The Clinical Research Scholarship Track is a component of the Scientific Investigation Track of the Scholarship & Discovery program. Clinical Research Track students work closely with their chosen mentors to frame clinically relevant questions, develop strategies for answering the questions, analyze their findings, and present their results.
The range of potential topics spans all areas of clinical medicine. One area of focus is the trials of therapeutics, such as a clinical trial evaluating a new drug or device in the direct care of patients. Projects can either be continuing work in a mentor’s lab or a new project developed in close coordination with the mentor. In either case, the student can and should take the lead on the project from data collection to presentation.
Meet the Track Leaders
Dr. Rubin is an Associate Professor of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the University of Chicago Medicine. His research includes health services and clinical research on topics that include perioperative visual loss, perioperative testing before surgery and outcomes after surgery and functional assessments. His current focus is on the utilization of technology, specifically accelerometers and mobile applications, to perform functional assessments and measure functional outcomes of older adults undergoing surgery.
Dr. Ruhnke’s career has focused on health outcomes research and didactic teaching in health policy, clinical research study design, health data interpretation, and the peer-reviewed publication process. He also served as an internal medicine residency program director in Sapporo, Japan. Dr. Ruhnke’s academic portfolio includes the measurement of outcomes, quality, resource utilization, and risk adjustment among pneumonia patients. He has also studied the impact of patient characteristics and patient-centered attributes of care on decision-making, utilization and patient-reported outcomes. As a collaborative researcher, he is a founding member of the multi-center Hospital Medicine ReEngineering Network (HOMERuN), through which he has studied hospital re-admissions and diagnostic errors. Dr. Ruhnke is a Senior Deputy Editor of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.
