Clin-STAR Journey Story

A VA-Based Clinician Scientist Inspires Medical and Surgical Specialties to Join the Aging Research Community

Dr. Una Makris is a rheumatologist, focusing on aging research, at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the Dallas VA. Earlier in her career with many choices before her, she relates, “So much of what we immerse ourselves in depends on circumstances. When I was a resident at University of Washington, I had the good fortune to work with Dr. Bill Hazzard, who inspired me to pursue both geriatrics and rheumatology.”

Her next stop was her rheumatology fellowship at Yale School of Medicine, where Dr. Makris concentrated on epidemiologic aging research. With several mentors, including Drs. Leo Cooney, Tom Gill, Cary Reid, Mary Tinetti, and Jonathan Bean, she was able to leverage multiple data sets, allowing her career to bridge various disciplines. After her clinical and research fellowships, moving from Yale to UT Southwestern allowed her to pivot her career focus from epidemiology to behavioral interventions, specifically investigating how to change health behaviors that may actually improve outcomes in a complex aging population.

This change also gave Dr. Makris an opportunity to reinvent herself. In the North Texas VA Health Care System, she began to focus her efforts on working with older veterans with comorbidities, particularly musculoskeletal pain and mental health conditions. Her specialty area is developing behavioral interventions to motivate older adults who suffer from both depressive symptoms and musculoskeletal pain—a challenging combination of conditions that are each often refractory and time-consuming to manage. She believes strongly in engaging with and empowering patients and says, “One aspect of being a clinician investigator that I particularly enjoy is asking the questions that are most relevant to the aging population and working with the patients themselves to implement solutions. I can then bring that back to the clinic to help others.”

Dr. Makris urges others to explore opportunities, saying, “There are many ways that a career in aging can evolve, with multiple funding sources—a combination of internal funding and grants from foundations, the NIH, and the VA.” For example, NIH funding allowed her to study the psychosocial aspects of back pain in older adults, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. With the VA in particular, she says, “There is an opportunity to impact veterans on both the local and national levels. Being a VA investigator allows learning from and collaborating with leaders in aging research with tremendous opportunity to evaluate and disseminate innovative models of care across the nation. The potential for uptake and increased access/reach of our research findings is truly unique within the VA system.”

As an alumnus of the NIA GEMSSTAR Scholars Program, Dr. Makris has conducted workshops and webinars for the Clinician Specialists’ Rising Stars in Aging Research Mentoring Program, speaking on the how-to’s of building an interdisciplinary team and finding mentors in the aging community. She encourages others to reach out, partner, and collaborate with the Clin-STAR community: “Everyone has a different trajectory and will share their experiences. We all have the same end goal of making a difference in how we care for our aging population and to improve outcomes that truly matter to them.” As both a mentee and a mentor herself, she is a firm believer in the power of mentoring, as well as having a diverse mentorship team. She states, “The community of mentoring and career development is powerful and has lifted up so many specialists into aging research to improve outcomes for the older adult population. We do not have enough geriatricians, so now is the time for medical and surgical specialties to come into the aging and geriatrics community. There is so much work to be done, and your mentors, Clin-STAR, the American Geriatrics Society, and the aging research community more broadly are there to support you!”