The research course at the heart of the study was not a conventional lecture series. Its defining modification was a “mentor line” approach, designed to keep students engaged with research across a full academic year. The 20 instructional hours were spread over four weeks and divided into three distinct components: eight hours of interactive lectures covering study design, biostatistics, and research ethics; eight hours of small-group workshops in which students practiced critical appraisal, data interpretation, and manuscript writing; and four hours of hands-on activities in which students analyzed real datasets and prepared short reports. Student groups were guided through project development and data interpretation, with structured faculty mentorship anchoring the entire experience. The emphasis throughout was on active learning and practical application rather than passive absorption of theory.

To measure the course’s impact, the researchers employed a longitudinal pretest–posttest design, surveying students at the beginning of the academic year before any course lectures began, and again after the course concluded. The questionnaire, drawn from a previously published instrument and reviewed by bilingual subject-matter experts for linguistic and contextual appropriateness, assessed research knowledge, attitudes, and motivation. The sample skewed heavily toward early-year students: 336 first-year students (43.6 percent) and 333 second-year students (43.3 percent) made up the bulk of the cohort, with 101 third-year students (13.1 percent) completing the picture. All participants were enrolled in the Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery program, and informed consent was collected online before data gathering commenced.

The baseline data painted a striking portrait of inexperience. A remarkable 79.9 percent of students had never participated in research before, and those who had were a small minority: 15.3 percent had participated once, 4.0 percent twice, and just 0.8 percent three times. When asked why they engaged in research at all, 51.3 percent cited improving their scientific knowledge, while 30.9 percent pointed to strengthening their curriculum vitae. Only 7.4 percent were interested in a research career, and a mere 1.7 percent admitted to peer pressure as their driver. Confidence levels were similarly modest: 32.1 percent felt somewhat confident in their research abilities, 26.4 percent felt only slightly confident, and 11.4 percent had no confidence at all. The dominant barriers to research participation were lack of research training (39.0 percent) and lack of time (38.4 percent), with mentorship gaps, absent research teams, and insufficient incentives trailing behind.

What happened after the course was, by any measure, dramatic. The percentage of students who could correctly define “critical appraisal” leapt from 0.4 percent to 75.8 percent. Correct answers on the purpose of a literature review before formulating research questions rose from 0.3 percent to 72.3 percent. Understanding of where the literature review belongs in a research paper climbed from 0.3 percent to 74.2 percent, and knowledge of what the introduction section of a research proposal should contain jumped from 0.3 percent to 75.2 percent. The proportion of students who could identify what the Methods section typically specifies surged from 5.2 percent to 71.0 percent. Even questions that students had partially grasped before the course showed meaningful improvement: knowledge of optimal sample size criteria rose from 50.6 percent to 64.9 percent, and understanding of how disease prevalence can be rapidly determined in a population increased from 60.5 percent to 72.7 percent.

The statistical machinery behind these findings was rigorous. Because the data were not normally distributed, the researchers used the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to evaluate changes in paired, non-normally distributed knowledge and attitude scores. For individual knowledge questions with dichotomous outcomes, the McNemar test compared pre- and post-course response distributions. All tests were two-tailed, with a p-value below 0.05 considered statistically significant, and the study adhered to the STROBE checklist for transparent reporting of observational research. Nearly every knowledge item showed a statistically significant improvement, with p-values below 0.001 for most comparisons, including questions on study design involving observation of a group over an extended period (28.8 percent to 72.4 percent), core elements of the research process (17.5 percent to 77.5 percent), and where data interpretation is written in a paper (0.3 percent to 69.9 percent).

Attitudinal shifts were more nuanced. The most notable change was a statistically significant increase in students’ agreement that “Research will help in one’s later clinical practice” (p < 0.001). Before the course, 40.0 percent agreed and 42.3 percent strongly agreed with this statement; afterward, the proportion who strongly agreed rose to 47.5 percent while those who merely agreed dropped to 32.2 percent. This suggests the course successfully bridged the persistent gap between academic research and its perceived clinical utility, a disconnect that prior studies have repeatedly documented in medical education. Students came to see research not as an abstract academic exercise but as something directly relevant to the clinical judgment and patient care they will one day deliver.

