Grant Randall, a fifth-year medical student, has been selected to take part in a student research fellowship program at the National Institutes of Health.
Beginning this June, Randall will take a leave of absence from medical school to devote his full-time focus to NIH’s Medical Research Scholar’s Program. He is the fourth student from the School of Medicine chosen to participate in the program.
“I talked to some of our students, Blake Montgomery and Dean Merrill, who did this NIH program and they had fantastic things to say about it,” Randall said.
The yearlong program offers medical, dental and veterinary students an intensive research fellowship participating in basic, clinical and translational research at the NIH’s campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Randall said he is excited about the prospects of working with and learning from some of the top researchers in the country.
“You get to take part in lectures pretty much every day and do basic science research, often with Nobel Laureates,” he said. “They do leadership classes, classes on statistics, how to conduct clinical research, writing research papers. Basically, a lot of the skills that people typically pick up along the way (in medical school and residency), they teach you there.”
Randall will spend the first couple of weeks of his fellowship meeting many of the NIH researchers and mentors to get an idea of the opportunities available and find a research project that meets his interest. He said he hopes to work in translational research to get a taste of both basic science and clinical research.
He acknowledged School of Medicine mentors Michael Wacker, Ph.D., assistant dean for medical student research, and John Foxworth, Pharm.D., professor of medicine, for encouraging him to explore the NIH program. Randall said he became interested in research while taking part in out-of-town clinical electives and working with scientists at the University of Iowa on immunology projects.
“That was my main exposure to in-depth basic science research, being in a lab every day,” Randall said. “I loved it and decided I wanted to do more.”
