The Cleveland Clinic reproductive endocrinology and infertility fellowship program is an American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology approved fellowship. It is a three year program with half the time devoted to research. We accept one fellow each year. Candidates may submit an application at http://www.socrei.org/cgi-bin/socrei/SREIApplicActions.pl. We participate in the National Resident Match Program.
The greatest strength of the Cleveland Clinic fellowship in reproductive endocrinology and infertility is the Cleveland Clinic itself. The Cleveland Clinic is the largest employer in northeast Ohio with over 1,700 physicians on staff. The Cleveland Clinic was ranked 4th in the nation in the 2009 US News & World Report and our department of Ob/Gyn was ranked 6th. The main campus is on over 140 acres including the hospital, clinic buildings and the Lerner Research Institute. The Lerner Research Institute is the fifth largest research institute in the country with over 741,000 square feet and receives over $150 million annually in grants and contracts. In addition, there are 14 clinic satellites in the surrounding communities and 12 affiliated hospitals.
The goal of the fellowship program is not just to prepare the fellows to meet the requirements for ABOG certification of special competence in the area of reproductive endocrinology and infertility but to become outstanding academic reproductive endocrinologists using all of the resources available at the Cleveland Clinic. We have seven reproductive endocrinologists in our section. This will provide the fellows with a very large and varied clinical and surgical volume. We perform the complete spectrum of reproductive surgery including correction of congenital malformations, microsurgical reversal of sterilization and surgery for myomas, tubal disease and all stages of endometriosis. We strive to use the most minimally invasive approach including minilaparotomy, operative hysteroscopy and laparoscopy with and without the surgical robot. In fact, we performed the world’s first fully robotic surgery, a tubal anastomosis in 1998. We perform over 500 fresh IVF cycles a year and the lab performs all permutations of IVF including donor sperm, donor oocyte, gestational carriers, embryo co-culture, embryo and oocyte cryopreservation, assisted hatching, PGD, in vitro maturation, percutaneous sperm aspiration and testicular sperm extraction. The IVF lab is also well equipped for research.
We can support the fellow in any area of basic science reproductive research they wish to pursue to fulfill their thesis requirement. Our group has been very productive and is always among those with the greatest number of abstracts accepted at the annual meeting of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. Many of those abstracts have been prize winners. The fellows may work in the Center for Reproductive Medicine research laboratory, the IVF research laboratory or the Lerner Research Institute depending on their particular area of concentration.
