Mody Advanced Training Award
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Chris Mody and Rachel Lim (recipient of the 2018 Mody Advanced Training Award)
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Chris Mody is a Professor of Medicine with the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine and the current Department Head of Microbiology, Immunology and Infectious Diseases. Following his internal medicine and respiratory medicine fellowship training in Calgary, Mody spent 4 years in the United States honing his research skills in immunology. After returning to the University of Calgary and spending 12 years as a respirologist and clinician scientist, he took over as Division Head in 2003. At that time he strongly encouraged and supported fellows to obtain advanced training in respiratory medicine, aimed at encouraging young respirologists to do exactly what he did: leave.
“We said to trainees, ‘If you want to stay in Calgary, we want you to go to the best place in the world for the thing you’re interested in, learn how to do it from the best people in the world, and then come back,’” he recounts. “Frequently, the response was, ‘Well if I do that, I might not come back.’ And we said that was okay. And almost all did come back to Calgary.” Mody says the aim of the program is to give trainees the chance to pursue their passion in a way that will continue to inspire them throughout their careers. “It was an incredibly valuable tool for training,” he says. “But especially for recruitment of individuals to the division in Calgary, not only because people came back but because they had trained with world experts. So in Calgary, for each category of pulmonary medicine we basically had a world expert.”
In 2018, in honour of Dr. Mody’s vision, the Division officially named the fellowship the Mody Advanced Training Award.
Trainees are key to the continued success of respiratory medicine. We want to grow the Mody Advanced Training Award to allow more students the possibility to go away for training. Please join us in making these training opportunities a reality.