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.
Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast.
I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and I'm super excited to have an amazing guest on the show
today, Dr. Vikram Paralkar.
And Vikram, I just want to thank you.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Okay, Vikram, let's get right down to it.
How did you start on this journey?
What led you from being a clinician to becoming a clinician scientist?
How did that happen?
My journey, I guess my journey begins with my childhood.
So I grew up in Mumbai, and both of my late parents were doctors.
And my dad was a surgeon, my mom was an OB-dyne, and so I grew up very familiar with medical
lingo around the dining table.
And at the same time, I was also very, very interested in science and scientific experiments.
So I was always the kid who had a chemistry set or was looking at things under a blood
cell under a microscope or dissecting algae or things like that.
And I just loved science.
And I also really enjoyed listening to my parents talk about medicine.
And I grew up with the assumption that, so both of my parents were in private practice,
they were not doing research, but I grew up with the assumption that, oh, well, every
academic doctor must have a little lab on the side where they just do the clinical work
and then after the day is done, they go and do some pipetting.
And so with this idea, naive idea in mind, that I went to medical school in Mumbai, and
I really loved learning about medicine, anatomy and physiology, biochemistry, especially in
molecular biology.
But I also began to realize about midway through med school that most doctors simply don't
do research or have the bandwidth to do research.
I think clinical medicine itself is so all consuming that most of your day goes in taking
care of patients.
And it was maybe about the end of my second year that I realized that I wanted to also
have a basic science lab in addition to becoming, being a clinical scientist, in addition to
being a clinician.
And that's when I also realized that that kind of career track would not be possible
in India simply because the infrastructure and funding doesn't exist over there.
And so I began to think of coming to the United States or to the UK to pursue my studies.
And during my medical school, I did one research rotation in the laboratory in India.
But beyond that, I really did not have any concrete research training.
And so when I came to the United States, I really wasn't eligible for any of the PSP
track, the position scientist pathway tracks.
And so I began a categorical residency.
I also decided specifically not to do a PhD because I felt it would just stay five to
six years out of the schedule.
And then I had to go back and do my clinical year.
So I came to Temple University.
I did my residency.
Then I was a chief resident.
And then I came to Penn for my fellowship.
And I pleaded with all of the people I was interviewing with that I'm absolutely sure
I want to be a physician scientist and have a lab.
And somehow you have to believe me despite the fact that I don't have a PhD or have spent
no more than a few months doing electives in the lab.
So thankfully they did believe me and I began my fellowship at Penn.
And in my, and so my big, now in the oncology department, hematology oncology department
here at Penn.
And I was very drawn to leukemia and leukemia management right since the beginning.
And in the second year of my fellowship, I joined the laboratory of Mitch Weiss, who
was at that point at CHOP.
He's now the head of hematology at St. Jude.
And his lab works on transcriptional regulation and erythropoiesis.
So I joined his lab, did my postdoctoral fellowship in his lab at the same time as developing
my clinical skills at the acute and chronic myeloid leukemia specialist.
And now I have my own lab and I'm a physician scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Oh my goodness.
What a phenomenal story.
Phenomenal.
And the part that really intrigues me and really resonates with me is just your focus
from the very beginning.
You knew where you wanted to go.
So it's like, you knew exactly what your destination was going to be.
Perhaps you didn't have the directions or you needed to kind of like take a detour or
two to get there, but you were so focused.
I wonder, you know, what was that?
What helped you have that focus?
I know your parents were physicians, but they weren't scientists.
Like where did that come from?
My dad was, even though my dad wasn't a scientist, he was very interested in science.
And so we had a lot of books about science at home.
You know, and I used to read everything from Breacher's Trip Time by Stephen Hawking to
books by Stephen Jay Gould to other things about evolutionary biology, Richard Dawkins,
Blind Watchmaker, Selfish Gene, et cetera.
So I was reading all of these books as a kid.
And I think there's just something about the unknown aspects of reality that fascinates
me.
There's just so much of the universe that we do not understand, so much of our own bodies
and our own cells and their fundamental functioning that we simply do not understand.
And I was just drawn towards those questions and I just wanted to explore them.
It is so awesome to hear the excitement with which you speak.
It's like you're on this amazing adventure and you're not at your destination yet.
