As part of our “Meet Yale Internal Medicine” series, today’s feature is on F. Perry Wilson, MD, MS, assistant professor of medicine (nephrology).
Nephrologist F. Perry Wilson, MD, MS, was a self-proclaimed ‘science and techie’ kid growing up, but wasn’t sure what line of work he wanted to pursue after completing his undergraduate degree in biochemistry.
“I knew I would do something science-related after when I graduated college, but I decided to take a year off and move to France,” said Wilson.
During his time overseas, Wilson was working as a singing waiter when his mother suggested that he take the Medical College Admission Test. He performed well on the exam and decided to move back to the U.S. to attend medical school in New York City.
“I don’t have a great ‘origin’ story, but I loved medical school,” Wilson explained. “They were the happiest four years of my life, which is not something you hear often. It was the fact that I was learning information that could tangibly help someone, I could use science for the greater good. For me, medical school was the right choice.”
It was during medical school that Wilson credits an inspirational teacher for leading him into nephrology. He knew he wanted to have long-term relationships with his patients and after completing a few kidney physiology courses, he knew the field in which he would specialize. Wilson liked that the kidney was a ‘highly mathematical quantifiable organ’ in which you could measure input and output but complex in nature.
When Wilson was looking for a faculty position, he discovered that Yale had the infrastructural support for what he really wanted to study, acute kidney injury. Additionally, he knew he could have great mentors in New Haven. Being from Connecticut originally, the draw of family nearby also contributed to this decision.
Upon his arrival in New Haven, Wilson dove into researching acute kidney injury (AKI) and currently runs a soon-to-be 6000-person trial through the NIH at Yale New Haven Health’s five hospitals: Yale New Haven, Bridgeport, Greenwich, Lawrence + Memorial and Westerly Hospitals.
“My lab’s focus is interventional data science, so we use real-time data analytics and create an intervention,” explained Wilson. “Our biggest study right now is looking at the effect of an electronic alert for AKI. We have some evidence that physicians might miss the diagnosis because acute kidney injury has no obvious symptoms, so we’ve created an Epic alert to notify physicians that their patient has AKI and what next steps to take. We aim to change physician behavior, and more importantly, change the outcome for the patient.”
I loved medical school. They were the happiest four years of my life, which is not something you hear often. It was the fact that I was learning information that could tangibly help someone, I could use science for the greater good.
Dr. F. Perry Wilson
Wilson hopes to expand the scope of this study in the future.
Along with serving as interim director at the Program of Applied Translational Research (PATR), Wilson is extremely active on social media, has his own blog and films weekly videos for Medscape, adding his commentary to analyze new medical studies.
Filmed at Yale Broadcast Center, Medscape’s Impact Factor was developed from Wilson’s interest in communicating how science works to the broader medical community.
“Medscape approached me to see if I would be interested in doing this weekly video commentary and I jumped at the chance,” said Wilson. “It has been really eye-opening to see how physicians around the world react to new medical science.”
Wilson’s future goals are to expand interventional data science beyond kidney disease.
“One thing that we're doing on an experimental level is learning how to target therapies to individual patients,” said Wilson. “My vision for the future at Yale and even broader is that we have really intelligent health systems leveraging the vast amounts of data. That we learn from that data, introduce novel interventions, study those interventions rigorously, let the good ones survive, let the bad ones go away and just keep getting smarter and smarter over time. That's the goal.”
For more information on the work at PATR, visit Program of Applied Translational Research.