A central focus of the Adolescent Medicine fellowship program at Vanderbilt is the development of exceptional adolescent medicine specialists seeking to pursue an academic career. The fellow’s research experience will be supported by well-established infrastructure at the division, department, and institutional levels, ensuring access to a wide range of potential mentors and collaborators as well as opportunities for career development.

The process of selecting a research mentor will begin in the first year of training. The first-year fellow will meet with the fellowship director monthly for the first half of the year specifically to discuss research interests and develop goals and timelines. Based on the fellows’ individual interests, the fellowship director will facilitate identification of a research mentor for each trainee. Throughout fellowship training, the fellow will be expected to meet with their mentor(s) weekly to ensure adequate research progress, identify and address challenges, and discuss career development. The fellow will have opportunities to present their project at appropriate intervals locally within established research conferences at VUMC.

The second and third years of training are largely devoted to research and scholarly pursuits. The nature of the research will be individualized to the interests of each fellow, and their clinical activity will be tailored to fit those research interests as appropriate. It is expected that by the end of the third year the fellow will have a defined scholarly work product. Acceptable trackable outcomes and products of scholarship will include high-level advocacy involvement, grant submission, peer-reviewed journal submission, or a medical education publication. A strong emphasis will be placed on publishing findings. The fellow will also be expected to present findings at a national conference by the third year of fellowship.