Our CARE Community: Meet Study Director Kimberly Burton, PhD
Our CARE community makes all the difference. Get to know CARE’s Study Director Kimberly Burton, PhD.
How did you first become involved with CARE?
My background is in biomedical research at the University of Washington. I spent a number of years doing research in two different departments there. But I was always very interested in the translational part of the research and how it might benefit people.
Very serendipitously, my youngest child and Tony and Sibel Blau’s daughter were both going to NYU from the same high school. So, we met in New York and went to dinner one evening at a lovely Turkish restaurant. Sibel is Turkish and she treated us to a wonderful dinner. We started to talk about what they were doing and their study for metastatic triple negative breast cancer patients was just coming together. I was very intrigued with the study.
I have a personal history with cancer. My mother died very young from cancer, and a dear friend also died very young from melanoma. I wanted to see if there could be a way I could help with their study.
They asked me to come to their next monthly meeting. I showed up at their next meeting in September and they had just received regulatory approval for their study and now they needed a project manager. Although I had no experience managing a clinical trial, my organizational and project management skills would be helpful. I had to take a quick course to learn about the regulatory requirements for a clinical trial and learn a bit on the fly because we enrolled our first two patients the very next month, October of 2013. We have been enrolling patients in this study (which is now centered at South Sound CARE Foundation) since then.
What makes CARE different?
For me, working with people who care for patients. I value working with the oncologists and hearing their stories and their ideas about how they treat the patients. I don’t work directly with the patients any longer but I enjoy working with other CARE team members who help care for the patients.
Another bonus is witnessing the commitment of the CARE Board members and team and their dedication to this work.
I feel very grateful that there is a community willing to donate money that in part invests in someone like me who can assist the oncologists by providing them research data, information, and treatment recommendations from other researchers involved in the study that they need to treat these difficult cases. I love that I can be that person.
How important is the community aspect of CARE?
The best exposure I get to the CARE community is through Beer & Bites. I love seeing the large number of people who show up from year to year, how generous they are, and how they pay attention when Frank speaks or a patient shares their stories. It’s an amazing community event.