Research is the cornerstone of medical advancement and it is more important than
ever that we provide young surgeon scientists with the resources they need to pursue pressing
research questions and develop their skills as scientists. Investing in young surgeons
scientists creates a new generation of leaders; however, funding for this
group is scarce. Generous gifts from donors like you can help young surgeon scientists
launch their careers and benefit countless patients down the line help pay it forward.
Surgeon scientists are incredibly important for the future of medical care in the United States,
and so if we don't train our surgeons to be scientists as well, we won't have people in the
research arena. They are able to address issues that patients face and that's been one of our
priorities is to be able to raise money mainly to support young people as they're beginning their
career, and that includes residents, even medical students and certainly fellows and junior faculty
who are starting a career because we realize how important it is for them to have some money to
generate preliminary data that will then lead to more success, to a successful and bigger grant
application. By studying the care that people get, to the outcomes that they experience,
outcomes research has really become key to improving the quality of care. What I see in
the future is using the hypotheses that we've generated from our institutional experiments to
sort of broaden the impact on a more state or national level, and that is ultimately where I
say this research going. Funding for clinical or outcomes research in my world would definitely
help me create large institutional databases, as well as access national databases so I can not
only generate the hypothesis, but then apply it more nationally. It would also allow me to conduct
prospective trials on interventions that we have created and follow them forward longitudinally.
And finally, and probably most importantly, it allows me to set up scholarships for other young
surgical scientists to continue to pursue this kind of research, which is so important in our
field. Philanthropic support specifically for young faculty and for those that will become
young faculty is imperative. So as a recruitment tool and a retention tool, I think is one of the
paramount issues that we face. As leaders in the surgery department, we have an obligation I think
to support our young faculty and help them get started and move on to more mid-career faculty.
That involves research and clinical care. The ways we can do that are with support from our
clinical revenue, but that only goes so far. We really need the help of external funding sources,
including the government foundations and philanthropy, and that's critical to us in
terms of the development of these faculty really that are the cornerstone for the future of the
department of surgery. Philanthropy has impacted me very personally. When you come as a young
investigator and you're trying to build a research program and trying to build the infrastructure to
sustain that research, it is a very daunting task. If you look at what's happening and
you turn on the news or you read a newspaper, you see that there's slashes to NIH budgets,
there's reduction in scientific funds available for research and then as a young researcher you're
competing against very senior researchers who've built up very impressive apparatuses to conduct
research, and so a young person such as myself or a beginning career investigator oftentimes
will not have much of a chance at the NIH against these individuals, and so philanthropy personally
has played a role and has allowed me to build a very strong research program. It's allowed
me to conduct significant investigation into these interesting questions that we have about
transplant and it's built these two laboratories that we have here and without that we would not
be where we are today. It gives people that have good ideas, that gives people who have innovation
in their kind of blood so to speak, the chance to compete with these seasoned investigators. As
a physician, I can help a patient one patient at a time and I do an operation, I do a transplant that
helps one patient at a time, I can go back into the laboratory and I can think of an idea and I
can hone that idea and I can improve that idea where I can help thousands of patients at once.
It gives me a chance to increase my impact and that's I think the reason that all researchers
do what we do, is that we want to have a profound impact on society in individuals and I want to
help as many people as I can. Every dollar that you give, every resource that you give, can cure
untold numbers of people in the future and so what we're really working with is we're working on the
future. We're working, we're thinking about all those people we can help in the future and that
doesn't just happen by accident. Having funding from philanthropy along with extramural funding
that's peer reviewed is critical, particularly in this day and age as funding becomes more
and more competitive. To achieve the role of philanthropy to help cover some of these gaps
is absolutely critical and many research programs, including our own, would have to stop functioning
were it not for the possibility of philanthropic contributions. I came to OSU to be a translational
scientist. Being in a place like this allows me to treat the disease that I'm interested in and
also use those observations develop lab-based treatment modality investigations. Philanthropy
is important especially for somebody like myself who's a junior investigator because it gives us a
seed money to develop our ideas. We come in highly ambitious with good ideas, but with the funding
situation the way it is, it's difficult to get our research off the ground. Philanthropy is really
the way to do that. It's my responsibility, I am making a commitment, I am paying it forward.