Curriculum

The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Fellowship ensures trainees’ qualification for the American Board of Pediatrics certifying examination in pediatric infectious diseases and prepares them for successful careers in pediatric infectious diseases.

During each year of training, fellows will spend time on the pediatric infectious diseases inpatient consult service (75% time in Year 1, 25% time in Year 2, 25% time in Year 3) and also care for patients in an outpatient setting, evaluating new patients and managing established patients in a variety of infectious disease clinics. The remainder of each year is devoted to scholarly activity (25% time in Year 1, 75% time in Year 2, 75% time in Year 3), including a mentored research project and an interdisciplinary quality improvement project. These scholarly activities will be tailored to meet each fellow’s educational and career goals.

Training in research and completion of a research project related to pediatric infections is an important component of the fellowship. Each pediatric infectious disease fellow must design and conduct a scholarly project in their subspecialty area with supervision provided by an assigned faculty mentor.

Fellows will have 20 months of protected time for research that is divided among all three fellowship years but is more heavily weighted toward the second and third years of training. The project may be basic science or clinical in nature, depending on the fellow’s interests. Research mentors are available through both CHOC and UCI, and opportunities for lab research are strengthened by the research excellence of the infectious diseases team from UCI. Fellows will have the opportunity to seek research opportunities and mentors at both institutions.

The fellowship core curriculum will provide training in biostatistics, lab and clinical research methodology, study design, grant preparation, research ethics, Institutional Review Boards, evidence-based medicine, quality improvement, scientific writing and various other recommended topics.