Education

• Medical research assistants are usually college students majoring in a health field like pharmacology, nursing or radiology, or in a scientific field such as biology or chemistry. Graduate students are most commonly employed as assistants. For some studies and employers, only pre-med or medical students are considered for research assistant positions. For others, students with an associate's degree or undergraduates at a four-year school qualify as assistants.
  
  

Laboratory

• In a laboratory setting, research assistants are called upon to fulfill a wide variety of tasks, including collecting samples, preparing solutions and slides and helping to set up experiments. In laboratories that keep animals for testing, care and feeding of the animals is usually included in the job. Some tasks are mundane, such as cleaning and maintaining lab equipment and handling clerical duties like labeling and filing. Laboratories can be located in hospitals or in institutions devoted solely to research.
  
  

Clinical Research Assistant

• Clinical research assistants are virtually the same as medical research assistants; they just work exclusively in clinical settings like hospitals, doctors' offices or health clinics. In a clinical setting the research involves dealing with patients and studying diseases, procedures and behavior, among other things. A clinical research assistant may help with such duties as interviewing patients, data collection and entry, measurements, drawing blood, collecting tissue samples and generally assisting the principal researchers.
  
  

Drug Trials

• One of the most common types of clinical research is a drug trial, where new and experimental drugs are tested on patients. A clinical research assistant for a drug trial will often help research scientists and doctors with interviewing patients, scheduling, administering drugs, keeping records of results, collating data and preparing reports. The assistant is often tasked with making sure test protocols are precisely followed.
  
  

Career

• It is not common for a medical research assistant to stay in the field as a career, since most people in the position are students. The exceptions are people who work as research technicians. A research technician usually has an undergraduate degree in a scientific field and has experience working as a medical research assistant. They tend to work directly under the supervision of the principal researcher in a lab or clinic and are assigned more difficult duties than an assistant.