Resident Research and Scholarly Activity

Valley Children’s provides specific opportunities for resident research education from the intern to the senior year. Residents receive practical experience so they have the tools to understand and engage in clinical research. Residents also conduct faculty-mentored, hypothesis-driven clinical research projects.

Scholarly Activity Research Series

Residents are incorporated into a Scholarly Activity to help ensure feasibility and appropriate resource allocation.

Participation in this Scholarly Activity Series will prepare residents to:

• Conduct background research
• Identify similar research studies (in terms of design and content)
• Generate specific aims and testable hypotheses
• Comprehend study design and basic statistical methods
• Create a statistical plan and perform power analysis (if applicable)
• Develop a research plan and timeline
• Create data collection tools
• Plan a demographic table, outcome tables, and figures and make sure you are collecting all the appropriate data
• Create database 
• Analyze data
• Draw conclusions from analyzed data
• Disseminate their work

Resident Research Boot Camp

Required seminars as part of the Resident Research Boot Camp are designed to introduce residents to the critical concepts that underpin clinical research and weaves formal research training into the program’s didactic curriculum. These lectures teach residents how to draft a research question, search the medical literature, design a study, analyze data, apply for funding and publish results. The lecture series is offered twice a year, and lecture handouts and slides are available upon request.
 

Mentorship

At Valley Children’s, we place a strong emphasis on the multidisciplinary training of our faculty; our faculty members bring a wide array of expertise and experience to the program as mentors. Whatever a resident’s research interests or questions, one or more of our faculty mentors likely have expertise in that area.
 

Research Day

In April of each year, we devote a full lecture day to research presentations by residents. Research Day is held at Valley Children’s Hospital, and the program includes a lecture from a visiting national expert in pediatric research, followed by resident research presentations.