Welcome from the Director

Welcome Message from Robert S. Sherwin, MD
Director of the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation

My vision for the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation is based on fulfilling two goals that were established when YCCI was created.

Our first goal, which is to establish a home for the training of the next generation of clinical and translational scientists, is the primary reason I wanted to be a part of YCCI. I’m convinced that if we’re going to have an impact on clinical research, it’s going to be by directly providing mentorship and an environment that encourages the transition from being a clinician to being a clinical researcher. I am fully committed to supporting and training young scientists, which is why I’ve spent a significant amount of time over the past 30 years mentoring junior colleagues so they can obtain funding for their own projects. I couldn’t be more delighted at the educational opportunities YCCI has made possible. We have devoted significant resources to our educational and training programs for junior faculty, fellows and medical students by expanding existing programs such as the Investigative Medicine Program and the T32 and K programs, as well as adding our own program that allows junior faculty and fellows to pursue research projects. We’ve also developing an integrated mentoring program led by an interdisciplinary team of mentors to help guide young researchers.  This new educational infrastructure provides clinical investigators with a significantly broader grounding in the essential elements of clinical and translational research and will help shape the future of clinical research at Yale.

Another key goal of YCCI is to provide an infrastructure for researchers that fosters the translation of disease-related discoveries from the laboratory to the clinic and then into the community. This is being accomplished by:

•  Making state-of-the-art core facilities and expanded biostatistical and bioinformatics resources available
• Establishing an organizational and regulatory infrastructure to support clinical studies
• Catalyzing the formation of teams of research-oriented physicians, nurses and epidemiologists
• Developing new research methods and technological advances
• Integrating community clinics into the research effort
• Creating a new community outreach program that brings together the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health
• Supporting pilot grants and clinical scholars engaged in community-based outcomes research

 I believe that developing this infrastructure is looking ahead to where I think research will move. In fact, success in clinical research in the future is going to require experts from different backgrounds to come together to solve problems. Every clinical investigation, whether it’s a large-scale trial on disease prevention involving thousands of patients or a small study on a handful of patients to test a new surgical technique or to study a disease mechanism, has the potential to have a real impact on improving health.  The structure provided by YCCI is helping clinicians from diverse disciplines pool their efforts in a way that allows them to learn from one another and take advantage of their collective expertise.

Robert Sherwin, MD
YCCI Director