Yet the study also surfaced an unexpected and slightly troubling signal. Agreement with the statement “Research could be a factor in increasing hate between classmates” shifted significantly (p = 0.04), with the percentage who strongly agreed rising from 7.7 percent to 13.1 percent. While overall agreement with this statement remained low, the authors interpret this as a possible reflection of underlying anxieties about academic competition and individual success within a high-pressure medical school environment. The finding runs counter to the collaborative ethos that research environments typically aim to cultivate, and the researchers suggest that future iterations of the course should incorporate explicitly collaborative, team-based project structures that frame research as a shared endeavor rather than an individual contest.

Perhaps the most consequential null result concerns motivation. Statements such as “I will participate in research in the future” (p = 0.213), “All medical students should be trained to do research” (p = 0.667), and “Research education should be mandatory in the medical curriculum” (p = 0.244) showed no statistically significant change. Nor did attitudes toward the importance of research skills for physicians, the value of research for understanding subject matter, or its role in enhancing critical thinking. The authors are careful to note that this absence of change should not be read as evidence that the course had no effect on these deeper beliefs, only that the present study cannot establish one. They suggest that such attitudes may be more deeply embedded and shaped by factors outside the reach of a single course, including early research exposure, sustained mentorship opportunities, and the broader research culture of an institution. By the end of the mentor line, 60 percent of students said they would like to join a research activity in the future, and 59 percent reported satisfaction with the course, but these figures did not translate into statistically significant shifts in the measured motivational constructs.

The study’s limitations warrant attention. The absence of a control group means that observed pre-to-post changes, while consistent with the intervention’s objectives, cannot be definitively attributed to the course alone; maturation, historical effects, or other co-occurring academic experiences may have played a role. The Hawthorne effect, in which participants alter their behavior when aware of being observed, cannot be ruled out, nor can social desirability bias from the self-report nature of the questionnaire. Attrition also narrowed the sample from 770 at pre-test to 670 at post-test, potentially affecting generalizability. The authors propose that future studies employ randomized or cluster-controlled designs to establish causality more rigorously, and they outline testable hypotheses linking course participation to gains in research self-efficacy, subsequent increases in intrinsic motivation, and ultimately observable research engagement such as project completion, presentations, and publications at six- and twelve-month follow-ups.

Subject of Research: Effect of a redesigned research course on medical students' research competencies and motivation

Article Title: Effect of a modified research course on medical students research competencies and motivation

Article References: Almaqhawi, A. (2026). Effect of a modified research course on medical students research competencies and motivation. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 877. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-01895-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-01895-y

Keywords: medical education, research competencies, student motivation, curriculum development, pretest-posttest design, critical appraisal, self-efficacy, Saudi Arabia, evidence-based practice, mentorship, undergraduate medical students, research training

The scale of the problem is hard to overstate. English dominates biomedical publishing to the point where fewer than 13 percent of high-impact medical journals currently publish in any other language, making English-language publication a mandatory gateway to visibility, international collaboration, competitive grant funding, and academic promotion. The stakes are particularly high for international medical graduates, more than 490,000 of whom practice in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada alone, and for the millions of early-career researchers and health professionals worldwide whose career advancement depends on English-language publication. Yet the conventional response, grammar workshops, language courses, and professional editing services, misses the point, the authors contend. In their own analysis of manuscripts rejected by a rheumatology journal, the most common reasons for rejection were poor study design, unclear research questions, weak interpretation, and disorganized structure. Strikingly, those critiques applied equally to submissions from native and non-native English speakers alike.

