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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.
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