Residency Training Program Names First Research Scholar

The UCSF Residency Training Program is proud to announce that Dr. Rita Mukhtar has been selected as the program’s first Resident Research Scholar. Rita recently completed her third year of as General Surgery residency at UCSF and as a Resident Research Scholar will spend the next year learning clinical and translational research methods. She plans to devote the next two years to her research activities.

Mukhtar states that she is “excited to have the opportunity to dedicate two years to conducting research and learning how to design clinical research projects.”

Rita will be working on her research project with her Department of Surgery mentor, Dr. Laura Esserman, on the role of the immune response in breast cancer and, specifically, will be “investigating whether or not the presence of tumor associated macrophages predicts outcomes and explains disparities seen in minority groups with breast cancer.” Her Resident Research Scholar award began July 1, 2009 and will continue until 2010. During this time she will participate in the year-long clinical research training program, Advanced Training in Clinical Research (ATCR) Certificate program) – offered by CTSI and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and she will be given additional pilot funds for her research.

Rita is very positive about her research training anticipates that the skills she will learn from the Residency Research Scholar Program will help her to be a more productive research fellow. Rita also predicts that the experience will “provide the foundation for starting an academic surgery career” once she finishes the General Surgery residency.

This article appeared in the October 1, 2009 issue of Synapse.