Program Director's Welcome
Thank you for your interest in the Cleveland Clinic fellowship program in Critical Care Medicine. As a program director, I am extremely proud of our commitment to training tomorrow’s leaders in critical care. We are committed to finding and training the best physicians in the world, irrespective of where you were born, where you trained, or how you look. With one of the largest Medical Intensive Care Units (MICUs) in the U.S., we have created a unique environment for training fellows. Our team of educators is wholly committed to advancing the careers of our trainees through mentorship and effective teaching techniques.
Mission Statement
We are committed to training physicians with a passion for clinical care, education, and research to become tomorrow's leaders in pulmonary and critical care medicine through excellence in patient care, scholarship, innovation and leadership.
We will accomplish this by:
- Providing world-class patient care and unparalleled clinical training
- Recruiting proactive visionary candidates with a diversity of career goals
- Promoting individualized mentorship
- Supporting, protecting, and guiding meaningful educational and research opportunities
- Innovating in education
- Teaching and role modeling character traits of effective healers and scholars, including communication, integrity, compassion, and teamwork
- Embracing quality and safety as a culture
Our track record of developing physician leaders is centered on our commitment to excellence in patient care, education, scholarship and innovation. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had the privilege of leading a significant portion of the clinical, educational, and research response for Cleveland Clinic. In our ICUs, creating a work environment that is safe for caregivers and patients alike has been our top priority. This includes ensuring that we have adequate personal protective equipment (PPE), testing resources, and guidance regarding COVID-19 best practices. Our commitment to ensuring the physical, spiritual and emotional wellness of caregivers has allowed our Critical Care fellows, nurses and staff to truly provide world class patient care. Here is one example.
With regard to education, our staff and fellows from the Respiratory Institute have used the pandemic as an opportunity to develop new avenues for learning. Through flipped classroom experiences and new ways to interact virtually, fellows now have access to a wealth of resources and expertise which build on our prior successes. One example of this is our mechanical ventilator curriculum. Standardized Education for Ventilatory Assistance (SEVA) is a biweekly conference designed to help fellows gain a detailed mastery of mechanical ventilation theory and management.
Our fellows are extremely productive academically. Scholarship is a central part of the culture here with fellows involved in an array of research topics. Popular areas of interest include, but are not limited to ARDS, ECMO, sepsis, mechanical ventilation, point of care ultrasound, medical education & simulation, and informatics/big data. Every fellow is expected to engage in mentored scholarship and writing as a part of their critical care training.
Finally, we believe that innovation is a cornerstone of our success. From developing new procedural techniques to new devices to new ways of educating, the seeds of discovery are abundant among our fellows. We foster these opportunities through a broad network of expertise, teamwork and resources within and beyond the Cleveland Clinic enterprise.
The examples above are only a fraction of the exciting work our fellows and staff are pursuing. We would love the opportunity to meet you and to show you more about what makes Cleveland Clinic a world-class healthcare organization.
Facts & Figures
Cleveland Clinic's Respiratory Institute encompasses the Departments of Pulmonary Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Infectious Diseases, and Clinical Allergy and Immunology.
The Institute has realized enormous growth in the past several years, increasing the size of its faculty to over 200 physicians and expanding beyond the main campus to seven regional hospitals and 10 free-standing outpatient facilities.
Our 65 bed medical ICU is among the largest in the United States. Teams care for patients in a specialized format with 6 rounding teams inclusive of a dedicated procedure team and dedicated Liver, Oncology, and ECCOR/ECMO teams.
These units support our lung transplant and liver transplant programs, which areconsistently ranked among the top 3 centers for transplant volume in the nation. Both specialize in high-risk transplant patients who are frequently turned down by other centers.
Members of our Interventional Pulmonology section perform over 3500 bronchoscopies annually and offer state of the art diagnostic and therapeutic options for patients.
Coupled with our clinical initiatives is a thriving research enterprise that encompasses virtually all areas of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Infectious Disease medicine. Several faculty hold joint appointments in the Lerner Research Institute where they run NIH-funded basic science labs investigating molecular and cellular mechanisms relevant to pulmonary fibrosis, pulmonary hypertension and asthma. Numerous other members of the Respiratory institute have participated and continue to lead major NIH-sponsored collaborative clinical trials networks including Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis Clinical Research Network, Prevention and Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury (PETAL), Long Term Oxygen Treatment Trial (LOTT) for COPD and the Clinical Trials in Organ Transplantation.
Leadership
Raed Dweik, MD, MBA is the Chair of Cleveland Clinic’s Respiratory Institute (RI) which in home to four departments: Pulmonary Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Infectious Disease, and Allergy/Immunology. The clinical activities of the RI are conducted at Cleveland Clinic’s main campus, as well as several Cleveland Clinic Health System hospitals and freestanding multispecialty outpatient facilities. In addition to providing general pulmonary, critical care, infectious disease and allergy services, the RI provides advanced subspecialty services that attract patients from throughout the United States and several countries. Over 20 percent of the Institute’s patients come from outside of Northeast Ohio. The educational activities of the RI include five fellowship programs in pulmonary and critical care, critical care, infectious disease, allergy and clinical immunology, advanced interventional bronchoscopy, and lung transplant. The RI conducts a broad spectrum of research activities across the spectrum of basic, translational, and clinical research (including multicenter clinical trials). The research is supported by federal grants, industry sponsored trials, and various foundation awards.
