In 2005, Dr. Paget offered Dr. Bass a position as associate program director, which led to her joining HSS full time in 2010 as rheumatology fellowship program director.
A ‘Roundabout Way’ to Clinical Research
As a premier joint replacement institution, HSS also has a large rheumatology division. When Dr. Bass arrived at HSS in the early 2000s, she recalls that quite a bit of controversy revolved around the best way to manage orthopedic patients after surgery to prevent thrombosis. Dr. Paget asked Dr. Bass to head up a task force to formulate guidelines on administration of blood thinners for thrombosis prophylaxis in postoperative patients.
Dr. Bass became involved with the National Quality Forum and then led a small clinical trial at HSS. This work led to her later participating in a large National Institutes of Health-funded anticoagulation trial, a six-year project that yielded two published papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That on-the-job training in clinical research methodology led to other research projects related to racial disparities and outcomes in orthopedic surgery.
Then, around 2017, clinicians started to see cancer patients treated with checkpoint inhibitors who were experiencing autoimmune side effects of the treatment, including arthritis. Dr. Bass was fascinated by these patients’ conditions and got to work helping create a registry in collaboration with rheumatologist Karmela Kim Chan, MD, also at HSS. They collaborated with scientists in the laboratories at HSS and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, and with oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York.
This line of study, says Dr. Bass, “was the perfect subject at the perfect time.”
In 2021, she made the decision to pass the program director baton to others so she could concentrate on seeing patients clinically and doing translational research, thus returning full circle to her love for immunology.
Advice for Fellows
In an article in the December issue of The Rheumatologist when the ACR presented her with the Distinguished Fellowship Program Director Award, Dr. Bass remarked, “I’ve always thought of myself as Merlin in The Once and Future King, living life backward, practice to teaching to research.” That said, while she was rheumatology fellowship program director, Dr. Bass cautioned her trainees not to model their careers on her career trajectory.
She has urged fellows to be realistic if their career goal is to be a researcher because to qualify for new investigator and other types of grants requires focus. By the same token, a plan to go into clinical practice could also include a component of collaboration with researchers.
