursue this with me.”

CIMIT’s commitment to education has helped clinicians not only launch research projects, but to disseminate information and share the learnings.

Dr. Davidson, a cardiac surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is working on percutaneous repair of damaged heart values, without the need for open-heart surgery. His Young Clinician Award enabled him to cross-train with surgeons in Boston and Cleveland to learn new techniques.

“The experience enabled me to learn from others, and I am trying to pass along what I have learned to doctors at BWH,” said Dr. Davidson. He said that surgeons can learn from each other in the rapidly growing field of minimally invasive surgery.