FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, June 15, 2015
Contact: Leah C. Payne, Director of Public Affairs, Schools of Medicine & Pharmacy, 304-691-1713         

Nephrology fellowship approved for Marshall School of Medicine 

HUNTINGTON, W.Va.—Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine has been approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to begin a nephrology fellowship. The ACGME is a private, nonprofit council that evaluates and accredits residency and fellowship programs in the United States.

Nephrology is a subspecialty of medicine that deals with the physiology and diseases of the kidneys and hypertension.

“Expanding our training opportunities to include nephrology is an important step for us as an academic medical center,” said Joseph I. Shapiro, M.D., dean of the school of medicine and a fellowship-trained nephrologist. “This program helps us to increase the number of nephrologists for our region, which suffers from significantly higher rates of chronic kidney disease and hypertension than most other regions of the country.”

The new fellowship program, scheduled to begin July 1, 2016, was approved to accept up to four fellows. The two-year nephrology fellowship is completed after a three-year internal medicine residency.

“This program is designed to train physicians to become outstanding nephrologists who can serve patients in our region as well as across the United States,” said Paulette S. Wehner, M.D., vice dean for graduate medical education and a professor of cardiology.  “There have been many people involved in the successful accreditation including Drs. Zeid Khitan and Neha Garg, nephrologists in our department of internal medicine, Amanda Jones, program administrator, and Cindy Dailey, director of graduate medical education.”

Zeid Khitan, M.D., who will serve as the fellowship program director, says he’s excited to begin. 

“We are all looking forward to starting a state-of-the-art kidney disease fellowship program aimed at training our candidates to be successful clinicians and scientists,” Khitan said. 

With the addition of the new nephrology fellowship, Marshall now has a total of eight ACGME-accredited residency programs and six accredited fellowship programs. 

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Date Posted: Monday, June 15, 2015