IARS Research Grants – Two Recipients Discuss the Profound Impacts on Their Careers

Uday Agrawal, MD

Dedicated mentorship and time are essential to help train the next generation of physician-scientists. On Friday, March 21 at the 2025 Annual Meeting, presented by IARS and SOCCA, Max Kelz, MD, PhD, the Lee A. Fleisher Professor and Vice Chair of Research for the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the University of Pennsylvania and IARS board member, moderated an inspiring panel during which two previous IARS Mentored Research Award (IMRA) recipients discussed the incredible impact the awards played on their careers.

Karim Ladha, MD, MSc, FRCPC, associate professor and staff anesthesiologist at the University of Toronto, presented work enabled by his 2018 IMRA grant entitled “Re-Defining Success in the Perioperative Period.” He described his initial motivation to move beyond the “textbook outcomes” that mark perioperative success, such as markers of organ dysfunction (e.g., troponemia, kidney dysfunction) or operational measures including readmission, to think more broadly about what actually matters for patients and their families. He cites personal experiences that for a particular patient, a successful outcome included the ability to hold her grandchildren at 6 months postoperatively, and tried to capture some of these more functional outcomes in a secondary analysis of the METS study.

To help characterize these important experiences for patients, he leveraged the increasing use of wearable technology during the POWERS trial which is ongoing. He closed his talk with extreme gratitude to the IARS and noted that the IMRA grant was a crucial step in his career that enabled him to continue his passion for research, and is now delving into the fascinating world of research in nonopioid analgesics for acute and chronic pain.

Sunny Lou, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Anesthesiology with joint appointments in the Division of Cardiothoracic Anesthesiology and the Division of Clinical and Translational Research Institute for Informatics at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, followed Dr. Ladha and discussed her journey exploring “Personalized Medicine to Support Perioperative Transfusion” with the help of a 2022 IMRA grant.

With her experience as a cardiac anesthesiologist, she recognized the importance of patients having cross-matched blood readily available for transfusion when needed but noticed that a majority of patients who have blood type and screens ordered in preparation for surgery do not end up receiving a transfusion, leading to billions of dollars and hours of clinical testing not utilized efficiently. She therefore set out to improve on decision support systems for ordering type and screens by including patient factors into a machine-learning model trained on the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program database and found that her approach was both more sensitive and specific than the traditional maximum surgical blood ordering schedule approach in recognizing when a patient required a type and screen. She has built on this impressive model to focus on implementation and usability for clinicians every day, hoping to make this a widespread tool. She also expressed overwhelming gratitude to the IARS for their support of her work, especially across departments enabling her to learn the computational skills required to perform her work.

During the question and answer period which followed, both Dr. Ladha and Dr. Lou imparted their wisdom about how to select a mentor, the importance of remaining persistent, and to continue to cultivate the sense of curiosity that drives them. A reminder to those interested that the upcoming deadline for the IMRA grant is April 30!