Supporting Pharmacy Residents in Completing Research Projects at UC Davis: Jeremiah J. Duby, PharmD, BCPS, BCCCP

In an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC^®), Jeremiah J. Duby, PharmD, BCPS, BCCCP, discusses his role as research advisor and how he supports pharmacy residents at the University of California (UC), Davis, in developing, executing, and completing research projects.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Can you describe your role as a research advisor for pharmacy residents at UC Davis? How do you support them in developing and completing their projects?

My role at UC Davis Medical Center in helping support residents, and actually students and staff as well, really falls into 3 main categories. I think, first of all, I am a facilitator, so I spend a lot of time gathering ideas from staff, from preceptors, from residency program directors, from our leadership, and then helping them develop those ideas and then share those ideas in a meaningful, foundational way with residents and students and collaborators who might be other staff so that they can then have a launch pad for actually initiating and executing that research.

That's kind of the facilitator role. In that capacity, a lot of times, I'm sort of nudging people away from guardrails and cliffs, like poor design elements or really complex statistical tests that probably aren't going to work. Sometimes, it's explaining to them how power will interact with the number of variables, statistical analysis, again, but how they can leverage the maximum number of subjects to answer as narrow a question as possible. So, that's sort of the facilitator role.

I also have an administrative role, which is really just keeping the trains running on time. We have 2 resident research coordinators that we work really closely with, and I also work directly with our residency program directors and with our enterprise manager of education, as well. I really work with just about everyone in our department in some capacity with either quality improvement or research, which work hand in hand, obviously.

In that administrative role, a lot of times, I'm identifying project management tools or opportunities. I'm helping, obviously, with our website, our SharePoint, which is where all these files are moving in and out. I'm creating job aids and tools, ensuring that the residents have some level of accountability in terms of regulatory and project execution and are communicating effectively. Then, coordinating the monthly workshop with the residents and advisors. We have a monthly didactic session for research. A lot of those talks actually identify speakers for myself. That's kind of the administrative role.

Those two roles, a lot of times, feel like they conflict or sort of hold me back from the third role, which is the role that is obviously most exciting for me, which is doing the work, doing the research. In that capacity, I can do just about any test that our biostatisticians can run.

Obviously, I don't have as much experience, and I defer to them on some of the more technical or challenging questions, but I sort of discovered along the way that if you're willing to put in the time and learn to use the tools with a background in pharmacy, you can do most statistical tests yourself, everything up to Kaplan-Meier, Cox regression. I mean, you can do Fisher's exact and χ² on your phone, if you want to, and come up with really sensible ways to explain complex problems, like what are the odds that something good or bad will happen with this therapy vs that therapy?

I think in that last part, as a researcher, I'm still serving as an administrator and facilitator, because I'm, in a lot of cases, setting up the meetings with the staff and residents. I'm helping them with their writing or their analysis, helping with their manuscript development and submission. It's still a facilitative role and a teaching role, but that's probably the role that's most exciting. I have to make sure that the first 2 roles don't sort of overtake or overwhelm that third role, because it's really easy to just sit in Teams or email all day, messaging people, responding to messages, putting out fires, and not actually get to the part of a public publishing.

The last role, I think, is probably just promoting staff, residents, and students as much as possible. Part of that is identifying people who are early in their research career trajectory and helping them as much as possible; they need a tremendous amount of help. Sometimes, I joke that I'm never working on the projects that are home runs. I'm always working on the projects that need a ton of extra work. It's pretty rare that I come into a project that's done and all they need is a final read or something.

Again, I try to just match the energy of the resident, the staff, and what, I think, keeps us all going is that energy from someone who's doing their first project, who's either precepting their first project or doing their first research project. That's pretty unique, and it is energizing for everyone involved. Again, just try to match that energy. That's also an opportunity, I think, to teach, to explore, and that really challenges everyone involved, at pretty much any level.