Department of
Emergency Medicine

Research and Scholarship

What we do:

The Division of Research and Scholarship serves faculty, fellows, residents and students explore their ideas start to finish -- from culmination to presentation and publication. 

The division is a conduit that serves to comprehensively support the department's research and scholarly activity, and was established to solely support this mission. We support faculty engagement in research, search for grants and funding, connect with student learners and navigate manuscript submission. We also help residents to explore their research interests, develop tangible projects, learn about ethics considerations through the process of IRB submission, prepare manuscripts for publication submission and connect them with professional presentations.

While research faculty and residents have many evolving interests the Emergency Medicine Research Division highlights the following topics as areas of specific interest to our faculty:

  • Emergency Medical Services
  • Education (Residency Application Process, Simulation, Curriculum Design)
  • Administration/Operations
  • Public Health/Safety (FOCUS Project, Hepatitis C, HIV)
  • Rural Emergency Medicine
  • Sports Medicine
  • Ultrasound
  • Wellness

Why research is important in Emergency Medicine? 

WVU continues to rank among the nation’s elite research institutions as reflected in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as an R1 research school. This designation is symbolic of its national prominence. The University continues to evolve and invest in research through its direct funding and through the graduation of many talented graduate students at the masters and doctoral level. This prominence supports our approach to emergency medicine research where our residents graduate from the emergency medicine residency program with specific skills that they can build upon during their career in medicine. Graduates can pursue a combination of academic careers inclusive of fellowship-training opportunities, community careers and truly rural opportunities after graduation. Regardless of what career niche they chose in emergency medicine, our goal is to prepare our graduates to be able to create their own scholarly work. Residents gain a foundation of skills for autonomous pursuit of scholarly work and proficiency in the interpretation of scholarly literature to determine if evidence-based medicine is generalizable and applicable to their practice. We encourage residents to engage in projects directly aligned with their interests so that they can build upon their foundations after residency.

Why work with the division? 

The Department of Emergency Medicine Research Division is physically and administratively positioned to welcome new research ideas and shepherd those projects to culmination. The Research Division, located on the 2nd floor of the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center (HSC-South 2225), houses the division’s support staff, the Director of Research and Scholarship, Research Coordinator, and research assistants. This personnel assists with all aspects of the research process ongoing within the department, including study design, Institutional Review Board protocol development and submission, data collection, data analysis, and presentation/publication of study results.  In addition to working with our EM faculty and residents, we welcome collaborative research opportunities from outside partners and funding/donor opportunities.

Division contacts: