2015 MODALE FELLOWSHIP REPORT
Dr. Shubhanker Mitra Assistant Professor (Medicine) Christian Medical College, Vellore I am grateful that Christian Medical College, Vellore selected me for a Modale fellowship in 2015. The fellowship was from 3rd August to 19th December, 2015 at the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) in Kansas City. During this period I had several learning opportunities. Epidemiology in infectious diseases has been my area of interest. Here I worked with my main mentor Dr. Russ Waitman* on “big data” from the HERON repository.** I developed a project titled “Comparative Burden of Comorbidities and Effect of Protease Inhibitors in People Living with HIV and Diabetes – A Single Center Study.” Using HERON we gathered data on 1,816 HIV patients from 1st January, 2000 to 15th October, 2015. Our team of investigators included Dr. Wissam El Atrouni, Assistant Professor in Infectious Disease and Dr. Rafia Rasu, Associate Professor from the Pharmacy Department. In this study we compared the various comorbid conditions between the HIV patients with diabetes and those without diabetes. We also evaluated the association between the exposure to different classes of antiretroviral agents and the risk of diabetes. During this project I had the opportunity to learn various statistical skills, manuscript write-up, data assimilation, etc. The manuscript is almost ready for submission for publication.
I also participated in a weekly basic epidemiology class where we were taught about epidemiological designs, sample size calculation, IRB proposal write-up and ethical considerations involved in research projects. At the end of the course, we had to submit a research proposal. I also had the opportunity to work with the former Director of Physical Therapy, Dr. Lisa Stehno-Bittel who taught me the way to write a big research grant proposal. This is the first time I had such a learning opportunity. I also spent about 2 weeks in the research microbiology laboratory of Dr. Indranil Biswas working on Acinetobacter and E.coli. I gained hands-on experience using techniques like transformation, ligation of PCR products, cloning and several other basic sciences techniques. Modale Fellowship also provided me an opportunity to learn more about the American culture. During our stay we interacted with several local as well as international students. We
participated in their functions and this broadened our vision and enabled us to embrace different cultures with an open mind. In October, I was able to present at the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA)’s IDWeek 2015 held in San Diego, CA. This was a great platform for me to share my work on tuberculosis with various researchers in this field and learn from them. I thank the Vellore CMC Foundation (Dr. Philip Ninan and Kate Guenther) for supporting my trip to the conference. All this would not have been possible without the support of Dr. Mani M Mani. I’d like to thank Dr Mani and Mrs. Rebekah Mani. They not just made this program a big success but also looked after us like a family. I’d also like to thank Dr. Philip Ninan for his constant motivation during the entire stay. I hope I’ll be able to use the earned skills from this fellowship at CMC, Vellore. -------------------------------------*Dr. Russ Waitman is an Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, Director of Medical Informatics, and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Enterprise Analytics at the University of Kansas Medical Center. ** Since arriving at the University of Kansas Medical Center in 2010, Dr. Waitman has worked with colleagues across the UKMC schools and campuses to establish a strategy for clinical and translation research informatics for Frontiers, the Kansas and Kansas City NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award. A key component was working with the University of Kansas Physicians and the University of Kansas Hospital to establish a master data sharing agreement and oversight process so they could jointly create an integrated data repository, HERON, based on the NIH funded i2b2 platform.