Given his time again, Robert Buynak, MD, FACP, may well be a train driver — but as a young man, he wasn’t sure how to go about it.
Academically gifted, he was raised in the true spirit of the American Dream: “My mom’s family really pushed academics,” he recalls. His mother, born in Croatia during World War Two, spent the first decade of her life in a displaced persons camp in Austria before travelling to the United States in the 1950s.
While Dr. Buynak excelled academically, he had little sense of what careers were actually available to him, “I thought an engineer drove a train until I was in college!” he laughs. “If I’d known that earlier, a train driver would have been an appealing job.”
As a student, ‘Doctor’ and ‘Lawyer’ were the professions he was aware of, and it was Doctor that called to him. He enjoyed science, particularly biology, and early hospital internships confirmed that healthcare suited him. The path took him to Notre Dame for undergrad, where he met his wife, then Harvard Medical School, and then Mayo Clinic for his residency.
A Community Physician First
Once married and with a growing family, Dr. Buynak moved to Northwest Indiana where he practiced Internal Medicine. It was a route that offered the flexibility to work across multiple conditions and respond to the needs of the community he served, while still prioritizing his family.
“I’m a girl dad,” Dr. Buynak says proudly. The father of three daughters, for twenty years his life has revolved around what he calls ‘girl dad stuff’ — his wife, the girls, and usually a group of their friends. “That’s been fun, actually,” he says. “I like that.” There are boyfriends and husbands now, too. And a granddaughter on the way.
It’s the life he built by choosing what mattered. Family over academics. Community over prestige.
“There’s just a lot of need in Indiana for taking care of diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease,” he explains.
For roughly a decade, he practiced full-time in private medicine, lectured, and taught at a local medical school. He even authored a book with the American Diabetes Association, 123 Diabetes, a series of essays explaining the condition in easy-to-understand terms.
Discovering Clinical Research
In 2002, Dr. Buynak started his own research site, something he only considered after a chance encounter with a pharma rep, “Until that point, I figured that trials were only done at a university,” he says. “It was the first I’d ever heard of doctors doing research in other offices.”
So he took the plunge, and what he discovered was a way to remain connected to the broader scientific scene while continuing to live and work in a smaller community, balancing clinical practice part-time with a growing research operation.
Building that site required learning an entirely new set of skills. “I had no business experience,” he says. “But somehow I opened a small business from nothing.” In 2010, he went all in on clinical research, building a dedicated research center that now employs twenty people.
Dr. Buynak is clearly incredibly proud of his research work. He speaks animatedly about a partnership with a local federally qualified community health center, where he volunteered with patients who often had no insurance and limited options. Many had chronic Hepatitis C, but no access to the new curative trials emerging around 2005.
“I got involved with those studies,” He explains, bringing patients from the health center to his research site. They got cutting-edge treatment they couldn’t otherwise afford, and were paid to take part. “There’s probably 80 people out there who had Hep C who got cured for free and probably wouldn’t have gotten that any other way,” he says. “That’s when research works best.”
Building a Research Team
There’s also a very obvious pride in his team, and Dr. Buynak speaks at length about the team he’s built around him at his site in Valparaiso, Indiana.
Unlike more urban areas, where experienced research staff are readily available, his site had to train people from scratch. Many coordinators started as medical assistants.
“We had to find smart, hard-working people who could grow into the role,” he explains. “We need people who overachieve in practice, who are detail-oriented.”
That attention to detail is essential because research operates under a level of scrutiny that differs from everyday clinical medicine. “In private practice, you see a patient and make a decision,” he says. “In research, everything is reviewed.”
For coordinators and investigators alike, that environment requires confidence, discipline, and the ability to accept feedback. When those qualities come together, however, the result is a collaborative team capable of delivering complex studies.
Joining Velocity
In 2020, after nearly two decades of running his site independently, Dr. Buynak joined Velocity’s integrated network.
“I had been running the site independently for eighteen years,” he says. “I didn’t really want to keep doing the business side of it, worrying every night about getting trials.”
Velocity offered something different: infrastructure, operational support, and access to a broader portfolio of studies.
One benefit became clear almost immediately. “Velocity has enough connections that we consistently have trials available,” he explains. Since joining the network, revenue at his site has tripled from $2m to $6m last year.
The timing of the acquisition also proved fortunate. Valparaiso joined Velocity just before the COVID-19 pandemic, when the network rapidly mobilized to support vaccine trials across the United States.
“We jumped into vaccine studies right away,” he recalls. “We were enrolling hundreds of people early in the vaccination effort.”
Today, vaccines account for roughly 40% of the site’s research portfolio, an area of work that was not previously part of the program.
For Dr. Buynak, the experience highlighted one of Velocity’s key strengths.
“I think the most impressive thing is how quickly the network can ramp up and adapt,” he says. “We can identify a study or a new indication and move quickly.”
