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INFORMATION FOR

Fellowship

The Yale Infectious Disease Fellowship program offers world-class training in clinical infectious diseases with an emphasis on educational development and investigation, under the close mentorship of renowned faculty experts. We fully embrace the value of broadly defined diversity and are furthermore committed to equity and inclusion as essential components of excellence in patient care, education, and scientific discovery. Our ACGME-accredited fellowship program prepares five postdoctoral fellows yearly for careers as clinicians, clinician educators, and physician scientists in the discipline of Infectious Diseases.

We offer several pathways for Infectious Diseases fellowship training including:

Year One of Fellowship Training

The first year of fellowship training is common to all three tracks and is focused on inpatient infectious diseases consultation. Fellows rotate through three different sites including Yale New Haven Hospital’s (YNHH) two New Haven sites and the West Haven VA Connecticut Healthcare System. All three sites are within 15 minutes of each other by car or Yale shuttle.

Most of the year is spent rotating on inpatient ID consult services at the YNHH York Street campus, a quaternary, high-complexity healthcare center with exposure to general and immunocompromised patient populations. At the York Street campus, fellows work with expert infectious diseases faculty on one of three fellow-led consultative services: general infectious diseases, transplant infectious diseases, and hematology-oncology infectious diseases. At the Saint Raphael’s campus and the VA, fellows rotate on general infectious diseases services. Additional faculty-led services operate at both YNHH campuses to offload fellow-led services and optimize the educational experience. There is no standard expectation for a longitudinal ambulatory clinic during year 1.

To gain exposure into other facets of infectious diseases, fellows rotate on four week-long subspecialty training blocks approximately every three months throughout the first year.

These include rotations in:

  • Clinical microbiology
  • Antimicrobial stewardship
  • Outpatient ID
    • With exposure to a wide variety of subspeciality ID clinics including HIV, transplant, substance use disorders and infectious diseases, neuroinfectious diseases, outpatient antibiotic parenteral therapy
  • Professional development block
    • Designed to provide fellows with time to develop a research and mentorship plan for subsequent years of research training

Fellows receive additional training in clinical microbiology through hands-on subspecialty plate rounds (bacteriology, virology, mycology and parasitology) within the YNHH microbiology laboratory three times weekly at the York Street campus. The educational experience is further complimented by weekly Infectious Diseases Case Conferences, Journal Club, ID/Rheum Research

Conferences, HIV Research Conference, and Didactic Conferences in which faculty provide lectures on high-yield topics.

Subsequent Years of Fellowship Training

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Clinician Educator Track (Year 2)

Fellows in the Clinician Educator track are generally working towards a career as clinicians or clinician-educators.

In the second year of training, fellows within the Clinician Educator track select one of four subspecialty training tracks with the purpose of developing added expertise in a particular focus area within infectious diseases. Available clinical tracks leverage the expertise of infectious diseases faculty experts within the section.

Tracks include:

  1. HIV infection
  2. Transplant and immunocompromised infectious diseases
  3. Antimicrobial stewardship and hospital epidemiology
  4. Neuroinfectious diseases

Within each subspecialty track, fellows are provided hands-on mentorship by infectious diseases faculty experts in those fields and receive additional focused inpatient and outpatient clinical training, formal and informal teaching, and opportunities for mentored research. Fellows maintain a longitudinal half-day HIV continuity clinic as required by the ACGME at one of three onsite HIV clinics.

Investigator Track (Years 2 and 3)

Fellows in the Investigator track are generally working towards a career as Independent Investigators or Clinician-Scientists.

Fellows in the Investigator Track pivot to research focused training in their second and third years of fellowship. Training, which is supported by a T32 training grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH/NIAID), is centered on a research project in basic, translational or clinical investigation under the direct mentorship of one or more faculty within the Section of Infectious Diseases or mentors drawn from sections, departments, or schools from across Yale University (including from the other sections within the Department of Internal Medicine, Yale School of Public Health, and the School of Arts and Sciences, among many others.)

Investigator track fellows receive wraparound career development support in the form of monthly T32 team meetings and presentation of their research at Research in Progress meetings. Investigator track fellows have the opportunity to pursue additional coursework or formal degrees including:

  • Responsible Conduct of Research
  • PhD in Investigative Medicine at Yale Center for Clinical Investigation
  • National Clinician Scholars Program
  • Masters in Health Science in the Medical Education Pathway Degree Program (MHS-Med Ed)
  • Masters in Health Science in Infectious Diseases through the Office of Student Research
  • Masters of Science in Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases at Yale School of Public Health

Coursework is also available for formal auditing through the Yale School of Public Health, Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI), and elsewhere. Many of our fellows take a grant-writing seminar to develop K award proposals.

Physician Scientist ABIM Research Pathway/Academic Track (Years 2, 3 and 4)

The ABIM Research Pathway is an integrated program that combines training in research with training in clinical internal medicine and its subspecialties including Infectious Diseases. This pathway is recommended for physicians who intend to seriously pursue a career in basic, translational, or clinical research. The Yale Infectious Diseases Fellowship program admits trainees accepted to Yale's ABIM Physician-Scientist Research Pathway and committed to Infectious Diseases training. Fellows in this track complete two years of Internal Medicine residency training followed by four years of Infectious Diseases fellowship training. The structure of this pathway is similar to the Investigator track but with one additional year of protective time for research (Year 4).

Infectious Diseases Fellowship Leadership

Diversity