The authors ground their framework in a candid acknowledgment of human cognitive architecture. Humans have been speaking for more than 300,000 years but writing for only about 5,000, and our brains evolved to survive rather than to produce academic prose. Writing a medical research manuscript therefore goes against our cognitive wiring, and it demands skills fundamentally distinct from conversation. Talking is fast, intuitive, and rich in contextual cues; scientific writing is slow, deliberate, and requires precision and economy without the benefit of tone, gesture, or improvisation. A common mistake, they argue, is treating writing as talking on paper, which yields an informal tone, loose logic, and unclear claims. Reading about writing, they add, is like reading about playing the piano: it will not build the muscle memory. The craft must be practiced, and the fluency seen in published journals reflects intense effort rather than innate talent.

From this foundation, the framework organizes the publication journey into three phases, beginning with mental readiness. The authors propose a deceptively simple equation: publishing equals research investment plus writing investment. Researchers routinely invest enormously in designing studies and collecting data while failing to plan the time and energy required to write and publish, an oversight the authors call scientific self-sabotage. The consequences are not merely personal. Up to 45 percent of clinical trials are never published, representing lost knowledge and a failure of scientific responsibility. Their remedy is a parallel workflow: draft the Methods while the study is being conducted, build tables as data emerge, and consult a statistician early, so that by the time data collection ends, most of the manuscript is already underway. Equally important is reframing the psychological burden. Writing anxiety and friction with coauthors are not signs of failure but proof of engagement, and confidence in writing comes through writing, not before it.

Phase two tackles the drafting process itself, starting with the blank screen, which the authors describe as a trigger for procrastination that functions as an emotional defense mechanism against anxiety. The antidote is structure rather than inspiration: outline the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections immediately, break each into subheadings, and start drafting in whatever language activates the best thinking, whether the authors call it Spanglish, Franglais, or Chinglish. The first draft should be allowed to be messy, and attention should be protected from digital distraction. From there, the emphasis shifts to rewriting for readers rather than for oneself. Editors and peer reviewers are unpaid volunteers who collectively spend more than 100 million hours a year on peer review, and what they want is not elegance or performance but clarity and coherence. Verbosity carries a literal price, since publishing costs roughly a dollar per word, and vague, bloated manuscripts lead editors to assume the authors’ thinking is equally vague and bloated.

The framework also confronts the emotional dynamics that distort scientific prose. After months of effort, authors frequently fall back on cognitive shortcuts such as confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, overstating conclusions or minimizing limitations as a form of self-protection. Low perceived self-efficacy can produce paralysis and overcompensation through obscure jargon, while inflated confidence yields manuscripts that are defensive and resistant to simplification. The authors prescribe a deliberate detachment of self-worth from the draft and a simple diagnostic question before finalizing any interpretation: would I believe this conclusion if I had not conducted the study myself? They similarly urge the eradication of marketing language. Hyperbolic phrases such as real-world evidence or paradigm-shifting results do not signal importance but trigger skepticism and invite desk rejections. Instead, credibility is built through honesty: proactively acknowledging limitations, presenting confounders, and remaining transparent about potential biases, because reviewers instinctively trust authors who can spot their own blind spots.

First impressions receive their own careful treatment in the workflow. Editors form initial judgments within minutes, anchored by the title, abstract, formatting, and cover letter, and these elements therefore demand meticulous attention. Adhering to journal submission guidelines and the standardized reporting frameworks of the EQUATOR Network, such as CONSORT and PRISMA, is framed not as bureaucratic box-ticking but as a roadmap for transparency and reproducibility that reduces avoidable editorial friction. Submitting a 300-word abstract against a 250-word limit signals carelessness, and as one editor quoted in the article observes, if authors cannot follow basic instructions, how carefully did they follow their protocol? On digital tools, the authors take a pragmatic rather than prohibitive stance: large language model chatbots, grammar checkers, and translation software can be chained productively, allowing researchers to draft in the language of their best thinking, rough-translate, refine syntax, and polish grammar. But the guiding principle is garbage in, garbage out; no tool can repair confused logic, and the machine can clean the grammar only if the author supplies the science.