You're still in progress and you're having a great time.
Is that fair to say?
Well as I mentioned, as a kid during my summer vacation, I was doing experiments in my bedroom.
And so no one was paying me to do that work then.
Now I'm being paid to do the exact same work.
So of course I'm excited.
I love it.
That's so awesome.
Okay.
So all along you were gunning for this destination, becoming a clinician scientist.
At what point did you finally realize that you had transitioned?
When was it that you finally said, wow, I'm a clinician scientist?
I think it probably happened maybe about the second year of my postdoc or so.
I felt that my PI Mitch during my postdoc was very, very willing to give me independence
to pursue my own ideas.
And so there was no fixed agenda in the lab.
I wasn't running projects, experimental projects that he wanted me to pursue.
His philosophy is to pretty much give everyone in the lab their own freedom and let them
come up with their own ideas.
And so I think very early in my postdoc, about maybe after the first six months or so I'd
gone by, I realized that really I was just pursuing my own ideas.
I was reading the literature.
I was coming up with the questions I wanted to ask.
And that's when I think I really felt like a scientist.
And I think the part of being a clinician scientist, I think, comes from the fact that
if you're seeing patients with the same kinds of disorders, then there's a certain kind
of intangible understanding of what aspects of biology are actively relevant in the clinical
sphere, how medications or drugs or stresses in the clinical arena produce certain phenotypes
that you can potentially try to recapitulate in the lab or that your lab experiments touch
onto.
So I think it really was during my fellowship and postdoctoral period that it all crystallized
together and I felt like a physician scientist.
Wow.
What an amazing experience you had.
And it's not common, Vikram.
Many fellows, especially postdoctoral fellows, are doing projects that their mentors have
gifted them.
And that's not a bad thing, but they don't have the opportunity to start leadership from
the beginning.
So you actually, while also doing your own experiments, were actually leading your research
direction.
And I think that's so unique.
I wonder, what do you say to someone who is not in that same situation as you, where they
just have whatever is available in the lab?
How can they also kind of grow their independence to be able to start leading early?
What would you advise them?
I think from a very practical point of view, I think every clinical fellow who wants to
join the lab has to immediately cultivate a network of mentors that are outside of their
lab mentor.
And I think that to me is the single most important thing that you should do in order
to get a variety of different sources of input and feedback on your ideas.
Because once you enter a lab, it's quite possible that your initial ideas may not be very productive
and they may not be the right ideas.
On the other hand, it may be that you have a fantastic idea, but your mentor simply is
unable to see it or they feel like those ideas are a little too far outside in the focus
of where they want the lab to be.
It was really useful for me to have a mentorship committee and all of the fellows who enter
labs are expected to have mentorship committees here at Penn.
And the expectation is that you would present at the mentorship committee your ideas.
You're not necessarily presenting what your PI has coached you to present, of course.
You are a postdoc, you have to come up with your own independent ideas and you have to
talk about your vision and how this fits into the clinical work you're doing.
And eventually, as time goes on, what will your faculty talk look like?
Can you say, this is what I'm bringing to your institution as a clinician and as a scientist?
How can you harmonize those two aspects of your work together and present a vision of
what you're going to work on in the next five to 10-year period?
And so I think from a very practical point of view, I would say having a wide variety
of mentors.
And also, I think, at some level, being honest with yourself as well, whether the physician-scientist
pathway is right for you.
It's not right for, I should say, based on my experience, it's not right for everyone.
One of the reasons being that basic science research has an element of chance involved
with it.
I think as clinicians, as long as we are aware of the literature and we are applying the
standard of care and we are following particular clinical guidelines, beyond a certain point,
the outcomes that individual patients will have are beyond our control.
There are some patients we'll be able to cure.
There are some patients, unfortunately, who we cannot cure and some patients who will
have very difficult outcomes under our care.
But as long as you are doing the right thing, your career and its progress as a clinician
does not depend on the individual outcomes of patients.
Whereas, on the research side, there is a lot of luck involved.
There may be two post-docs who get two different paralogs of the same gene family and one of
them gets a profound mouse phenotype and gets a very high-impact taper and the other one
gets an extremely subtle genotype and they spend years trying to get it published and
it leads to a low-impact taper and then they are not as well positioned.
