What's The Best Way To Find Clinical Research Opportunities?

[武田信玄]

So first of all, I'm not in med school yet. The doctor I'm working under right now, I found him by

 

1. searching for all the clinical research papers on pubmed from my local university and

 

2. sending out cold emails to around 100 or so last authors of these paper, most of them are MDs.

 

So in the end he was the only one who replied and let me tag along a project. But it doesn't seem to be an effective way of reaching out to these clinical researchers. And right now I'm also looking into finding a potential research supervisor in the school that's I'll be attending. Now this time I just go to the school homepage and look for interesting labs and send out cold emails. What I found is that I got more reponses from basic research/PhD professors than clinical research/MD professors. In fact for the past week I didn't get a single reply from the MD profs but I did get three replies from PhD profs.

 

I think the reasons are MD profs may not have a fixed lab room (they might have an office to do all the data analysis). Also MD profs have clinical duties so they might be busier than PhD profs?? Anyways I was told by some people that it's better to wait until school starts and that's when I should begin to make contacts.

 

But long story short, I come from a basic research background and even though I am working on a clinical project, I still don't understand how exactly clinical research is conducted. Does anyone have any tips how to find clinical research projects? Do I just have to talk to residents and upper-classman and doctors when school starts?

 

Thank you.

[武田信玄]

Also with PhD profs, most of them have a lab page so I can just go there. With MDs, they just have a profile page. Sure I can go to pubmed to search their name but sometimes when their name is not the last author, I don't know whether they are truly running some projects or are simply just offering some primary data to the project.

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Check if the PhDs do clinical research... they don't need to have an MD. Most MDs consider research as a side thing while they focus on their clinical work. Most of the MDs that are on my papers are there because they provided general input for the project and let us recruit patients at their clinic, but weren't an active part of the research process.

 

Also don't cold e-mail professors, if you put low effort into your emails you'll get bottom of the barrel professors who are willing to take anyone.