Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills
to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.
As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients.
When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find
that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research
program.
Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit.
However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.
For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians
the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.
Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene.
Hello everybody.
Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast.
I'm your host Toyosi Onwuemene.
I am excited to be talking with you today, and especially because I have an awesome,
awesome guest today.
It's Lisa Baumann Krautsiger, and she's going to tell you in a few minutes how to really
say her name, but it's a pleasure to have you here on the show, Lisa.
Thank you for being here, and I want to invite you, please, to introduce yourself to our
audience.
Thank you so much for having me.
So yes, my name is Lisa Baumann Krautsiger.
I kept Baumann for a reason, but since Krautsiger is horribly hard to pronounce.
I'm a clinician investigator at Bursby Blood Research Institute and the Medical College
of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
My clinical work involves benign hematology or classical hematology, and my research is
in thrombosis.
Thank you, Lisa.
You talked about being a clinician investigator or clinical investigator, and I think there's
so many terms that we can use to describe it.
I think sometimes there's a sense of we're clinical scientists, we're clinician scientists,
clinician researchers.
Is there a specific name you kind of identify with the most?
Yeah, I don't know.
I try not to get too tripped up with the terminology, to be honest.
Probably within the structure that I work in, investigator is the term, and that what
goes through both basic scientists and translational scientists and clinician scientists.
I do probably prefer the term clinician investigator because it then speaks to both what I study
as well as then puts me in the same sort of structure that other areas of research are
within our institute.
Sure, sure.
Thank you for clarifying that.
Now, let me ask you about the defining moment, if there was one, or maybe the series of defining
moments at which you felt like, yeah, you know what, I'm not just a clinician.
I'm a clinician investigator.
Yeah, I thought this question was really interesting because I actually came to medicine in the
opposite direction.
So I always through high school and into college knew I was going to be doing biology and doing
research.
And probably my defining moment was when I was doing an internship and half of my time
I spent it in the lab doing laboratory investigation and half of my time then I was able to shadow
a clinician.
And it was a very gut response to the days that I got to go in and see patients and really
showed me that I wanted to be a clinician as well.
And so I probably always knew I was going to be doing research and added the clinical
piece to it.
Throughout my career, I've gone back and forth between doing laboratory based investigations
and doing clinical investigations.
And I think that's helpful for me to then understand both realms in order to bridge
that gap a little bit better.
When I'm seeing a patient, it's helpful for me to be able to say, well, we don't have
the answer to that question, but we are looking into it in this way or that way.
Or say, you know what, that's a great question.
I'm going to add that to my list of things we don't know and things we probably need
to look into.
And then on the opposite side, when I'm doing and looking at either looking at grants or
thinking about projects, I need to really focus that in on what's important to the patient
in front of me, because there are so many things that you could do and really trying
to anchor the research projects and the time spent on things that are really going to help
patients.
So it kind of goes both ways for me.
Sure, sure.
And that's really unique, at least I think from my perspective, Lisa.
I think many, many people come in from the perspective of I've been doing patient care
for so long and now I want to do research.
And that can be hard because they haven't actually even ever done anything in research
at all.
And so, but for you, it sounds like you've kind of grown both perspectives at the same
time.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm wondering how has that been an advantage for you?
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is trying to, as I mentioned, bridge that gap because
there aren't a lot of people that understand both laboratory-based investigations and clinically
based investigations.
So able to look at, for example, studies that are looking at biomarkers in clinical diseases.
Well, most of the time that those are laboratory-based investigations and trying to understand the
techniques and the pluses and minuses of it.
And from the opposite way, so we have multiple investigators that are studying different
pieces of their either structure, their protein of choice, or whatever else from a laboratory
perspective and trying to give them and see where we might be able to translate that and
trying to set up the laboratory-based investigations to answer the ways that we can potentially
translate that to human and patient care.
So I think that is a distinct advantage.
It leads to a lot of difficulty in trying to understand or pick what am I going to go
see when at an annual meeting or what am I going to do in terms of where my focus is
going to be for, what journals do I read?
What should I review?
What projects am I going to be involved in?
When you're kind of straddling both, it can be a little challenging from that perspective.
So what I hear is that your work is translational and you're also in a sense an interpreter.
So you're translating between the clinicians and the lab investigators to a great extent
as well, just even in terms of interpreting what studies need to be done, not just even
in terms of what the studies are that you're doing, but in even communicating, I think,
between groups.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, actually, that's a great way to think about it.