I think unless you're willing to put up with that kind of aspect of luck, unless you're
willing to pivot and unless you're willing to, as they say, know when to hold it, know
when to fold it on the basic science side, it's going to be very difficult to be a scientist
because I think experiments not working out or negative results are just an intrinsic
part of how science is done.
So I do think that that has to be an important reckoning that every potential scientist has
to do for themselves.
They have to, first of all, be really interested and excited by a scientific question, but
they have to be willing to deal with lots of failed experiments and lots of investigational
directions that don't go anywhere.
And if, despite that, you are still enthusiastic about the questions that you're asking, then
that's when you are a scientist.
I love it.
You said many things.
So one thing you said that I want to highlight is the importance of having a network of mentors.
I think many times, and I'm not sure where this comes from in medicine, where it's like
there's just one mentor for me, but there's one mentor.
And if things don't work, it may not be the mentor's fault, it may not be you, it just
doesn't work.
And I love what you're talking about, this need to have a mentoring network so that you
know what, you have options.
And in saying that, you're also talking about the importance of leading your own career.
Like nobody's in charge of your career, you are.
And if an experiment fails terribly, like you don't get to blame your mentor.
You don't, I mean, nobody knows that it was going to happen that way.
And so, but your ability to say, I'm in charge allows you to pick yourself up and say, where's
the next opportunity?
So it's interesting, you talk about luck and I agree that there's an element of luck.
There's also an element of flexibility, also an element of recognizing when it's time to,
as you said, fold the cards and move on.
And an element of accepting the successes when they come.
As like, you know, I, preparation meant opportunity, right?
It's not all luck, but it's like working hard and then seizing opportunities when they come,
but also when the opportunities don't work out, finding a different direction as well.
Absolutely.
No, I completely agree with this.
And I think one of the wrong impressions about science that students and postdocs sometimes
get from reading papers is when you read a paper, the findings in the paper are presented
in this extremely logical progression, as if they did the first experiment, they got
an amazing result.
Then they did the second experiment, got an amazing result.
Right, section number one, almost onto the next section.
Then they did an RNA-seq and they picked one of those genes and they manipulated it and
lo and behold, it rescued the phenotype.
So what you don't see in any of these papers is how many different avenues that came perceived
that did not go anywhere and how many negative results they had.
And I think that is something you really actually don't understand until you have done it yourself
and your results have given you negative results.
And so I absolutely agree, the willingness to be flexible, the willingness to, again,
at some point, take a step back and say, is this project working?
Is this project within the big picture plans of what I want to do?
Is this a time to pivot?
Can I take this to my mentors and get guidance from them on what they would do if they were
in this situation?
And also, why did I choose to be a scientist in the first place?
What are the big picture questions that I'm interested in?
And how can I move forward keeping those questions in mind?
I really, really, really appreciate that.
And I feel like it can't be said enough.
I think sometimes, and this is part of our training, where our training is not very flexible
as clinicians, right?
You do med school, you end med school.
You go to residency, you end residency, you do fellowship.
I mean, it's very prescribed.
And so when you start doing a research project and things are not quite working out, there
is that sense of like, no, I'm committed to this.
Let's see it through to the end.
And as you say, there are times where you stop and say, is it worth continuing this
project?
And you alluded to not just making the decision on your own, but bringing in a team of mentors
or a team of advisors to help you make that decision.
I wonder if you want to speak to where do you get that flexibility from?
Because we don't all have it.
Oh, well, and are you asking me as a person or in general, how does one get flexibility?
Well, I think I'm asking to be honest, I feel like you, you've had to be flexible in your
journey as you've pivoted so much.
So in a sense, you've been practicing flexibility for a while, but I'm assuming that.
So if you want to speak to how you got your flexibility, that would be great.
And if, you know, I don't have the flexibility, what do I do?
Where do I go to get it?
Well, I suppose the one thing for myself that I could say is that there's one interesting
feature sometimes we see in Tremies where if their experiment is critiqued, they take
that as critique of themselves.
And I think one of the things that you have to realize as a scientist is the biggest skeptic
for your data has to be you yourself.
Right?
If you're getting an interesting result, you have to ask yourself, how could I be fooling
myself?
Do I have all of the right controls?
Is it possible I'm leading myself down the garden path?
