Stacey House, MD, PhD

My background is that I grew up on a tobacco farm in Kentucky and was the first in my family to graduate college.  I knew I wanted to be a physician from a young age but didn’t realize I could incorporate research until I had a mentor at Yale where I did my undergrad convince me that I should go the MD/PhD route.  I thought I’d have no chance to get in, but he told me he was the chair of the NIH MSTP review committee and he knew more about it than me and I would be able to do it.  Sometimes mentors can help you realize your worth when you can’t see it yourself.  I ended up completing a MD/PhD at University of Cincinnati doing basic science research in cardioprotection signaling pathways.    

I came to Wash U for EM residency with a husband, a toddler, and a newborn in tow.  Luckily, my family was supportive of me juggling the clinical demands of residency with continuing my basic science research and becoming involved in clinical research.  I stayed on as faculty since 2011.  Initially, I focused heavily on cardioprotection research, but over time became more enamored with clinical research and building the department’s research mission through research operations.  I started the Emergency Care Research Core (ECRC), which is the centralized infrastructure we have to conduct clinical studies in the emergency department.  Currently, I’m the Vice Chair for Clinical Research in Emergency Medicine, ECRC Director, and Research Fellowship Director.  I work 20% clinically at BJH and focus the rest of my time on continuing to expand our research infrastructure, building collaborations with other departments and other institutions, providing mentorship for researchers, and conducting my own studies.  My research interests are somewhat broad-based but currently focused in the areas of biomarkers/diagnostics, acute viral illnesses, and neuro/psychological sequelae of trauma.  

I’ve had mentors who have transformed my professional pathway mixed in with some horror stories.  I think I’ve learned from both.  I tend to be intense when it comes to my own workload and have had a lot of my success from what I would call the “brute force approach” of just doing more all the time.  That fits my personality and probably stems from my childhood on the farm but is not an approach I would advise others to take.  So I would say that my mentorship approach includes reflection on how to combine passion and logistics to build expertise in a fulfilling career while drawing from my own experience to make the process less painful.