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• Emergency medicine encompasses all patient populations, traverses all geographies, and interacts with every culture, race, creed, and socioeconomic class. • Emergency physicians have become experts in rapid risk stratification and diagnoses. • The science of short-term risk stratification, often on undifferentiated conditions with inadequate historical data, has been necessarily one of the main focuses of emergency medicine research. • The rapid and accurate diagnosis of potentially life-threatening conditions is another nucleus of emergency medicine research and is the arena in which many new technologies are first studied. • Research into and the administration of emergency medical services (EMS) and the resuscitation from cardiopulmonary arrest have become almost completely encompassed within emergency medicine. Thus, emergency medicine has a unique perspective in medical care by dealing with time-sensitive and life-threatening disease processes across broad populations and geographies. The clinical practice of emergency medicine encompasses a wide variety of populations presenting with undifferentiated conditions and therefore providing distinct research opportunities. Evidence-based improvements in emergency care have been shown to improve immediate morbidity and mortality as well as affecting long-term outcomes. While there has been remarkable growth in the number of emergency care patients, emergency physicians, and emergency medicine training programs, there remain unique perspectives and challenges to emergency care that will require marked expansion of research endeavors. Future emergency care should be guided by evidence and based on high-quality research performed by well-trained investigators who have a realistic perspective on this challenge.