HSANZ President Dr Adam Bryant spoke with Dr Kenneth Lim to explore his overseas HSANZ Fellowship journey, at the Mayo Clinic in the United States, and shared insights on how trainees can find, secure, and prepare for the right fellowship opportunity. Kenneth Lim was the recipient of 2024 HSANZ Clinical Fellowship.
Dr Adam Bryant: Congratulations on this wonderful fellowship Kenneth. Our trainees are going to hugely benefit from hearing about your experience. Could you outline the Fellowship you undertook and where and who your supervisors were?
Dr Kenneth Lim: Thank you. I did my overseas fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota in the United States. My supervisors were Professor Yi Lin, Professor Shaji Kumar, and Professor Wilson Gonsalvis.
Dr Bryant: How did you become clear about your fellowship. Did you sit down with your supervisor and workshop it with them?
Dr Lim: I started out with Professor Hang Quach as her Fellow at St Vincents Hospital [Melbourne], and that really fired up my interest in doing clinical trials in Multiple Myeloma. During that one-year fellowship there, it really spurred my interest in pursuing clinical research. That encouraged me to look around for an overseas fellowship.
After finishing my training, I was still exploring my career options and asked myself, do I want to go into private work or to have an academic career or to be a clinical trialist, or do I want to go more into the translational space.
My one-year fellowship with Hang made me understand the treatment landscape of Multiple Myeloma in Australia and know what’s missing and know what’s coming, so I based it on that in selecting my fellowship.
Dr Bryant: What process did you use in looking for a supervisor and what lead time does a trainee need?
Dr Lim: Reading widely and seeing who has been publishing on what. I had a few criteria for an overseas fellowship, given that there are a lot of good local fellowships here in Australia. My three criteria included:
1: a centre with very high research output, because that means there is strong mentorship that would help you fine tune your research.
2: a centre with strong expertise in standard of care, and cellular therapies, to be more experienced in that field, so that when I came back to Australia, as we’re still slightly behind the United States, I would have that real expertise to bring back here.
3: looking for sites known for innovation and development of risk scoring systems.
I really wanted to go to the Mayo Clinic as a site because it really fulfilled these three criteria. Through Prof Huang Quach, I got linked in with Prof Shaji Kumar [Mayo Clinic] and Prof Wilson Gonsalvis, who run the fellowship program there.
I initially reached out to Shaji Kumar because he’s a leader in risk-adapted approaches and risk stratification models, my area of interest. But, subsequently, going to the Mayo Clinic you start working with different clinicians and sometimes it’s all about fate or you finding someone you can really work with. I connected closely with Prof Ey Lin, Head of the Cellular Therapy Unit in Mayo Clinic, and most of my research projects were with her.
I was interested in delayed Car T Cell associated toxicities…and hence my projects there focused on that area, and included my paper on immune effector cell-associated late onset neurotoxicities after ciltacabtagene autoleucel CAR-T in multiple myeloma.
That work resulted in a few publications and changed standard care practice.
Dr Bryant: That’s a brilliant outcome and I saw these papers coming through so it’s really highly impactful, and impressive at your level. What other advice would you give a trainee considering a fellowship?
Dr Lim: My advice to trainees considering a fellowship is to know what you want to achieve in your fellowship, whether it is a local or overseas fellowship, and have goals.
Dr Bryant: What sort of lead time does a trainee need? Was there anything that was more challenging that you expected about taking an overseas fellowship?
Dr Lim: It took a lot of work to get there and that includes sitting the United States MLE [Medical Licensing Examination] exams and that was a three-step process.
Obtaining a United States Visa took a while. My advice to anyone wanting to do a fellowship in the Unites States is that you will require one year of planning before going.
I would not do a fellowship for the sake of doing it, but you really have to be very clear of your research question initially but also what you want to achieve skills-wise and think about what you can bring back to Australia.
The [HSANZ] Fellowship is an amazing opportunity to go overseas and the stipend you are provided actually helped significantly in achieving that.
You can explore HSANZ Clinical Fellowship opportunities here.
[NOTE: this article is based on a video interview between HSANZ President Dr Adam Bryant and HSANZ Fellowship recipient Dr Kenneth Lim, and edited for brevity]
