By Michelle Meyers

Stephanie Wong (top row first from the right), Diego Razura (top row third from the right), and Yun Ji Kim (top row fourth from the right) with Dr. John Oghalai and fellow participants at the Clinician-Scientist Training Program (CSTP) Seminar Series.
(Image Credit: Kristin Brokaw)

Diego Razura is from Memphis, Tennessee and attends the Quillen College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University. The program is small; it does not have a home Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) program, and the few research opportunities that are available are generally only during summer. When the Dean of Student Affairs at Quillen sent out a mass email inviting students to apply for the University of Southern California (USC) Caruso Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Clinician-Scientist Training Program (CSTP), Razura was reluctant to put himself out there, but his friends encouraged him to take the leap. “I figured it was a shot in the dark…I thought the chances of them picking someone from Tennessee versus someone from a great medical institution like Harvard were slim, but I’ve always been passionate about ENT and I decided, I’m just going to make sure they know that from my application,” Razura said. He finds himself particularly drawn to ENT surgery because of the level of intricacy and detail—he loves working with his hands—and he likes the idea of seeing both pediatric and adult patients as well.

Yun Ji Kim, meanwhile, was born in South Korea, emigrating to San Francisco at the age of seven and then attending the University of San Diego for college. She is currently a fourth year student at USC’s Keck School of Medicine and has always imagined herself becoming a surgeon, though originally she wanted to pursue plastic surgery. “I never knew that ENT was a surgical specialty,” Kim acknowledged. “But then I fell in love with it. The surgeries are very complex, very meticulous.”

Razura and Kim make up the first cohort of CSTP medical student trainees in USC’s clinician-scientist training program, a 9- to 12-month program giving medical students the chance to engage in cutting-edge research opportunities supported by the close mentorship of USC faculty. (The CSTP also has a residency track: the first CSTP resident, Stephanie Wong, started the program in June of 2022, and the second CSTP resident, Kevin Biju, will start this upcoming June.) For those unfamiliar with the term “clinician-scientist,” Razura was kind enough to break it down, explaining that clinicians are generally focused on seeing and attending to patients, while scientists often spend their time doing research in the lab and may not be attuned to how their research could be incorporated into clinical settings. A clinician-scientist, however, is able to witness the needs of patients in the clinical setting and then incorporate those observations into their research, bridging the divide. Several of the objectives of USC’s CSTP are for participants to gain experience in working with cutting-edge experimental techniques, to develop close mentoring relationships with published research faculty, and to gain experience in writing scientific papers and grants.

USC’s CSTP offers a diverse array of research opportunities, including basic, translational, and clinical research. Basic science research typically involves a wet lab, where scientists engage in hypothesis-driven experimental research aimed to uncover the molecular basis of disease and to support development of new treatments. Over the past year, for instance, Kim was thrilled to take part in Dr. Ksenia Gnedeva’s lab, conducting studies using mouse models to look at the possibility of employing gene therapy to repair damage to the inner ear. In Kim’s words, “The inner ear is important for balance and hearing, and one way that we can potentially repair that damage is through gene therapy that delivers genes to the damaged cells through the use of viruses.” Kim appreciated that the Gnedeva Lab was new and hands-on, giving her the chance to learn how to do basic science research even though she didn’t have previous experience, and she was especially grateful to be able to travel to conferences to present the work that she was so proud of. Although in the end her project was a great success, Kim acknowledged that one of the most significant lessons she learned was how to cope with failure. She said, working in the lab, “there is a lot of failure—day-to-day, all the time—and some of it is not in your control.”

Conversely, Razura joined Dr. Brian Applegate’s research group, which focuses on translational engineering, or translating the results from basic research into diagnostic, screening, and modeling mechanisms that can be directly applicable in a clinical setting, ideally improving patient outcomes. More specifically, as part of Dr. Applegate’s research group, Razura was looking at applying Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), an imaging technique that has been used in specialties such as ophthalmology, cardiology, and orthopedics, to laryngology by utilizing low-coherence light to capture high-resolution cross-sections of the vocal folds in real time rather than just visualization of the surface with a standard laryngoscope.

On a daily basis, Razura indicated that the research process has involved quite a bit of troubleshooting, from looking at issues in the algorithms to figuring out exactly what it is that the team wants to measure through quantitative rather than qualitative metrics. In addition, Razura’s major in college had nothing to do with computer programming, but over the past year, he has been able to teach himself enough about programming to communicate effectively with engineers and computer scientists. Razura also acknowledges that it was a bit unusual for him to decide to do a research year between his second and third years of medical school (most students who go this route do a research year between their third and fourth years of medical school), but he appreciates that with two years to go, he has more time to solidify his connections, to publish his research, and to network at conferences.

Both Kim and Razura have expressed their immense gratitude for having had the opportunity to be part of USC’s CSTP and urge others to apply. Kim explained that part of the value was what she learned about herself, how to persevere and motivate herself through failures to achieve success. Moreover, Razura has realized that while he has wanted to be a clinician since he was seven or eight years old, because research transcends the duration of a clinician’s life, it can be a way to leave a lasting legacy, developing and contributing to studies that will help patients for generations to come.