by Kirsten Brown

When Jules H. Sumkin, D.O. (’80), first received an offer to be an academic clinician, he imagined it would be a great temporary job. Twenty years later, he still sees it as a great job — and a permanent one. Sumkin will share the progression of how he discovered his career in his lecture, “How I Became an Academic Clinician,” Monday, April 17, from noon to 1 p.m. in Irvine 194.

As Sumkin tells it, he practically stumbled into what has become a successful career spanning two decades.

Looking back, he calls this point in his life “serendipitous.”

“At the time that I finished my fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, the job market was terrible,” he explains. “I didn’t like the private practice possibilities, and they were not in the sort of environments I wanted to practice in. So, Pitt suggested that I could stay here as an academic clinician. And I thought I would do that for a year or two while looking for another job. But I’m still here.”

As a student attending OU-COM, Sumkin says he had no understanding of what the term “academic clinician” really meant.

“I never really entertained it as a career choice,” he says.

To make the issue clearer for a new generation of OU-COMers, Sumkin will discuss what the job entails and the various types of academic clinicians.

“It runs the gamut from very clinical types who just happen to do some research to (pure) researchers to physicians or Ph.D.s who do basic types of science research,” he says. “And there are people, like myself, who do clinical work, but who are involved in the academic institution and who are teaching research.”

Lately, Sumkin has turned his research and his lectures in the direction of breast MRIs. A future project involves converting mammography film into digital form, thereby creating one of the largest digital mammography set-ups in existence.

“Even though most of radiology is not film, mammography is still film in most places,” he explains. “About 93 percent of mammography is still film. So, since we do a very large volume of breast imaging, probably about 100,000 exams a year, we’re converting them all from film screen to digital. It’s quite a project.”

Sumkin also holds a position as chief of radiology at Magee-Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, where he acts as co-director of a breast imaging fellowship, funded by the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Candidates for the fellowship include graduates in radiology who, like Sumkin, will specialize in women’s imaging. Sumkin’s research projects range from industry-funded reports to prospective hypothesis-driven research. He has authored numerous publications, reviews, papers and books while traveling internationally to give scientific presentations. This year, he will participate in a symposium on breast cancer in Bursa, Turkey.

At his OU-COM lecture, Sumkin hopes to open the minds of students to the rewards that the profession of academic clinician has to offer.

“I can show them my path,” he says. “I want to give them a picture of this as a possible career choice.”                                                                                 

Sumkin’s lecture is part of the Alumni Research and Professionalism Series.