Program Director’s Message
Dear Applicant,
Our priority for our cardiovascular training program is to ensure a strong clinical background and training experience, and to provide exposure to a wide and varied patient population. We seek to select exceptional clinicians and expose them to a wide array of training and research opportunities. Each fellow is encouraged to determine their own interests. The Program Director, Associate Program Director and Chief of Cardiology work closely with each fellow to ensure that their personal goals will be achieved during the fellowship. Whether you are pursuing a future in academics or clinical cardiology, interventional to prevention, we will work closely with each fellow to individualize the program to your needs. Specifically, we have mentorships (both for personal and research opportunities), a Women in Cardiology program and a formal policy on parental leave (to allow both maternity and paternity leave).
Just a short word about some of our unique rotations. The C Team is our inpatient cardiology service (including CCU), an extremely busy and active service, and is primarily responsible for following cardiac patients from emergency room to discharge. Fellows will be exposed to acute and chronic cardiac patients with heart failure, arrhythmias, valvular heart disease, congenital heart disease, pulmonary hypertension and acute coronary syndromes. The fellows on this service will supervise third- year medical residents, interns and medical students during their month long rotation. The program is highly autonomous, and thus fellows will ample get hands-on experience making decisions, performing procedures and teaching. Teaching is top-down, so faculty instruct the fellows, the fellows teach residents and the residents teach interns and medical students. Patients are followed for continuity from the Emergency Department to the CCU, and then stay on the service all the way to discharge (step-down, telemetry, wards).
Advanced Imaging exposes fellows to cardiac CT, MR and nuclear imaging, with a strong emphasis on structural and valvular heart disease, and fellows can sit for cardiac CT and nuclear board examinations during their second or third year.
Fellows will attend Adult Congenital Heart Disease, Structural Heart Disease, Pulmonary Hypertension and High-Risk Obstetrics clinics, as well as a continuity clinic where fellows will follow their own patients over the 3 years of their fellowship.
A new added focus in the program is on preventive cardiology, structural heart disease and advanced congestive heart failure. We have a new preventive cardiology lecture series to cover all aspects of this new growing subspecialty, and have a new faculty member whose primary focus is on advanced cardiomyopathy, as well as a dedicated program for structural heart disease with both imaging and interventional faculty.
We encourage each fellow to develop and follow their own path during fellowship, to best achieve their desired goals and training to prepare them for practice or further fellowship training. Fellows will have time in their second and third year to take electives in advanced heart failure, structural heart disease, electrophysiology, transplant medicine and imaging. Fellows who are highly motivated to become interventional cardiologists will be able to participate in the interventional track, providing them increased exposure to interventional/structural heart disease and increased procedures during general fellowship. For those Fellows interested in academics will work on writing grants and getting manuscripts written to establish themselves as an academic cardiologist.
In addition to attending the various clinical, invasive, and non-invasive services, the fellow will be expected to participate in several didactic conferences that are held on a weekly basis. Weekly conferences include cardiology grand rounds, cardiac imaging, arrhythmia and ECG conferences, and cardiac catheterization conferences. Additional didactic conferences are scheduled throughout the month, including journal club and research conferences. Fellows’ are expected to attend, participate and present at these conferences. Fellows are also sponsored to go to national conferences every year, including ACC and AHA, with the expectation that they will attend at least one national conference per year. Fellows’ registration and travel for attending these conferences is sponsored by Harbor-UCLA.
We have a long track record of providing the training that fellows need to successfully pursue clinical or academic cardiology. We have many prior fellows who are in academic positions throughout the United States, and all of our clinical fellows find excellent jobs in their desired geographic region. Please feel free to reach out with any further questions about our program.
Sincerely,
Matthew J. Budoff, M.D., FACC, FAHA
Professor of Medicine, UCLA
Endowed Chair of Preventive Cardiology
Program Director, Division of Cardiology