Research is an integral part of our Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Fellowship. In fact, many of the principal investigators in NYU Langone’s Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine have also trained here.

We believe that our research program will support you to become the attending physician you want to be, as we routinely train great people from the bench to the bedside. The goal of the research component of your training is to introduce the techniques and skills that are necessary not only to conduct but also to interpret basic, translational, and clinical research in lung disease.

For those who want to pursue a researched-focused career, we provide fully funded opportunities for an additional research year (or years) to pursue advanced projects. During your fellowship, you also have opportunities to broaden your exposure to epidemiology, biostatistics, and the state-of-the-art laboratory developments that are rapidly becoming essential to the practice of medicine in the 21st century. There are additional formal and didactic components that can be taken as individual courses or connected to pursue a master’s degree with the Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Our research program occurs over the course of a three-year fellowship. Preparation for your capstone project begins in your first year, as you narrow down your interests to one area, which may be anything from asthma to critical care outcomes. Our division conducts research in several areas that may be of interest to you. A core research curriculum is also a valuable part of your training.

Fellowship Research Project

Our faculty members advise and mentor you as you develop your research interests and project. Because we believe that you work harder when you are truly interested, we provide you with an opportunity to explore your research interests and passions.

First Year

At the beginning of your first year, you are assigned a research advisor, who introduces you to the division’s scientific activities. You meet your advisor about once a month to review your progress on selecting a mentor and a project.

You also attend a one-day research retreat in the fall, where you meet research faculty and junior faculty who have chosen basic, translational, or clinical research careers. In addition to learning about the activities in our division’s laboratories, you receive advice on choosing a mentor, how to pursue a research career, concepts of grant design, and how to approach prerequisites for projects, such as investigational review board application approvals.

During January and February, the first-year class has a dedicated research workshop with many members of our research faculty.

In the spring of your first year, you choose a research mentor. Your decision may be based on a preexisting research interest. If you don’t have a defined interest already, you and our program faculty can work together to identify a mentor based on your clinical area of interest, a mentor’s interest in you, or a mentor’s resources. The mentor can work in our division or elsewhere within NYU Grossman School of Medicine, if you need someone with another area of research expertise.

First-year fellows submit proposals for possible research projects to a research committee, and a dedicated project is finalized by the end of the first year.

Second Year

During your second year, you present an overview of your area of study at a research conference. We encourage you to present your research project for possible submission as an abstract or for a poster or oral presentation to national meetings—such as those of the American College of Chest Physicians or the American Thoracic Society—or international meetings. Abstract and presentation proposals are extensively reviewed before submission. We also encourage you to develop your presentation into a manuscript for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.

Third Year

Your third year is devoted to your research project under your mentor’s direction; you also have less clinical responsibility. Day-to-day activities include basic laboratory work, clinical trial work, or biostatistical analytic work. During this year, you are expected to strive for a publication in a high-quality journal.

Fellows interested in a research career also have the opportunity for grants and advanced research fellowships.

If you are interested in an academic career, arranging one or more additional years of research may be possible. Please discuss this possibility with your research advisor, division chief, and fellowship director as early as possible. You are encouraged to apply for relevant awards and fellowships, including support from the Physician–Scientist Training Program as well as to consider a master of science degree in clinical investigation through NYU Langone’s Clinical and Translation Science Institute. Pathways for an MPH and a master’s in medical education are also available.

Opportunities for Additional Training

Our fellowship program takes full advantage of the many resources at NYU Langone, where opportunities include study at the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, a master’s degree in public health, and the Vilcek Institute of Graduate Biomedical Science.

The Clinical and Translational Science Institute supports a master of science in clinical investigation, with focus areas on translational research, biomedical informatics for clinical investigators, comparative effectiveness and implementation research, health disparities and health equity research, health innovations and therapeutics, and healthcare delivery science. It also has certificate-level resources on translational research, comparative effectiveness and implementation research, healthcare delivery science, health disparities and health equity research, healthcare innovations, and an intensive program in clinical research methods.

Vilcek Institute of Graduate Biomedical Science supports offerings in a master of biomedical informatics and a master in genome health analysis.

Focus Your Training

We know that part of fellowship is helping develop the skills you need to be a successful academic physician. Academic medicine has placed role for promotion on tracks with focus on clinical education and clinical research.

We support a training focus for fellows interested in clinical education: they receive extra training and mentorship in becoming leaders in clinical education by supporting developments in curriculum development, educational methods, teaching portfolio development, and other areas.

For those who want to focus on research, either clinical or bench, we support students with structured courses through the Clinical and Translational Science Institute or an alternative program, mentorship, additional funding for fourth-year training, and additional fellowship seminars to hone research ideas.

Research Laboratories

Our fellowship program takes full advantage of the many research resources in pulmonary and critical care at NYU Langone.

Housed at Bellevue, the William N. Rom Environmental Lung Disease Laboratory is a component of NYU Langone’s World Trade Center (WTC) research program and the WTC Environmental Health Center. The laboratory’s mission is to promote lung health through clinical evaluation and treatment of individuals exposed to environmental dusts and epidemiological health tracking, as well as translational research on the mechanisms of WTC- and environmentally related lung diseases.

Additional research laboratories are located at both Tisch Hospital and NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue. For example, studies in lung physiology are performed in the André Cournand Respiratory Physiology Research Laboratory at Bellevue.

Segal Lab, founded by Leopoldo N. Segal, MD, and also known as the NYU Translational Lung Biology Laboratory, is a multicenter PI lab founded to help bring bench to bedside. Its studies look at real-world questions: the effect of the lung cancer microbiome, the relation between biomass and asthma, the ventilator-associated pneumonia transcriptome, and pulmonary signatures of thrombosis. Segal Lab brings a multiomic approach to pulmonary and critical care diseases.