Integrating Clinical Training & Research
Thank you for your interest in the pediatric urology fellowship at Primary Children’s Hospital and the University of Utah. The training program is two years in length and is designed to uniquely integrate clinical training and research in a very functional way. The fellow will have 60 percent clinical and 40 percent research time allocations throughout the two-year commitment. This allows for both ongoing research throughout the fellowship and a full two years to hone clinical and operative skills. The fellow will have exceptional opportunities for increasing independence, particularly in the second year of fellowship. Due to its integrated nature, the fellowship at Primary Children’s Hospital provides an experience that will be similar to what a research-oriented pediatric urologist could expect as a faculty member in most academic institutions. We feel that both productivity during the fellowship years and preparation for a future job are optimized by this design.
Facility & Patient Volume
Primary Children’s Hospital is a 300-bed, free-standing pediatric hospital affiliated with the University of Utah and Intermountain Healthcare. It serves the entire Mountain West, which spans about a tenth of the geographic mainland US. Our setting and regional reputation provide a broad diversity of disease and an exceptional volume of patients. This enables a fellow to have a remarkable breadth of surgical and clinical experience along with extensive exposure to endoscopic, open, and laparoscopic pediatric urology. We have five pediatric urologists with diverse training backgrounds on faculty and a pediatric gynecologist was recently hired to closely collaborate with our group. We are part of a larger Division of Urology that includes 13 adult urologists and several full-time PhDs. There are a total of three urology fellowship training programs (infertility, reconstruction, and pediatric urology) at the University of Utah.
Rotation Schedule
Our program offers a unique integrated schedule that permits clinical and research experience during both years of fellowship. We feel that this more closely mimics the ‘real life’ practice of an academic pediatric urologist. The fellow will spend an average of two days each week in pursuit of hypothesis-driven basic or clinical science research. The fellow is given the flexibility to schedule these days based on operative schedules and research timelines. Rotations through pediatric surgery, pediatric gynecology, and pediatric nephrology are also scheduled.
Conferences and Courses
The pediatric urology fellow is expected to attend both major research conferences each year (AUA and SPU Fall Congress) along with one training course. There is the also the potential to present pertinent research findings at international research meetings, at the discretion of the Division.
Optional Division-Sponsored Formal Graduate Coursework and Optional Third Year
The pediatric urology fellow will have the opportunity to pursue OPTIONAL Division-sponsored graduate coursework leading to a Graduate Certificate in one of several fields at the University of Utah. Coursework will supplement the fellow’s research aims and will aid in the completion of research abstracts and manuscripts. Coursework leading to a specialized Graduate Certificate is available in Public Health, Patient Centered Outcomes Research/Comparative Effectiveness Research, Global Health (requires 4 weeks on-site in Peru or Ghana), Health Services Administration, Big Data, and Statistics (for applicants with a sufficient background in mathematics), in addition to other health-related fields at the discretion of the Division. If the fellow wishes to pursue a graduate degree, they have the option to pursue a third year of fellowship, and will divide their time between clinical work, research, and graduate coursework culminating the completion of a Division-sponsored health-related Master’s degree in their field of interest (subject to Divisional discretion).
More information regarding several of the Graduate Certificate/Degree offerings can be found here.
Apply Through Fellowship Match
Interested applicants should register for the pediatric urology fellowship match website, found at www.spuonline.org. We take one fellow at a time, every other year. The next fellowship interviews will be conducted in early 2022. The fellowship program director, Dr. Chad Wallis, can be contacted at chad.wallis@hsc.utah.edu with additional questions. Again, thank you for your interest and we welcome any inquiries.