And I think for me, I just think I'm intrinsically, if I get an interesting result, I am the one
who constantly thinks about the ways in which it could be wrong.
And I find myself asking, how can I push this in a different way?
How can I approach it in a different way?
What else can I do to ensure that what I'm getting is truly a real result as opposed
to some kind of spurious artifact?
And as a result, I think if an experiment doesn't work out, if a result doesn't hold
up, well, the process worked.
As in I investigated it and I got a high confidence negative result.
And so I think for me, the success of an experiment is really not about whether you get what you
want to see.
It's about whether you can get a clear result.
So given that, I think if that is your approach, then in general, it will probably help you
in science long-term.
Because the question isn't if the experiment going to validate the result conclusions you
already had in mind from the very beginning.
But can you find the truth of the system?
And the truth may be a negative result.
And you have to be prepared for that.
Those are really good points.
I think that clinical training is not the same as research training.
And many times I think a lot of clinically trained people come at it with that.
It's like, well, I mean, there's a lot of subjective judgment in the clinical arena.
And so there's sometimes the sense of this judgment on my experiment is a judgment on
me.
But what you talk about, the need for skepticism is so important because you know what, if
you're not skeptical, other people will be.
And as soon as your paper leads your lab and goes out to the reviewers, then you find out
just how strong the skepticism is.
So you're talking about the opportunity for people to question your work so you can question
your work and do what is needed to really make it rigorous.
Because it's an opportunity to see what else are you missing.
Absolutely.
And I think in some ways, sometimes there's an aspect of this that also bleeds over to
the clinical side in the sense of when our patients have unfortunate outcomes, we do
as doctors sometimes blame ourselves.
Why did I not act on that one particular slightly high calcium a day earlier that I could have?
Why did I not give a higher rate of fluids on the surgeon as compared to others?
And these are things that we always think about.
And I think one of the things in clinical medicine that we learn about is you can, at
the end of the day, you can only do your best, right?
And you can only try to apply the standard of care and you can only try to be diligent
and a conscientious doctor, but you cannot control the outcomes that you get.
You have to accept the outcomes that arise from any disease.
And I think at some level, that's what science is like.
You can try to do your best and you have to be willing to accept the outcomes.
It's always good to have multiple different projects going so that if one particular one
doesn't work, how does it always be others that you can carry forward?
But that may be one way in which there are some similarities, but clearly there are many
differences as well.
Thank you for those points.
I also see this, you know, there's a love for what you do, but there's a healthy, my
eyes are open.
I'm not walking in the clouds.
I'm like doing this wonderful experiment and I have these other three potentially if this
one doesn't work.
So that's really good.
And I do think that more people need to understand that, you know what, you just don't know what's
going to succeed.
And so don't focus on just one area.
So that's really awesome.
You know, it leads me to my other question, and this is around the fact that, goodness,
you're so optimistic.
You like pursued things and you succeeded and you're just having a great adventure.
Has this been like just a walk in the park for you?
If there have been any challenges, what have they been?
Well, it hasn't been a walk in the park.
So there have certainly been places where I have had to, so like actually let me walk
you through my process of coming to the United States.
So I applied for a residency from India and I applied to 120 residency programs and I
got interviews at eight of which only one was a university program and that was Temple
University Hospital.
And it's my good fortune that I got into that program because as you know, if you are in
the community program, for instance, it is really difficult to transition from that into
an academic environment and end up with a research career.
So that was definitely not an easy transition, but things ended up working out there.
And then during my postdoc, actually the first project that I was working on ended up not
going in the direction that I wanted.
And I ended up getting actually a high impact negative publications because it went against
something that was considered to be more of a accepted dogma in the field.
But it did lead me to a point where I had to pivot my scientific direction.
And so midway through my postdoc, I had to find a different project and I had to develop
the resources to be able to get it to a point where I could get other people out if I could
and have the applying for faculty positions come up with sort of a vision of how this
project would help me set up my lab.
And as a result, my postdoc was perhaps a little longer than some of my colleagues,
but that was fine because at the end of the day, it helped me get what I wanted to get.
I love it.
I'm a master of the pivot.
And so what I'm hearing you say is that, yes, you have challenges and for every challenge,
you kind of got up and found a different way.
You've kind of been the person who's always getting up again and saying, what other direction
can I go in?
