Col. Andrew Cap, the division chief of Acute Combat Casualty Research at the Army Institute of Surgical Research
SAN ANTONIO— Col. Andrew Cap, the division chief of Acute Combat Casualty Research at the Army Institute of Surgical Research, admits that he’s the last person you want to ask for advice on how to plan out a career in medical research. The path he took to become one of the Army’s leaders in improving how casualties are treated on the battlefield is so convoluted and dependent on chance that it can’t be duplicated.
Cap graduated from Harvard in 1992, having spent his time focusing on government and language studies. He also worked briefly as an EMT, which left him with an interest in trauma medicine. He knew he wanted to go into medicine, but he also felt pulled to military service. He put off both for four years to continue his studies in government, getting a degree from MIT in technology and policy as it relates to science, medicine and engineering.
Armed with an understanding of how medical innovations are fostered in the public and private sectors, Cap entered the MD-PhD program at Boston University. His wife was working at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, so he was exposed to high-level work in oncology and hematology. At the same time, he was logging hours at Boston Medical Center, the university’s main teaching hospital, and the largest safety net hospital and Level 1 trauma center in New England.
“I got this exposure to emergency medicine and trauma medicine,” Cap explained. “At the same time, I was getting my PhD studying vascular biology and in particular the role of platelets.”
In the preceding eight years, his desire to serve his country hadn’t diminished, and Cap felt that time was running out. “I was finishing my PhD and turning 30, and I decided if I wanted to serve the military, I’d better do it now.”
He took a two-year health professions scholarship for the last two years of medical school and was commissioned into the Army in April 2001. He began an internal medicine residency in Bethesda, MD, at Walter Reed, where he trained to be a bone marrow transplant specialist.
A summer spent in Landstuhl, Germany, doing a rotation in surgical and intensive care reignited his interest in trauma medicine, however. This was only strengthened during a subspecialty fellowship program at the National Institutes for Health, where he became involved in a project studying the effect of blood transfusions in combat casualties.
In 2005, Base Realignment and Closure consolidated most of DoD’s combat casualty research to USAISR, including its blood research program. Due for a transfer and with few opportunities for a transplant specialist, Cap was tapped to head the program.
“[My commander] said, ‘You’re going to be a combat hematologist,’ and I laughed. Because there was no such animal,” Cap said. “The program was tabula rasa when I got here. We were building a brand new building. They cleared some space in one of the labs and loaned me a contract technician and said that for now we were it as the blood research program. Do some good stuff.”
To stand up a research program right out of a fellowship was an opportunity few clinician researchers ever have. “I didn’t exactly have an open checkbook, but at the same time I kind of did,” Cap said. “Research money was pretty flush at the time. I was able to build a laboratory and hire people.”
While the program—and the building housing it—was still being built, Cap deployed to Iraq for six months. He took his BlackBerry with him and ran the lab from southern Iraq.
“When I came back, I got the tour of the new building that was finally open, and we got started in earnest. That was 2011.”
While landing in the leadership role of the Army’s blood research program can partially be chalked up to luck, what Cap has been able to accomplish since coming there can only be explained by his unique training.
Continue Reading:
