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 Abhinav
Diwan, MD
Assistant Professor
University of Cincinnati
Assistant Director of Echocardiography
Cincinnati Veterans Affairs Medical Center
2003 ACCF/Merck Fellow
“The technique I developed during my
year as a Merck Fellow formed the basis for a lot of the research
I will do in the future. It’s the foundation.”
— Dr. Diwan
Dr. Abhinav Diwan is no stranger to winning
awards. One of just 34 selected from a pool of 18,000 students
applying to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, he
won 11 of the 16 awards given during his tenure there. Still,
he recalls the 2003 Convocation Ceremony, where he received
an ACCF/Merck award, as one of his “grandest moments.”
Equally clear in his memory is when he learned
that he had been selected to be a Merck Fellow of the ACC.
His mentor, Dr. William Zoghbi, congratulated him in an elevator.
“I was happy for two reasons,” Dr. Diwan says.
“It was the first time that I had written a proposal
independently and it got funded. That made me feel that I
did something right. The other part was feeling good about
the prospect of spending 12 months doing echocardiography-related
translational research. I really wanted to learn echocardiography
well. And this would give me that opportunity.”
It gave him other opportunities as well, such
as time in the operating room where he saw how cardiac surgeons
work and experience working with experts in echocardiography
who have since become his mentors and colleagues. And, says
Dr. Diwan, it put him on course to do what he had come to
the United States for. “I always wanted to be a scientist,
and opportunities to get funded in India are limited.”
Although Dr. Diwan’s career as a clinician-scientist
is still in its infancy — he has been in his first post,
that of an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati,
for less than a year — he is already seeing the impact
of his ACCF/Merck award. He has published about a dozen papers,
three as the first author, and is in the process of applying
for NIH and other funding. “The ACCF/Merck award was
a good way to get initiated into grant-writing,” he
notes.
The award also helped him to land his current
position, he says. “Getting a grant during your fellowship
is proof for academic institutions looking to hire you that
you can obtain funding and do research.”
Even more important, Dr. Diwan used his time
as an ACCF/Merck-funded fellow to develop a new technique
for conducting research on the human heart. “We haven’t
published the results yet because we are conducting ratification
studies, but it worked in my hands and I believe I will be
using this technique in my research for many years to come,”
he predicts. “It’s the foundation for the work
I’ll do in the future.”
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