Is that fair to say?
Right.
I mean, I guess another way to think about it would be I am extremely privileged that
I am genuinely doing the work that I love doing.
Right?
And I think that making changes, changing a scientific direction, changing a project,
accepting that, oh, this project didn't work out or perhaps I need to spend another year
doing X, Y, and Z, those are small prices to pay if at the end of the day, I get to
do what I love doing.
I appreciate you saying that because I think that's so important for really all clinicians
and really all clinician researchers.
And I wonder how did we get to be able to tolerate misery, not doing the things we actually
enjoy doing.
And I really do think that's important.
And I wonder if you want to speak to it.
So as young people are coming in, people are trying to get publications because it helps
them get into residency or fellowship.
And they want to say they had a lab experience.
How do you advise people who are coming through now as trainees who are trying to do all
the things, get all the checkboxes, but also hopefully eventually end up where they love?
What do they do?
That's a difficult question because I don't think there's a single right answer to it.
I do find that often when I'm talking to fellows or residents, I ask them if, and let's say
they approach me or someone else for a rotation project or they want my guidance on which
kind of lab we should pick.
I ask them, do you genuinely want to do the lab because you enjoy answering questions
or is it just because you want to have that as a line on your CV so it can help you in
the next phase of your career?
And it's really important, I think, for trainees to be honest about this because sometimes
an example in oncology is, in general, you can think of two big career paths if you're
doing research in oncology.
It's the basic science lab based or you can think of clinical trials.
And there are trainees sometimes enter a lab, but in their heart of hearts, they are not
absolutely sure that that's what they want to do.
And so they spend the two years of fellowship, two years of research time of fellowship,
pursuing a project somewhat half-heartedly.
It doesn't work out.
But then at the same time, they might have spent the time better in getting a clinical
trial up and running.
And so what happens is they reach the end of the fellowship and they don't have a basic
science project that's really working out and they don't have a clinical trial that's
well established.
And so now they're in a real fix in terms of when they apply for an academic position,
exactly what are they going to sell their career as?
And so sometimes it happens that they will then purely do a clinical research career.
And that's fine.
There's absolutely nothing wrong in being 100% or 80% clinical.
But if that wasn't your original goal, then in some ways you have to reflect on whether
you have used this trainee time optimally to advance your career.
And so I would say the first goal is to identify this is really, really, really what you want
to do.
One way to do this is to talk to others who have pursued this track before you and learn
the positives as well as the pitfalls of this career track.
And then, yes, if you're sure, then dive into it and give you everything to that track.
Yeah, that's really, really, really great advice.
And I do wish that more people heard that.
I think sometimes, and perhaps again, it goes back to the training of medical school that
is just the path.
And after four years or five or six, you're done.
And then residency, it's like, this is the track.
And then people feel like fellowship, it's the same thing.
The fellowship is unique because it's a transition point.
And so if ever you are not doing anything you didn't care about, fellowship is not the
time to just dabble in things you're not interested in.
Because at the end, as you mentioned, you can lose both ways.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I really think fellowship is not a dabbling time.
I think by fellowship, you really have to have a pretty clear idea.
For instance, in oncology, when you're coming in for fellowship, you don't need to know
if you want to become a breast cancer or a lung cancer or GI cancer specialist.
That you can figure out.
What is important to know is, do you see yourself long term as someone who's going to run their
own lab?
Do you see yourself as someone who's doing mostly clinical work but is connected with
the lab person?
Do you see yourself interested in epidemiology, you know, and statistics?
That's like another direction you can go in.
Or do you see yourself as someone running clinical trials?
I do think it's important either by the beginning of fellowship or at least six months within
the first start of your fellowship to figure this out.
So you can position yourself well for the remaining two to three precious years of your
fellowship.
Absolutely.
I wonder though, Vikram, how do people get that certainty?
Because I feel like there's so much, in a sense, chameleoning and shape shifting throughout
training.
And so how do you now suddenly get to fellowship and be clear on your direction?
How do people get that?
I think one of the ways in which this is changing is I think we have a decent amount of contact
with residents these days talking about our career pathways and the career tracks.
And so I sometimes am invited to talk to the internal medicine residency program about
a physician scientist track and what it's like.
And I'm constantly urging residents that residency is really busy and most of the time is spent
in catching up with the sleep that you've lost after being on overnight call.
But please keep thinking from your intern year itself about what the shape of your career
is going to look like.
Don't fixate on specialties and subspecialties.
That is less important than the contours of your career and exactly what kind of work
you want to be, what kind of doctor you want to be, what kind of clinician or clinician
researcher or clinician epidemiologist or basic scientist you want to be.
And I think perhaps more emphasis in residency to figuring that out, perhaps in some kind
of formalized way.
I don't know, perhaps residency programs could implement questionnaires or something like
that to help people score what are the different things they want to get out of the career
and then trying to come up with some kind of career counseling.
I'm thinking off the top of my head that I can imagine one way in which residents could
be formally exposed to and trained early to pick between one of these different approaches
so that they can then get everything lined up for when they begin fellowship.
I love it.
I love how you talk about the shape of your career.
It's not, you're not, you're not, you're not like locking yourself in.
You're just figuring out what are the contours.
I really love that term.
It's just, it's just, what does it look like?
It's a big blob or it's like a big piece of stone.
You're chiseling out the statue, but what, what does it look like?
What's the shape?
I really appreciate you saying that.
Thank you.
So we are coming towards the end of the show and I will say that, gosh, we've, we've learned
so much from you.
I feel like it's just been just, there's been so much packed in and there's still so much,
I think, that we could yet talk about.
But I want to ask you, when you think about this whole pathway, this whole journey as
a clinician scientist, what haven't we talked about that's important for younger people
to know?
That's a good question.
Actually, I think we talked about so much that I wondered if anything specific I have
left to say.
But I guess the one thing I would say in response to this question is, and it doesn't apply
to me, but I think in the past, especially for women in science, having children and
taking maternity leave was considered to be a real detriment to your scientific career.
And that is definitely changing.
And so I think there's a lot of recognition that, you know, maternity time, paternity
time is going to be part of your scientific career and definitely allows you to add extra
years to your tenure clock, for example, as a faculty member if you have kids.
And so I think that is something that I hope that women in science don't shy away from
the position scientists track, thinking that maternity leave or maternity is anyway going
to compromise their success.
Because I think there's a lot more recognition of this.
There are lots of resources for this.
And I think as we are increasingly seeing more women in leadership positions as chairs
of divisions, including basic science divisions, which necessarily might not have been the
case maybe like 10, 15 years ago, I do think that this is an important aspect of science
that is shifting.
And so I suppose that's the one thing I would say, that I hope scientists don't choose
or not choose position scientists tracks for reasons about the logistics, about family
life and concerns that that may not allow them to achieve what they really should be
able to achieve.
I really appreciate you saying that.
I think really even speaking more broadly, it's like don't think that there are barriers
that are insurmountable.
Don't make the choice based on those barriers because you see the obstacles and for whatever
case you have ideas about what those obstacles are.
So don't make the decision based on obstacles you perceive.
There is opportunity to push past those obstacles.
I think all of science is about pushing past obstacles.
So that's really, really important that you raise that and thank you for doing that.
All right.
Well, I want to say thank you for being on the show.
I really do appreciate your insights.
I will tell you that I appreciate and enjoy your enthusiasm for your work.
You clearly are on a great adventure.
That's not without its challenges.
You just choose to see them as opportunities to move in different directions.
I think that optimism, that enthusiasm, and that just flexibility and practicality is
key and that people really should be looking to engage those skills to be able to really
succeed in this career.
Thank you so much.
It's been such a pleasure to talk to you.
I appreciate your insight and everything you bring to this conversation as well.
Thank you.
It's been fun.
All right, everybody.
That was an amazing conversation.
I think so many people need to hear it.
This path can be challenging, but really, how do we choose to see it?
How do we choose to move forward?
How do we choose to address pitfalls?
These are things that Dr. Parulkar really elaborated on for us.
So please, if there's someone you know who would benefit from hearing this podcast episode,
please share it with them.
If you're a mentor, your mentees probably need to hear it.
If you're a mentee, your network needs to hear this.
So definitely share this episode.
All right.
Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time on the Clinician Researcher Podcast.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic
clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they
have a mentor.
If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself.
Someone else needs to hear it.
So take a minute right now and share it.
As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation
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