Clinical training

The clinical practice curriculum includes primarily outpatient clinics and electives. Clinical rotations include aorta/Marfan, genetic arrhythmia/SCD, familial hypercholesterolemia, hypertrophic and dilated cardiomyopathy, congenital heart disease, pulmonary hypertension, and cardiac amyloidosis clinics. Selective options include medical genomics, genetic counseling, laboratory medicine and pathology, biomedical informatics, Center for Individualized Medicine, medical ethics, cardiac imaging, and cardiac pathology.

Rotation schedule

A typical weekly schedule in the Cardiology, Genomics Fellowship program includes four days of various cardiovascular (CV) genomics clinics (including time for clinic prep and follow-up) and one day of research. This schedule will form the core of the fellowship time, consisting of approximately nine to 10 months with two to three months of elective time. You are expected to participate in the educational activities of the Genomic and Precision Medicine Council of the AHA and one or more of ClinGen’s variant curation expert panels (VCEPs).

Call frequency

Hospital consultations and follow-up of inpatients may be included in the curriculum. You will not have overnight call responsibilities.

Research training

You are required to engage in scholarly activity during the fellowship. Mayo’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCaTS) is a central hub for institutional advancement of research and education. The center provides tools and expert consultation to support every aspect of medical research, including basic discovery science, clinical and community-engaged research, and late-stage application and commercialization.

Research opportunities

These are examples of extensive opportunities for translational genomics research are available.

• Mayo Genomic Research databases: Project GENERATION and TAPESTRY include nearly 200,000 participants with exome and genotype data. The RIGHT 10k project (pharmacogenomics) includes 10,000 Mayo patients with sequence data on >80 pharmacogenes. Additionally, there is access to UK Biobank data as well as All of Us Data.
• Clinic databases: Aortopathy clinic, long QT/SCD, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, dilated cardiomyopathy, FHIRE, and Cascade Registry (familial hypercholesterolemia).
• NHGRI datasets: eMERGE, PRIMED, and ClinGen.
• Clinical Trials: Biologics and other novel lipid lowering therapies, gene therapy, and gene editing for monogenic CV diseases.
• Variant Curation: Opportunity to participate in ClinGen’s Variant Curation Expert Panels and develop functional assays to assess variant pathogenicity.
• Rare diseases: Rare disease research including novel therapeutics and whole genome/exome sequencing for diagnostic odysseys.
• EHR-based genomic discovery and implementation: Use of Artificial Intelligence in Genomics, Machine learning and NLP, and digital tools for genomic medicine implementation.

Didactic training

Clinical conferences, seminars, small discussion groups, journal clubs, and one-on-one instruction are integral parts of this fellowship. Daily conferences cover a wide variety of topics. You are encouraged to take the course offered by the Genomics and Precision Medicine Council of the AHA, attend the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Genomic Medicine meetings, and avail of research/educational talks on genome.gov. You can pursue a Masters in Clinical Research or a Certificate Program in Clinical and Translational Science or Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare. Coursework in bioinformatics, data science, genetics is available through Mayo Clinic’s graduate school. There is an expectation to complete and become certified by ClinGen's Variant Curation training and participate in ongoing Variant Curation Expert Panels.

Evaluation