The final phase pushes past the assumption that publication is the finish line. Papers written merely to exist, the authors warn, fade into academic obscurity, whereas clear writing, honestly acknowledged limitations, and actionable conclusions produce manuscripts with favorable number-needed-to-read values, meaning papers that others actually use. Quality work attracts citations, collaboration requests, speaking invitations, and, most importantly, generates knowledge that advances patient care and scientific thought. The authors close by turning their own biography into evidence: the team includes a former deputy editor with more than 120 publications who is still ambushed by prepositions, an infectious diseases physician who rewrote his first manuscript 19 times, a literary theorist bridging discourse analysis and scientific writing, and a multilingual psychiatrist who routinely watches cognitive overload paralyze expression. Their message to the global community of non-native English-speaking researchers is ultimately one of empowerment: scientific writing is a learnable clinical skill, the cognitive barriers in the way can be dismantled systematically, and with the right structural tools rather than just grammar checks, researchers can let their science speak for itself.

Subject of Research: A structural writing workflow framework for non-native English speakers in scientific publishing

Article Title: Beyond Grammar: A Structural Scientific Writing Workflow for Non-native English Speakers

Article References: Barajas-Ochoa, A., Vargas Amésquita, A., Guerrero-Cignarella, A., & Ramos-Remus, C. (2026). Beyond Grammar: A Structural Scientific Writing Workflow for Non-native English Speakers. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10917-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10917-2

Keywords: scientific writing, non-native English speakers, peer review, manuscript rejection, WRITE-IT workflow, academic publishing, cognitive overload, EQUATOR guidelines, large language models, medical journals, international medical graduates, research training

The authors argue that the confusion surrounding translational research is not primarily conceptual but operational. Researchers widely accept that medical advances should arise from clinical needs and eventually return to clinical practice, but there has been no clear, actionable framework describing how an individual investigator, particularly one starting from scratch, should initiate and structure such a project. Yin and Wang, who are affiliated with the Engineering Research Center for New Materials and Precision Treatment Technology of Malignant Tumors Therapy and the Division of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University, draw on their own accumulated experience to distill the translational process into a sequence of defined stages, each with a distinct purpose and output.

The proposed strategy begins not in the laboratory but in the clinic. According to the framework, the first step is active engagement in clinical practice accompanied by systematic study of clinical practice guidelines. This pairing is deliberate: daily patient care exposes clinicians to unresolved problems, uncertainties, and inefficiencies, while practice guidelines codify the current state of accepted knowledge and, crucially, reveal its boundaries. By reading guidelines critically, a researcher can identify where recommendations are weak, based on limited evidence, or silent on important questions. The intersection of bedside observation and guideline analysis is where the strategy locates the raw material of translational research: a well-defined clinical question rooted in genuine unmet need rather than in laboratory convenience or intellectual fashion.

Once a clinical question has been formulated, the second step is a comprehensive literature review focused specifically on that question. The purpose of this review is not the broad survey familiar from graduate coursework but a targeted search for potential solutions to the identified clinical problem. The authors emphasize that this stage serves a dual function: it prevents duplication of existing work and, more importantly, it allows the researcher to convert a clinical question into a scientific one. A clinical question asks what should be done for patients; a scientific question asks what mechanism, intervention, or biological principle might answer that need. The literature review is the bridge between the two, revealing which candidate approaches are plausible and which have already been exhausted.

The third step introduces empirical data into the pipeline. With a scientific question in hand, the researcher conducts preliminary clinical research designed to identify potential answers. These early studies are not expected to be definitive; rather, they function as exploratory probes that generate observations, signals, and patterns from real clinical material. The output of this stage is a scientific hypothesis, a testable proposition that could, if confirmed, resolve the original clinical question. This sequencing reflects a core principle of the translational philosophy articulated by the authors: hypotheses in medical research should emerge from clinical reality rather than being imported wholesale from basic science journals, ensuring that the eventual findings have a clear path back to patient care.

The fourth step returns to the literature, this time with a different objective. Having proposed a scientific hypothesis, the researcher must conduct a detailed review to assess the current research status of that hypothesis. This assessment determines whether the hypothesis is novel, partially explored, or already refuted, and it maps the technical landscape that any validation effort must navigate. In the authors’ framework, this second literature review is not redundant with the first; the first survey searched for solutions to a clinical problem, while the second interrogates the standing of a specific hypothesis within the scientific community. The distinction matters practically, because a promising hypothesis may fail at this stage if prior work has already settled the question, saving the researcher months or years of misdirected effort.

Only after these preparatory stages does the strategy reach its culmination: the sequential conduct of clinical research and basic research to validate the proposed hypothesis. The word sequential is significant. Rather than launching laboratory experiments in isolation, the framework prescribes an ordered interplay in which clinical observations guide laboratory investigation, and laboratory findings are in turn tested against clinical data. This iterative loop embodies the two directions of translational medicine, often described as bench-to-bedside and bedside-to-bench. The design ensures that every laboratory experiment has a clinical justification and that every clinical finding is pursued to its mechanistic roots, closing the conceptual gap that the authors identify as the field’s central weakness.

The significance of this contribution lies less in any single technical innovation than in its pedagogical clarity. Translational medicine has become a keyword in grant applications, institutional missions, and journal scopes, yet trainees frequently report that the term offers little guidance on day-to-day research decisions. By specifying five ordered steps, from clinical practice and guideline study, through literature review and hypothesis formation, to sequential validation, the strategy converts a broad principle into a tangible research plan. For early-career clinicians contemplating their first project, the framework provides an entry point that does not require prior laboratory expertise, deep funding, or access to advanced facilities, only disciplined attention to the questions their own patients generate.

The commentary also carries implications for how research institutions and mentors might structure training. If clinical questions are the proper starting point of medical research, then departments that separate clinical duties from research training may be systematically misallocating their talent. The authors’ experience in hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery and in translational medicine engineering suggests that surgical specialties, where unmet needs are encountered daily, are particularly fertile ground for this approach. Institutions could, in principle, embed guideline-reading exercises, structured literature reviews, and preliminary clinical data collection into residency and fellowship programs, producing a pipeline of investigators whose research agendas are anchored in clinical relevance from the outset.

Like any framework distilled from individual experience, the strategy will require testing and refinement across specialties, disease areas, and research cultures, and the authors present it as a proposal rather than a proven protocol. Nevertheless, its publication in an open-access venue means that the full stepwise approach is freely available to the global research community, from well-funded academic centers to resource-limited hospitals in developing regions. At a time when the volume of biomedical literature grows faster than any individual’s capacity to absorb it, a clear, question-driven roadmap for turning clinical puzzles into validated scientific knowledge offers something genuinely valuable: a way for the next generation of medical researchers to begin, and a reminder that the most important research questions are often standing in the clinic all along, waiting to be asked.

Subject of Research: A clinical question-driven step-by-step strategy for conducting translational medical research

Article Title: How to conduct medical research: a clinical question-driven step-by-step medical research strategy based on the concept of translational medicine

Article References: Yin, Z., & Wang, L. (2026). How to conduct medical research: a clinical question-driven step-by-step medical research strategy based on the concept of translational medicine. Journal of Translational Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-026-08943-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12967-026-08943-z

Keywords: translational medicine, medical research, clinical questions, research strategy, clinical practice guidelines, scientific hypothesis, literature review, clinical research, basic research, bench to bedside, research training, Journal of Translational Medicine

The term clinician scholar covers a spectrum of roles in which physicians combine clinical practice with scholarly activity, whether that activity is laboratory science, health services research, quality improvement, or education scholarship. In psychiatry, the stakes are unusually high. Mental illness accounts for an enormous share of the global burden of disease, yet psychiatric treatments often rest on an evidence base that is younger and thinner than that of many other medical specialties. The researchers point to earlier work, including a 2024 report in Academic Psychiatry by Bastidas-Bilbao, Ho, Sockalingam, and Sheehan, arguing that research training in psychiatry residency needs transformation to create a new pipeline of interdisciplinary researchers. The new study is the empirical groundwork for that transformation.

