As Long as It Was Fun Posted on November 21, 2007 Andrew A. Nierenberg (bio) explains how participation in a clinical scholars program led to 21 years of research.

I did a residency at NYU. I was interested in learning how to take excellent clinical care of very ill people, and then towards the end of my residency, I became interested in how we made clinical decisions. And in order to do that, I realized that I didn’t have the tools to even think about it, and it turned out that somebody a year ahead of me did an interesting fellowship called the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program. And really almost at a lark, I applied to it, and to my surprise I got into it.

So I ended up doing two years of intensive research training, heavily didactic in the first year, and then I had to do a project in the second year. And I decided that I would continue to do it as long as it was fun, and that was over 21 years ago.

The setting that I currently work in is at Massachusetts General Hospital. And I help run the Bipolar Clinic and research program, and I also head the NIMH Bipolar Trials Network. Within the research program, we do a lot of intervention research. So we do things with pharmaceutical companies that are mostly investigator-initiated, and we also do things that are funded by NIMH. We have two K Awards that just came into our program, and we’ll be doing things through the Bipolar Trials Network.

Again, it’s all really focused on intervention research, and we collaborate with people who do neuroimaging, genetics, neurophysiology studies. We’re expanding to look at some basic cytokines, cognition, and we’ll collaborate with anybody who will play with us.

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