Young Investigator Award - Clinical Science

This award, created in 1970, goes to young investigators working in clinical or basic-science cardiovascular research. The investigator must be either a research trainee or researcher in his or her first independent university or hospital appointment at the time of submission.

The Thrill of Discovery

Dr. Douglas Lee had a Eureka moment during the cardiac physiology course at medical school.

“I found myself staring at a Wiggers diagram—a unifying figure of a fascinating organ system. That’s when my interest in cardiology began,” he remembers.

These days, Dr. Lee is driven partly by the thrill of finding answers where others had not thought to look. His work focuses on patients who present at emergency rooms with heart failure yet are considered well enough to be discharged.

“Collectively,” he says, “we think they are safe to go home so there’s little data on them.”

In fact, he found that a surprisingly high number of them died soon after discharge or were readmitted. Since one-third of heart failure patients are not hospitalized, a large number of people are at risk. Despite advances in biomarkers and cardiac imaging, physicians worry about discharging emergency department patients with chest pain because of the risk of a missed myocardial infarction. The concern is even greater for heart failure because physicians have fewer diagnostic tools.

Dr. Lee is developing predictive models to help ER physicians make better on-the-go decisions for patients who may have a higher risk of adverse events.

“Using a simple, cost-effective model in a Blackberry-style device, we may prevent unnecessary deaths and readmissions,” he says.

Dr. Lee is a staff cardiologist at the University Health Network and a clinical epidemiologist and research scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.