What does it take to win the AMA Research Challenge? Prospective entrants to the competition— the largest national, multispecialty research event for medical students, residents and fellows—might be asking that very question.
For those pondering submitting a poster abstract for the AMA Research Challenge, and taking a shot at a $10,000 grand prize, it’s worth looking back at why judges lauded the projects that won recent iterations of the event. Here’s are a few key takeaways from judge who offered feedback on winning research projects in past years.
Learn about past AMA Research Challenge winners:
- 2020: Posters on ventilators, e-cigarettes land top honors.
- 2021: Moraxella catarrhalis project lands grand prize.
- 2022: Top prize-winning research offers clues on infertility biomarkers.
- 2023: Research on bile duct cancer detection earns first place nod.
Asking the tough questions
In 2020, Victoria Danan, a medical student at Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University at the time, was declared co-winner of the event. Danan’s project—“Winning the Ventilator Lottery: A Comparison of Five Scarce Resource Allocation Protocols in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic”—was touted by judges for its social science and ethics value.
The project looked at protocols that determined the distribution of ventilators. And there was no easy answer for who should get them. That stood out to Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP, one of the four judges for the 2020 AMA Research Challenge.
“You’ve done an excellent job at showing us where you live and the protocol that is being used where you live yields different results,” said Dr. Arora, dean for medical education at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. “So, we think about the protocol, does it have equity, and do we have equity across the region? That’s an interesting application. Should we be standardizing these protocols? I commend you for bringing that forward and pushing us to think as a group, as a nation, of what we should be doing.”
According to 2020 judge Mira Irons, MD—then the AMA’s chief health and science officer—taking a critical eye to procedure and protocol is a bedrock of effective research.
“The work that Victoria did, when you think about it, is so simple in some ways,” said Dr. Irons, who in 2024 took the helm as associate chief of genetics and genomics at Boston Children's Hospital. “But it underscores the fact that we have to think about what our outcomes are and how our actions or recommendations will play out. This is what’s important to patients and families. It can help inform what we are seeing in the health care environment right now.”
Dive deeper:
- 1st-time poster presenters offer tips on medical student research
- What you need to know to ace a poster abstract
- 4 tips for medical students to get their start as researchers.
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Impacting public health and policy
Shamsh Shaikh—then a third-year medical student at Boston University School of Medicine—shared top honors with Danan. Shaikh’s poster—“The Effect of Pod-based E-cigarettes on Endothelial Cell Phenotype: Preliminary Results”—was honored for its value as translational research. He is now a general surgery resident at Riverside University Health System in Moreno Valley, California.
Shaikh’s research examined the components of e-cigarettes and the potential harm that the product can have. Results offered some startling data, concluding that Juul e-liquid components demonstrated acute toxicity in vascular endothelial cells.
“You do this kind of work to inform public policy,” said 2020 judge Clyde Yancy, MD, vice dean for diversity and inclusion at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and an AMA member. “Rather than make a draconian statement of we don’t like this, we don’t want to do this, let it be driven by science.”
Dive deeper:
- 5 reasons to showcase your work in the AMA Research Challenge.
- From poster to print: Get published as a medical student, resident.
A clear explanation
Marielisa Cabrera-Sánchez, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, took home top honors in the 2021 AMA Research Challenge for her work on Moraxella catarrhalis.
The condition is an upper respiratory bacterium that exacerbates chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and may not have been a familiar topic to judges, coming from a variety of specialty backgrounds.
“It was so impressive,” said judge Sanjay Desai, MD, the AMA’s chief academic officer and group vice president of medical education. “You took on a question that has such large implications globally for so many patients in their quality of life. What was most impressive was the ability to take such sophisticated science and communicate it in such an accessible way too many of us who don’t perform that level of science.”
Demonstrable “technical mastery”
2023 AMA Research Challenge winner Jesse Kirkpatrick, an M3 at Harvard Medical School, took a relatively unknown disease and made the topic familiar to the judges in his five-minute video presentation. That is no easy task, and was instrumental in his earning top honors for his research—“Detection of cholangiocarcinoma with protease activity probes” (PDF).
Kirkpatrick’s “ability to convey these details and take us on a journey reflects the mastery that Jesse has over both the clinical content as well as the science that was conducted for three people that are not treating people with cholangiocarcinoma every day,” said judge Dr. Desai, a judge for the 2023 event. “That foundation across the clinical and science disciplines and to take us on that journey is so impressive.”
