CIC Career Exploration Series: Clinical Chemistry

On February 25 2020, CIC Toronto hosted this Career Exploration  Series where the focus was on clinical chemistry. The event speaker was Dr. Amir Babalhavaeji, who completed his PhD in biological chemistry and is currently a second-year fellow in the clinical biochemistry program at the University of Toronto. Amir discussed various roles in the area of clinical chemistry, including clinical technologist and clinical scientist, as well as the training processes involved with these careers. He then explored day-to-day roles of a clinical scientist, which involves quality oversight in the clinical chemistry lab, acting as a liaison between clinicians and technologists, as well as additional roles as an educator and a researcher. Attendees learned about the process by which a new diagnostic test or biomarker is validated and put into practice. Amir also shared from his personal experiences as a trainee in how he addressed various requests or pages sent by clinicians as well as identifying inaccurate sodium measurement results for a commonly used blood test in cases of hypernatremia.