Program Highlights

Our fellowship is distinguished by the following:

• It is a small fellowship, which allows for a high faculty-to-fellow ratio and an unusually close working relationship between faculty and trainees. Fellows enjoy a great deal of one-on-one and one-on-two teaching, and are exposed to several different approaches to disease management in the course of an average week.
• It is not a “service fellowship.” It was established to give the faculty an opportunity to teach and to pursue scholarly activities. There was never any need to provide help in shouldering the clinical burden on the faculty.  
• It is a program that is dedicated to didactic teaching. We offer a weekly board review session and a biweekly series of didactic lectures and teaching sessions on important topics in endocrinology. Faculty and fellows gather every week for an academic meeting that can include journal club, discussion of difficult and interesting cases, board review questions, outside speakers, review of interesting or difficult scans with radiologists, and literature reviews presented by the fellows. There is also a quarterly Medical-Surgical Endocrinology Conference. Fellows are regularly updated with new guidelines that are discussed at the weekly academic meeting.
• Because we are a safety net hospital our program provides a clinical experience that is enriched with patients from underserved populations. We see patients who participate fully in their disease management, and patients who require our patience, perseverance, and individualized teaching. Our patients present with unusual problems such as myxedema coma and thyroid storm as well as the more common problems such as Graves’ disease and type 2 diabetes. There is also a wide variety of inpatient consultations including diseases of the thyroid, adrenal glands, parathyroid disease, pituitary disease, and diabetes.
• There is a teaching clinic devoted exclusively to management of patients on insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring. 
• There are three general endocrinology clinics per week in which fellows manage their own panel of patients and, with appropriate supervision, manage a wide range of endocrine diseases including adrenal incidentalomas, pituitary adenomas, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, hypoparathyroidism, hyper- and hypothyroidism, diabetes insipidus, adrenal insufficiency, hirsutism, and polycystic ovary syndrome.
• The outpatient nursing service performs a wide variety of outpatient testing for us, including cosyntropin stimulation tests, saline suppression tests, meal tolerance tests, water deprivation tests, and clonidine suppression tests.
• Through an agreement with the Department of Radiology our fellowship offers training in ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration biopsy of the thyroid. In 2018-19 our second-year fellow performed 39 ultrasound-guided FNA’s under the supervision of a radiologist.