I think about it also in terms of translating things to our patients.
So we do that as a clinician every day, translating classical hematology to other areas of medicine.
So I think maybe that's just a way for me to frame who I am.
I'm a translator of knowledge.
I love it.
Well, Thomas, what has been the biggest challenge for you in this journey?
Yeah, I think there have been several.
I think one of the big things is when I started my research career, I was focusing on device-related
thrombosis.
And that was really in mostly mechanical circulatory support.
And my first grant was in that as a pilot study.
And very shortly after I received that pilot study, my surgeons lacked.
Therefore, the entire mechanical circulatory support program fell apart.
And so the big lesson for me with that is that it's very difficult to study as well
as to put your career in others' hands.
I was able to make some continued progress with that group by reaching out to other surgeons
and other programs.
And it is an area that I'm still very interested in.
But it definitely is a major challenge when you don't...
The patients aren't primarily yours.
And I think we have that in classical hematology in many aspects, especially in thrombosis.
So any of our work in cancer-associated thrombosis, our oncologists, their primary patients are
theirs.
So in a lot of ways, it's ensured that I had honed my skills in collaboration.
But it does make things definitely challenging when you don't own...the patients aren't
primarily yours.
So, Rand, thank you for sharing that perspective.
And I feel like I heard two things that really, really stood out to me.
One is just how strong you've become through that process of forming multiple, not just
one or two, but it sounds like multiple collaborations to move your work forward.
In a sense, I look at it as like you're diversifying your portfolio.
It's like, well, if one thing fails, other things move forward.
But the other piece that really, I think, resonated with me is that putting your career
or putting your research in one person's hands or in one group's hands.
And I just wonder, other than the collaborations, how else have you done that?
What would you recommend to someone else who is in a similar situation?
But maybe their surgeons haven't left and they're feeling happy that things are going
well.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a fine balance here.
I definitely agree that you need to diversify your portfolio in terms of projects that are
going on or other areas, because not every, I promise you, only a very few limited amounts,
a number of your grants are going to be funded.
That's just the reality.
And you don't know what's going to necessarily stick.
So or what's, you know, what hurdles you're going to have in one project versus another.
And so definitely having potentially a couple of different areas that you are working through
and having projects at different stages also helps a lot.
And that's obviously hard when you're at the beginning part of your career, when everything
is just beginning.
But hopefully, you know, potentially through a mentor, you could come into a project that's
already ongoing.
So you can, again, try to not only diversify in topics, but diversify in stages of where
a project is.
And the other thing is to probably have more than one mentor or more than one sort of group
that you're working on.
You know, there's definitely people change institutions, as I had mentioned, happened
to me, but also mentors leave and other clinical collaborators leave.
And I think it's been important to that that doesn't completely derail everything that
you are currently working on.
The other thing I wanted to mention in terms of collaboration is at the same time that
that happened to me with my mechanical circulatory support research plundering, for lack of a
better way to say it.
The other thing that happened right at that time was the opportunity to form the clinical
research network that I run now called Venus.
So that was back in 2016, and it was a bit serendipity, which a lot of times plays into
good things that the Canadian group was VT researchers, Alcan Vector, they had received
grant funding to actually form an international network.
And as a piece of that, they were looking for US based researchers to really formalize
a US network.
And so that really was a great opportunity and has really led a vast majority of my research
since that time.
And so the other kind of thing message to send is that, you know, when one area, the
other benefit of diversifying is one area is not going well, sometimes other things
come along.
And you have to be open to that as well, because you don't necessarily know where each of the
things are going to lead.
That's really, really, really well said, Lisa.
Thank you for sharing that.
What I see is someone who's leading their career.
It's like, yes, other things may not be working in this area, but because I'm leading, I'm
going to move to this area that's working well.
And I think that even as a young person starting in the field, you are leading in terms of
you're the one saying, okay, I'm going to work with this mentor, I'm going to try to
work with this group.
And in a sense, as you're leading yourself, then you put yourself in great positions to
be ready for opportunity when it comes.
And so you speak of being lucky.
And I think of you as someone who kind of just had done a lot of the right things and
was in the right place to recognize an opportunity when it came, and you were ready to run with
it as well.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
I mean, you have to put yourself out there, but you have to also be willing to do it and
put the hard work in.
