I want to get into clinical research without an MD, but I feel like an impostor

Field: Medicine/Health

Country: Canada

Hi all, I wanted to know your thoughts/experience on non-MDs hoping to do clinical research with MDs.

My master’s training is in epidemiology and health services research, but I’m increasingly becoming interested in clinical trials and immunology and studying specific diseases. Most people leading trials are MDs, and I’m very keen to learn from them, but they rarely supervise PhD students. I’m also concerned of “overstepping” somewhat, since I obviously have no clinical experience, and often feel like I can’t weigh in on things because of it.

I also feel like I won’t have a lot of job/funding opportunities vs a clinician who wants to study the same diseases. I thought about doing just maybe pure methodology (e.g., epidemiology, immunology) but it’s really broad and I’m having a harder time getting into that vs focusing on specific conditions.

Anyway, long story short, I want to explore a clinical/biomedical/immunology PhD, but I feel out of place, or should I stick to a health services research PhD and explore things at the population level.