Methodologically, the project was designed as a quality improvement initiative rather than a conventional research study. The Office of Research Ethics at the University of Toronto deemed it a quality improvement project, and it was therefore exempt from formal research ethics review. That designation matters because it shaped how the team could gather information quickly and responsively from trainees. The investigators used two complementary data collection strategies: an online environmental-scan questionnaire distributed to psychiatry residents and fellows, and qualitative semi-structured interviews with a subset of trainees. The interviews were then subjected to thematic analysis, guided by the conceptual and design thinking framework for thematic analysis published by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke in Qualitative Psychology in 2022.

The analytical approach deserves attention because it reflects a broader shift in medical education research. Rather than treating thematic analysis as a mechanical coding exercise, the Braun and Clarke framework emphasizes reflexive, conceptually informed decisions at every stage of design, from how questions are phrased to how themes are constructed. The University of Toronto team also acknowledged the assistance of Drs. Song Min Lee, Christina Truong, and Nikhita Singhal in preparing and analyzing the qualitative interview data. Within the project itself, the authors describe a clear division of labor: Ho and Sheehan designed and directed the project, Sockalingam served as a mentor, and Ananya Garg and Eulaine Ma carried out the resident interviews and the thematic analysis that underpins the findings.

The study did not emerge in a vacuum. The University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry operates a dedicated Clinician Scholar Program, and the new needs assessment was explicitly framed as an evaluation of residents’ interests, experiences, and needs in relation to that kind of training infrastructure. Elsewhere in Canada, research-track programs for psychiatry residents have been described at three institutions in a 2014 review in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry by Bhat, Leong, Lee, Voineskos, Daskalakis, Lam, and colleagues, and a 2017 report in Clinical and Investigative Medicine by Yin, Steadman, Apramian, and colleagues charted a path for training the next generation of Canadian clinician-scientists more broadly. Parallel efforts in family medicine, such as the fifteen-year outcome analysis of Canada’s first clinician scholar program published by Workman, Albert, and Norman in Canadian Family Physician in 2019, and the enhanced-skills clinician scholar program described by Lacasse and colleagues in the Canadian Medical Education Journal the same year, demonstrate that the model has been tested across disciplines.

What distinguishes the Toronto approach is its insistence on listening to trainees before building or expanding programming. Needs assessments of this kind serve a specific technical function in curriculum development: they establish the gap between the current state of training and the competencies residents will need, so that educational resources are directed at demonstrated deficits rather than assumed ones. By combining a broad questionnaire, which functions as an environmental scan of the entire training population, with in-depth interviews, the design captures both the distribution of interests across the residency cohort and the textured reasons behind individual choices. That mixed qualitative design is particularly well suited to questions where the answer is not a simple yes or no but a map of motivations, barriers, and unmet expectations.

The scholarly context also reveals why the psychiatric pipeline is fragile. A widely cited 2011 paper in Academic Medicine by Parker, Burrows, Nash, and Rosenblum argued that evaluating clinician scientist programs requires going beyond the classic Kirkpatrick framework of training evaluation, shifting the question from whether a program works to how it works. That reframing acknowledges that the outcomes of physician-researcher training, such as grant funding, publications, and sustained academic careers, unfold over decades and depend on mechanisms that simple outcome metrics cannot capture. Meanwhile, a 2017 study in BMC Medical Education by Holmes, Karlin, Stonington, and Gottheil reported the first nationwide survey of MD-PhDs in the social sciences and humanities, documenting distinct training patterns and career choices for physician-scholars whose work sits outside the biomedical laboratory. Psychiatry, which draws heavily on the social sciences, humanities, and clinical psychology, sits squarely in that interdisciplinary territory.

