Fellowship Overview

Description

We are a high volume liver transplant center, performing approximately 200 adult liver transplants per year. We are the largest living donor liver transplant program in North America with 50-70 living liver donations per year. Our program follows >2000 recipients in clinic, and maintains a waiting list of 200-250 patients, meaning that approximately 10-15 new patients are assessed for transplant weekly. Our transplant program includes innovative therapies including living liver donation for fulminant liver failure and extensive liver cancer, donation after cardiac death, and liver transplantation with normothermic perfused grafts.

We have four funded transplant hepatology fellowship positions. The trainees come for one or two years, depending on the future career goals for the fellow. We recommend a one-year fellowship if the fellow will return to a center that provides care for transplant patient, but is not performing liver transplantations. If the fellow aims for a future position in an active transplant center a two-year fellowship is advisable. Our fellowship positions are fully funded and a salary is provided. The fellow is required to participate 3-4 times per months in the in-house call of the Multi-Organ transplant service. Our fellowship curriculum involves weekly rotations between the in house liver transplant service, the liver transplant outpatient clinics, and protected time for research. The fellowship also includes participation in elective and emergency endoscopy for liver transplant patients. We will arrange for rotations in transplant related fields such as radiology, pathology, and imaging according to the fellows wishes and needs.

 

Research

Clinical research is an important component of the fellowship. We provide an extensive database including more than 2000 liver transplantations with liver 20 years of follow-up. A database manager as well as a statistician is available to assist with research projects. Our patient population includes many unique features, such as a large living donor population, patients with extensive hepatocellular carcinomas, large data sets for uncommon indications for liver transplantation. Our expectations are that the fellow completes one project in his/her first year and three projects in the second year.

Curriculum & Didactic Teaching

We offer a wide variety of education and teaching rounds.

The following regularly scheduled rounds and conferences are held:

Date Frequency Name
Mon 8 – 9 am weekly Hepatology Clinicopathological Conference
Mon 6 – 8 pm monthly HPB/Hepatology Faculty Club Series
Tues 8 – 9 am weekly Live Liver Donor Imaging Review
Tues 4 – 5 pm weekly Hepatoma Review Board
Wed 8 – 9 am weekly Multi-Organ Transplant Rounds
Thu 7 – 8 am weekly GI Transplant Teaching Seminars
Thu 4 – 5 pm monthly GI Transplant Quality Assurance/Research Rounds
Thu 6 – 9 pm quarterly Transplant Journal Club
Fri 9 – 10 am weekly Liver Transplant Listing Conference
Fri 10 – 11 am weekly Live Liver Donation Recipient and Donor Review

 

Invited Professors

(2015) Pedro Baptista

Group Leader and Assistant Professor, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Zaragoza Area, Spain
“Tissue and Organ Engineering”

(2015) Dr. Scott Friedman

Chief, Division of Liver Diseases, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY

(2015) Dr. Christine M Cserti-Gazdewich

Transfusion Medicine Specialist & Consultant Hematologist

(2015) Dr. Jean-Michael Pawlotski

Professor of Medicine at the University of Paris-Est , France

(2016) Dr. Herbert Gaisano

Senior Scientist, Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, one of the world’s leading gastroenterologists, has been appointed to the Order of Ontario

(2016) Dr. Michael Ison

Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and Surgery (Organ Transplantation)
“Study of Infection in Transplant Patients”

(2016) Dr. Atul Butte

Director of the new Institute of Computational Health Sciences (ICHS) at the University of California, San Francisco, and a Professor of Pediatrics

(2016) Dr. John Fung

Professor of Surgery, Chief, Section of Transplantation, The University of Chicago

(2016) Dr. William Chapman

Chief, Division of Surgery Chief, Abdominal Transplantation Section

(2016) Dr. Peter Ghali

Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology, McGill University

(2016) Marina Berenguer

Consultant Hepatologist at La Fe University Hospital, Valencia, Spain

(2017) Prof. Qin Ning

Department of Infectious Diseases, and the Director of the Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
“Treatment Strategy for Chronic Hepatitis B”

Upcoming Speakers

(Apr 2017) Dr. Peter Zandstra

University Professor & Canada Research Chair, Stem Cell Bioengineering
Zandstra’s work integrates engineering and biological approaches and has contributed to the development of clinically and industrially relevant and academically recognized technologies based on the design of bioprocesses for the growth and differentiation of adult and embryonic stem cells. Direct applications of this work include tissue and cellular engineering, gene therapy, and organ transplantation.

(2017) Dr. Michael Wolf

Professor of Medicine and Learning Sciences, and Associate Division Chief – Research for General Internal Medicine & Geriatrics