Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship

As lifelong students and teachers of pulmonary, allergy/immunology and medical intensive care, we are dedicated to developing physician leaders for academic medicine and industry, advancing the frontiers of medicine through research aimed at developing new strategies for the prevention and detection and treatment of respiratory and allergic disease. We care for patients as a multidisciplinary team of professionals who apply the latest scientific and medical advances with competence, compassion and humility. As stewards of a great institution, Penn pursues these missions with unwavering integrity and with an optimistic view of the future.

Our fellowship is committed to a social justice framework in our educational and clinical missions. We welcome and support applicants who have faced barriers to practicing medicine, specifically those who identify as minorities, whether defined on the basis of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical ability, religion, first generation in higher education, or otherwise. We are committed to creating fellowship classes that reflect our diverse patient population, as we believe that this is essential for addressing the healthcare disparities facing the patients we serve. To this end, we perform holistic application reviews, behavioral-based interviewing techniques, and offer one-on-one confidential recruitment advising for applicants.  

We are very excited to have two distinct training pathways available at Penn for prospective Pulmonary Critical Care Fellows — tailored to future career goals and aspirations. We expanded our fellowship training opportunities for several reasons:

1. The Penn Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Division has proactively response to changes in our specialty in recent years and expected growth in the future.
2. We want to ensure that we are capturing all the training opportunities available at Penn Medicine, including numerous types of critical care exposure, a world-class lung transplant program, and varied sub-specialty immersive experiences – interstitial lung disease, interventional pulmonology, pulmonary hypertension, and advanced consultative pulmonary medicine, just to name a few.
3. Most importantly, we want to be able to continue to provide a complete training experience and to maintain Penn's status as a premier training institution that will continue to attract the future leaders in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.

Training Pathways

Our two training pathways are as follows:

1. Research Scholar – The goal of this pathway is to attract top fellowship candidates with a focus on careers as physician researchers. This pathway includes 18 months of in-depth clinical activity as well as two years of dedicated research time. The research time can be in one of several areas — basic and translational wet bench research, as well as several University of Pennsylvania Master's Degree programs, including clinical epidemiology and health services research.
2. Clinical Scholar – The goal of this pathway is to attract top fellowship candidates with a focus on training and preparing excellent clinician leaders. This new pathway is distinguished from the Research Scholar experience as fellows would remain clinically active for 3 years (as opposed to 18 months). As part of this track fellows are expected to build an area of clinical focus (critical care, transplant, advanced lung disease, etc.), and to complete scholarly projects in either medical education or quality and safety.