Like, you know, when we started, when we started the Venus organization, no one was, it wasn't
being covered by anything in my, in my career.
I didn't get a point, whatever FTE to run Venus.
It was, it was my own volunteer time and it was a lot of work.
And we then got a lot of fantastic help from a lot of other organizations that really helped
us get the, get the group off the ground.
And so it is both, right?
It's having the confidence and being willing, willing to put yourself out there, taking
the opportunities when they do come and then putting in the hard work and, and making sure
that it is something that you are proud to be a part of.
Lisa, you've spoken of hard work.
You spoken of collaborators leaving, things not working.
This is a hard journey you're describing.
And I'm wondering what's kept you in the game.
I think part of it is just again, the desire to always know more.
I think it's the trying to take care of our patients better and really answer the questions
that they, and we have, but we don't know yet.
And so I think that is the biggest thing that, that drives me.
I mean, I see how much we've been able to improve patient care, even in, in my career.
And I'm hopeful and want to be involved in the next steps of all of that.
Because in the end, that's where, you know, as a, as a doctor, my, my role is to make
patients better.
And by doing research, I see that as ability to forward their care as well.
That's really, that's really amazing.
What I hear in that is someone who's not satisfied with the status quo.
Yes, we're taking great care of patients, great care of patients, but how can we do
that better?
And seeing research as an opportunity to actually improve the care of patients currently, and
in fact, being rewarded by you seeing some of the research you're doing come to be able
to be used clinically to help patients get, be better.
Absolutely.
That's the, that's the coolest thing to be able to do.
That is very cool.
And I'm so appreciative of you coming and sharing all this insight with us.
And we're kind of rounding up and getting to the end of the show.
I wanted to ask you if you had one word or one piece of advice that you wanted to share
with a young person who's just getting started and wondering, okay, maybe I should just focus
on clinical care to the best of my knowledge, even though they really want to do research.
What would you share with them?
What advice would you give them?
I would suggest to stick with it.
I think that it does seem daunting when you first start, and hopefully people are better
at sharing the ups and downs, especially people who have been successful in their careers,
but just know that it is definitely worth it and being able to then take what you're
learning and translate that into patient care is incredibly rewarding.
So stick with it.
You don't, even if you don't make a research, you're 80% of what you do every day.
That's okay.
Even if you only make it a quarter of what you do or half of what you do, and then you
get to decide whether that's enrolling people in clinical trials, whether that's designing
trials, whether that's doing retrospective reviews.
I think there's, and that's what we've really tried to do with the Venus Network is we have
people who are involved at all of those stages.
We have people who are leading the projects.
We have people who participate in the projects, which is absolutely essential.
So you don't have to have a master's in clinical research in order to participate in clinical
research.
If you want to design the trials, go get your master's in clinical research because it definitely
will help you in not only face validity of being able to design them, but also the underlying
knowledge of how to do it.
So there are lots of ways that you can participate in research and you can then make that as
large or as small of a part of your career.
That's super awesome.
Thank you, Lisa.
I hear you saying the sky's the limit.
What do you really want to do?
And that's what you should go for because it does give you the most satisfying, fulfilling
career to be doing things that are meaningful to you.
And there are many opportunities to participate in research in different ways and with different
people.
And yeah, that's definitely something that if you are listening today, you should pay
attention to.
Don't think you can't do it.
Don't give up before you start.
You've done many hard things.
You've come through medical school, come through residency, maybe going through fellowship
or have finished fellowship, but you've done a lot of hard things.
So hard things are not easy to do, but you've been doing them.
And so even though it can be hard to succeed in research, you can, and it's definitely
worth sticking with it because it's very fulfilling and very rewarding as Lisa has shared with
us today.
Lisa, I just want to say thank you for being with us here on the show today, for sharing
your insights and just for being an all around inspiration.
Thank you for being here.
Oh, thank you for those kind words.
And thank you so much for having me.
It's great to see you.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
Okay, everyone.
So you've heard Lisa.
Keep going, keep working at it.
And if you need a piece of encouragement, if you need just, just to keep being encouraged
along the journey, which can be hard, definitely reach out to us, sign up for our weekly newsletter,
docsleaveresearch.com.
And we'll be happy to just keep you engaged and keep you thinking about different ways
to succeed in research.
All right.
This is the end of today's show.
It's been a pleasure hanging out with you and I look forward to seeing you again next
time.
Take care.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic
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have a mentor.
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