Customizing Your Nephrology Education

Yale Nephrology provides many ways to further customize your educational experience beyond the various track offered. Review the topics below to learn about more opportunities to tailor your education to your career goals.

Training is provided through extensive clinical, research and teaching opportunities. The body of knowledge relating to basic and clinical nephrology is a rapidly evolving and expanding subspecialty. The curriculum is based on the ACGME's core competencies which are patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, and systems-based practice. Using extensive clinical material and conferences, fellows are trained to be experts in their field. The full curriculum is available upon request.

All nephrology teaching conferences at Yale are mandatory for all fellows, as we believe that nephrology is best taught through a combination of clinical practice and formal didactics. These didactic talks work through a two-year curriculum to insure that fellows have had an opportunity to learn about all the core topics in nephrology from experts in the field. In the summer, there is a crash course in clinical emergencies in nephrology and core physiology teaching sessions given by leaders in the field. Throughout the remainder of the year, we work through a two-year curriculum to ensure all topics are covered in a variety of formats.

A more thorough list of conferences is available if requested.

• Tuesday Afternoon Dialysis Conference Series: An informal lecture by core clinical faculty covering a full curriculum of ESRD subject matter. Also included in this series are some case based conferences.
• Friday Morning Renal Grand Rounds: Presentation by faculty and fellows on a variety of topics.
• Friday Noon Conference: This conference has a core summer conference series on electrolytes and acid base. Once this has been completed, this conference includes “Research in Progress” talked by faculty and fellows as well as a journal club series.
• Fellows Physiology Series (once per month): A fellow organized series where second year fellows divide up the core physiology topics and work with a faculty mentor to teach them to each other in an informal interactive conference.
• Fellows Pathology Slide Review (once per month): Fellows review Kidney Biopsy cases with select faculty and each other on a multi-headed scope.
• VA Case Conference Series (once per month): Informal case based conference series run by the VA faculty where a case is presented and then discussed around a table.

Kidney disease crosses all political and geographic boundaries in the world. At Yale Nephrology, we view the critical role we all have to play in expanding the care we are so fortunate to have here at home, around the world to those patients with noncommunicable diseases, such as chronic kidney disease, and hypertension.

We have a long history of training international fellows, through our clinical fellowship program, or as partners with the International Society of Nephrology fellowship programs, and we are pleased to offer this experience as part of your traditional fellowship training as well.

By partnering with the Office of Global Health, we have developed a partnership within nephrology with Makerere University located in Kampala, Uganda.

With the help of the Yale/Stanford Global Health Scholars Program, fellows interested in pursuing a career in Global Health within Nephrology can complete a 6-week Global Health rotation during their second year of Nephrology fellowship.

As a fellow in this program, you will be both a learner and colleague, will provide care to patients with kidney disease, and will learn about the challenges in under-resources communities. You will also will act as educators for the residents and physicians on site, frequently running teaching sessions and attending conferences.

More information about this selective program is available on interview day for those with a specific interest in Global Health as a career path.

For those with further research interests in nephrology, the below programs are also offered through the Section of Nephrology.

Postdoctoral research fellowship positions are available at Yale University in all aspects of kidney disease research including physiology, cell biology, pathology, developmental biology, genetics, vascular biology, bioinformatics, medical informatics, clinical epidemiology, and biostatistics. Information about potential mentors and application procedures can be found here.

The Yale Summer Undergraduate Medical Research is an intensive training program in modern methods of kidney, urology, and hematology research with the intent to foster undergraduate students to pursue a career in biomedical research. Please find the application information here.