Meet Shyamashree Biswas, Research Consultant at The George Institute

When I got the opportunity for an internship at The George Institute, I was pursuing my master’s in clinical research, and I was very keen to get real-world research experience. My medical training only gave me exposure to clinical environments. The internship at The Institute provided me with opportunities to work in interdisciplinary areas. 

The most important part I would like to highlight is that I got opportunities to work on multiple tasks of varied nature in a short period of time. This experience aided me to identify my research interests. My internship journey started with working on a public survey from scratch in collaboration with the impact and engagement team. I have witnessed the strength of collaborative and multidisciplinary work, and at the same time, I have learned to appreciate the amount of effort and time required to put together a research idea. An opportunity to perform statistical analysis on a couple of datasets gave me confidence in managing data and churning out publication-quality tables and graphs. 

By the end of my internship, I was fortunate enough to continue working as a research consultant at The Institute for a multicentre randomized controlled trial and closely working with the data manager, and contributing to central data monitoring, which is one of the areas of my research interest. I have contributed to the protocol development for cost-effectiveness analysis alongside a clinical trial and am continuing to learn various aspects of statistical analyses. I am also helping develop a Clinical Trial Course at The Institute. Every aspect of my work be it writing minutes, making slides for a presentation, developing a questionnaire, or getting the data prepared for analysis, there is so much to learn. The skills and experiences I gathered during my internship have helped me to get prepared for a job and enabled me with a smooth transition from an intern to a full-time researcher. I believe I am at the best place to learn and share knowledge and skills, which will guide me to grow as an independent researcher contributing to the betterment of the health of millions.

Blog written by Shyamashree Biswas, Research Consultant, The George Institute India