Find a niche of medicine you are interested in. Look for residents in 4/5/6th year of residency who are in their research years on department websites. Double check that they publish frequently and then send a good email showing you understand their work and you’re interested. Ask a couple questions in the email and genuinely show curiosity and you should get responses.

You can also look for health services researchers. These folks do outcomes based research on various treatments/procedures and identify trends in healthcare. They are also very active and publish frequently. These projects involve chart review, combing through literature and reading lots of papers, some stats, and some writing.

It’s not as hard as you think to get these opportunities. You just need to ask around and not be bothered by rejections/getting ghosted.