Careers for clinician investigators.

For the purposes of this article, we define clinical research as that form of medical research that involves human beings as the direct subjects of the research at the individual or a population level. The research may involve the study of biological samples (eg, blood, genes, proteins, and tissue) as a means to understand the individual or the group, but the ultimate objective for the clinical investigator is a better understanding of the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. Many researchers not trained as physicians perform clinical research; eg, many with PhD degrees work in health services research. The limited scope of this article necessitated that we focus on the physician investigator, henceforth referred to as clinician investigator.