Indeed, the humanities dimension of the project is not incidental. The study was funded in part through a Medical Humanities Education Matching Funding Grant, and the broader literature suggests this is more than a stylistic choice. A 2018 multi-institutional survey published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine by Mangione, Chakraborti, Staltari, Harrison, Tunkel, Liou, and colleagues found that medical students’ exposure to the humanities correlated with positive personal qualities and reduced burnout. For a specialty in which burnout and emotional exhaustion are well documented occupational hazards, integrating humanistic and scholarly training may serve a dual purpose: cultivating the reflective capacities that good research demands while protecting the wellbeing of the trainees themselves. The Toronto team’s framing of clinician scholarship as an educational enterprise rooted in the medical humanities signals an expansive vision of what research training can be.

The institutional footprint of the project extends beyond a single department. The author team spans the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, the Department of Psychiatry within the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and University Health Network’s Toronto General Hospital and Centre for Mental Health, reflecting the multi-site reality of modern academic psychiatry in Toronto. The work was also shared with the international medical education community before publication: the team presented the project as a poster at the 2023 Association for Academic Psychiatry Annual Meeting and as an online short communication at the 2023 AMEE conference, the annual gathering of the International Association for Health Professions Education. That trajectory, from local needs assessment to international presentation to peer-reviewed publication, illustrates the standard pathway by which educational innovations are tested, disseminated, and adopted.

The corresponding author, Certina Ho, and her colleagues report no conflicts of interest, and the datasets underlying the study are not publicly available, a restriction the authors attribute to the need to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the residents and fellows who participated. For the field, the significance of the work lies less in any single data point than in its methodological stance: that the design of clinician scholar training should begin with systematic evidence about the people it is meant to serve. As departments of psychiatry worldwide grapple with how to replenish a shrinking cadre of physician-researchers, the Toronto study offers a template, pairing an environmental scan with reflexive qualitative analysis to surface what residents actually want from research training, what they have experienced so far, and where the gaps lie. The next step, translating those findings into curricula that measurably expand the pipeline of interdisciplinary psychiatric researchers, is the challenge the team’s earlier work has already set in motion.

Subject of Research: Needs assessment of psychiatry residents' interests, experiences, and training needs for clinician scholar development

Article Title: Training the Next Generation of Clinician Scholars in Psychiatry: Understanding Residents’ Interests, Experiences, and Needs

Article References: Ho, C., Ma, E., Garg, A., Sockalingam, S., & Sheehan, K. A. (2026). Training the Next Generation of Clinician Scholars in Psychiatry: Understanding Residents’ Interests, Experiences, and Needs. Academic Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-026-02414-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s40596-026-02414-9

Keywords: psychiatry residency, clinician scholar, medical education, research training, thematic analysis, needs assessment, qualitative research, physician-scientist pipeline, University of Toronto, academic psychiatry, medical humanities, curriculum development

Behind the program are Phillip Myer and Jennie Ivey, both professors in the UT Department of Animal Science, who have secured a $750,000 grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture to fund the project over five years. Their central premise is that scientific training alone is insufficient. Students must also learn how knowledge moves out of the laboratory and into the field, where it influences livestock management, animal welfare and the economic viability of farms. By deliberately fusing these domains within a single fellowship, the program aims to produce graduates who can generate, translate and communicate science with equal confidence.

Recruitment will be national in scope, drawing applicants from animal science, agricultural and related life science programs across the country. Once selected, fellows will embark on a year-long sequence combining virtual and in-person experiences, each anchored in one of six focus areas: animal nutrition; livestock production, robotics and automation; livestock gene editing and genomics; animal disease, immunology and parasitism; animal welfare; or animal reproduction. These tracks reflect the scientific frontiers where animal agriculture is changing fastest, from precision feeding strategies to genome editing tools that promise healthier, more productive herds.

One of the program’s most distinctive features is its integrated mentoring model. Rather than pairing each student with a single advisor, F.U.S.E. assigns every fellow a team that includes research faculty, Extension faculty, a graduate student mentor and a county Extension agent. This structure exposes students to the full arc of agricultural science: the design of experiments, the interpretation of data and the practical challenge of delivering findings to producers, industry representatives and other stakeholders who will ultimately apply them. Mentors from different professional backgrounds will model the collaboration that modern agricultural problem-solving increasingly requires.

