Clinical Center hosts 9th Clinical Investigator Student Trainee Forum

Episode # 76
Uploaded: November 2, 2011
Running Time: 02:36

CROWN: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this is CLINICAL CENTER RADIO.

Nearly 300 students attended the 9th annual Clinical Investigator Student Trainee Forum, organized by the NIH Clinical Center. The two-day meeting provided a variety of scientific lectures, career advice, and peer-to-peer interaction – a format that Dr. Fred Ognibene, Director of the Office of Clinical Research Training and Medical Education, says they’ve been refining over the years to answer students’ questions.

DR. OGNIBENE:  How do I select a residency? How do I pay off my debt? Do I select which fellowship to go into? Do I pick an institution based on clinical experience or research experience, or both? So with that being said, we’ve been responsive [and] we’ve put together a really great program. It’s a diverse group of wonderfully trained individuals, reflecting both the rich environment we have at the NIH but those from the outside as well.

CROWN: Forum attendees are medical, dental, and veterinary students participating in clinical and translational research fellowships. But for some of them, like YunXiang Cheu who is a student at Harvard Medical School, it was their first trip to the NIH campus and the Clinical Center, a 240-bed hospital entirely dedicated to clinical research. Students visited several departments to observe translational science from the bench to the bedside.

CHEU: They have great opportunities here. They have great labs [and] potential people that I can work with in the future. And it seems to be a great opportunity for me to gain colleagues and opportunities for me to work in their labs in the future.

CROWN: Networking was also an important component of the forum, both meeting other peers as well as previous students who’ve gone on to fruitful careers.  Forum attendee Mary Crisham Janik, a student at the University of California San Francisco, School of Medicine, says:

CRISHAM JANIK: You just start to get a sense of the possibilities. The things that could be and all the places you could go and all the things that you could do. [There are] people who are doing amazing things coming from such different backgrounds and having such different passions and interests. So it really just makes you think more broadly about what your career could be like.

CROWN: For more information on NIH’s training opportunities, visit http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/training. From America's Clinical Research Hospital, this has been CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. In Bethesda, Maryland, I'm Ellen Crown, at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

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