Hi @Austin, thanks for reviewing my project proposal.
To answer your questions,
Who is on my team?
I would be the lead researcher for the study. I am an intern at the hospital we’re planning to conduct the study at. The exact team is not yet finalized, but Dr. Baldeep Singh (Asst. Prof, Department of Medicine) will likely be my advisor. I would tentatively take the guidance of Dr. Ajay Chhabra (HOD, Department of Medicine) and Dr. Gurpreet Kaur Randhawa (Professor, Pharmacology) as well.
As for my experience with similar projects:
I conducted a Cross-Sectional Study for measuring healthcare literacy in India, which I presented at MEDSICON 2022 (https://medsicon.com/) and won an American College of Surgeons (ACS) membership for.
I did another cross-sectional study on the “Factors Influencing Surgical Career Pursuit among Medical Students: Gender Perceptions from an Indian Hospital”, which was presented at an ACS conference in Boston in 2023.
This would be the first Randomised controlled trial I would be doing. There’s not a lot of funding support in India for research projects like this, especially at pre-residency stages.
I’ve been thinking about conducting this study for about a year now but the lab tests for investigating some markers involved in the metabolic pathways of Diabetes and IF (such as leptin, insulin) are not routine investigations (they are costly and not easily available in regular laboratories). This funding will help me cover that, in addition to reimbursing the participants for their time and expenses incurred (such as for travel), ensuring patient participation, weekly visits, compliance, etc.
Other funding: None - as of right now, this is the only funding request I’ve made for this project. We first aim to finish a literature review and conduct an RCT at this scale to streamline the process. After that, we’d likely approach larger teams to see how best to advance this line of research and seek further funding (as large scale RCTs can get quite expensive).