Myer emphasizes the broader stakes of the effort. By strengthening the pipeline of well-trained animal science professionals, he notes, the program will support not only agriculture itself but also the local communities, economies and food systems that depend on a skilled and innovative workforce. Ivey adds that the project will train undergraduates through mentored research, farm-based experiences and Extension activities that translate science into practical solutions for producers and stakeholders. Together, their vision positions the fellowship as an investment in rural resilience as much as in individual careers.

The technical training embedded in the fellowship is deliberately comprehensive. Fellows will receive hands-on instruction in experimental design, data collection and analysis, animal management, scientific writing and science communication. They will also work alongside Extension professionals during farm visits, production-site experiences and outreach programming, and will contribute to the development of Extension materials used with real audiences. The experience culminates in an intensive summer research and Extension residency in which students finalize their projects, sharpen their communication skills and engage directly with animal agriculture professionals, ensuring that no fellow completes the program without having presented and defended their work in professional settings.

Networking opportunities form another pillar of the program. Fellows will prepare scientific abstracts and presentations and will have opportunities to present their research at the American Society of Animal Science Annual Meeting, one of the field’s most important gatherings, as well as at a dedicated F.U.S.E. Animal Science Conference hosted by UTIA. These venues will connect students with scientists, Extension specialists, industry representatives and other leaders across animal agriculture, giving early-career undergraduates access to professional networks that typically take years to build. Recruitment for the first cohort is expected to begin in January 2027, with the inaugural fellows starting their experience later that year.

The F.U.S.E. award is part of a considerably larger federal commitment: an $8.8 million investment by USDA-NIFA in Research and Extension Experiences for Undergraduates, or REEU. That national program funds experiential learning opportunities that help undergraduates develop the technical, professional and leadership skills needed for careers in food and agriculture or for continued study in graduate and professional programs. F.U.S.E. Animal Science advances these goals by intentionally integrating research and Extension training within a single year-long fellowship, a design its creators argue is rarer than it should be in undergraduate agricultural education.

The program’s leaders bring complementary expertise to the effort. Myer’s research focuses on gut microbiology in beef cattle, with particular emphasis on the rumen microbiome and its significance for feed efficiency and nutritional physiology. He helped create rumenmicrobes.utk.edu, a public resource explaining the science of microorganisms and animal nutrition, and earned his B.S. in biology from Bradley University in 2008 and his Ph.D. in microbiology from Purdue University in 2013. He subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the USDA-ARS U.S. Meat Animal Research Center from 2013 to 2015, studying gut microbiome impacts on nutrition and feed efficiency in finishing beef steers, and currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the UT Department of Animal Science.

Ivey completed a B.S. in equine science at Rutgers University in 2009 before earning her M.S. and Ph.D. at West Virginia University, where she studied equine nutrition and exercise physiology. Her research and Extension interests center on nutritional, exercise and management interventions that improve equine well-being, along with the influence of owner knowledge on equine management. She serves on the Equine Health Advisory Commission for the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and on the Board of Directors for the National Association of Equine Affiliated Academics. Together with the broader University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, which comprises the Herbert College of Agriculture, the UT College of Veterinary Medicine, UT AgResearch and UT Extension, the two professors hope F.U.S.E. will become a national model for how land-grant institutions prepare students to carry agricultural science from the bench to the barn and beyond.

Subject of Research: An undergraduate fellowship integrating animal science research and Extension training at the University of Tennessee

Article Title: UTIA launches fellowship to prepare future animal science professionals

Article References: UTIA launches fellowship to prepare future animal science professionals. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: animal science, undergraduate fellowship, USDA NIFA, Extension, University of Tennessee, research training, livestock, REEU, science communication, agricultural workforce, mentoring, professional development