Dr. Dweik's clinical interests include pulmonary hypertension, asthma, chronic beryllium disease and critical care and he regularly attends in the medical intensive care unit (MICU). He is board certified in internal medicine, pulmonary disease and critical care medicine and has been listed in The Best Doctors in America since 2005.
Dr. Dweik is Professor of Medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and has a joint appointment in the Lerner Research Institute (LRI) with continuous funding from the NIH since 2002. He established a Research Center of Excellence in Pulmonary Vascular Disease including a patient registry, a human sample biorepository and an animal model core. He was the recipient of the Cleveland Clinic Outstanding Innovation in Translational Medicine Award and a Third Frontier Award from the state of Ohio for his pioneering work in exhaled breath analysis in lung and systemic disease. He has published over 250 peer reviewed manuscripts and book chapters and serves on several journal editorial boards, National Institutes of Health (NIH) review panels and American Thoracic Society (ATS), American Heart Association (AHA), and Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) committees.
Dr. Dweik is the recipient of many teaching awards including the Cleveland Clinic Distinguished Teacher Award from the Internal Medicine Residency Program for five times, the Teacher of the Year Award from the Pulmonary Fellowship Program and the Scholarship in Teaching Award from Case Western Reserve University. He is Director of the KL2 program of the Cleveland Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative (CTSC), a member of the admissions committee at CCLCM, and past chair of the Committee on Advancement, Promotion and Tenure (CAPT) at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Dr. Dweik has served on the Board of Governors, Board of Trustees and Board of Directors of the Cleveland Clinic Health System and chairs the system's Innovation Management and Conflict of Interest committee (IM&COI), the routine Capital Review Committee (CRC) and the strategic capital Advisory Team (AT).
Dr. Dweik is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians (FACP), the Royal College of Physicians of Canada (FRCPC), the American College of Chest Physicians (FCCP), the Society of Critical Care Medicine (FCCM), the American Thoracic Society (ATSF), the American Heart Association (FAHA), the Pulmonary Vascular Research Institute (PVRI), and a founding member of the International Association for Breath Research (IABR).
After receiving his medical degree from the University of Jordan Faculty of Medicine, Dr. Dweik completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Miami Valley Hospital and Wright State University in Dayton, OH. He completed his fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Cleveland Clinic.
Hassan Khouli, MD is the Chair of the Department of Critical Care Medicine at Cleveland Clinic. He has over 20 years of experience working in critical care medicine and pulmonary medicine. Dr. Khouli has special expertise in the evaluation and management of patients with complex critical illnesses including sepsis and septic shock, ARDS, multi-organ failure, and decision making at the end of life.
Prior to joining Cleveland Clinic at the end of 2017, Dr. Khouli was a Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, the Chief of the Critical Care Division at Mt. Sinai St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai West Hospitals, and the Chair of Medical Ethics for over 15 years. He is the 2017 recipient of the “Dr. Nathan Kase Innovations in Medical Education Award” from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Khouli was an early leader in the development of simulation training and he founded the Center for Advanced Medical Simulation (CAMS) at Mount Sinai West and Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospitals; one of the earliest centers in the U.S. to be accredited by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare.
Dr. Khouli has been an invited lecturer regionally, nationally, and internationally. He has received several government, private foundations, and industry research grants and has authored many peer-reviewed articles, abstracts, and book chapters.
Dr. Khouli has been actively involved in public policy, including current service on the New York State Governor’s Task Force on Life and the Law (composed of individuals representing medicine, law, religion, philosophy, and bioethics), and the New York State Department of Health Sepsis Advisory Board. He has been elected to “Best Doctor in America” several years.
Neal Chaisson, MD, is the Program Director of the Critical Care Medicine Fellowship in the Respiratory Institute at Cleveland Clinic. He joined Cleveland Clinic in 2013 after completing his fellowship in Pulmonary/Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His primary area of expertise is in the evaluation and treatment of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).
Dr. Chaisson has active clinical and research interests in the hemodynamic evaluation of PAH patients and in medical education. He has been a runner-up for the Distinguished Teacher Award from the Internal Medicine Residency Program in 2015 and 2016 and was presented with the award in 2017. In 2019, he was awarded Critical Care Medicine Teacher of the Year In 2021, he was named Educator of the Year for the Cleveland Clinic Respiratory Institute. In 2022, he was nominated for the Cleveland Clinic’s Frank E. Bunts Professional Staff Award for Medical Education.He directs educational training for the Pulmonary Vascular Disease Program. He also maintains a strong interest in critical care medicine and in the understanding of hemodynamic parameters surrounding shock assessment.
Aanchal Kapoor, MD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, Associate Program Director of Critical Care Medicine Fellowship and Medical Director of Medical Intensive Liver Unit (MILU).
She completed her Internal Medicine residency from University of Cincinnati, Critical Care Fellowship from Cleveland Clinic in 2012 and joined as Associate program director of Critical Care Medicine at Cleveland Clinic. In 2014 she completed a Medical Education fellowship and in 2021, completed her Masters of Education in Health Professions Education (MEHPE) degree. She currently leads the Critical Care Education Track for the Critical Care fellowship.
Her primary areas of clinical expertise are in the evaluation and treatment of critically ill patients with liver disease. Her scholarly interests include simulation based training and curriculum development for procedures, airway management, hemodynamics and mechanical ventilation. She directs a simulation based workshop in conjunction with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to assist faculty in developing competency based assessments for trainees. Within the field of Critical Care her growing interests are in the field of management and research on critically ill liver patients.
Matt Siuba, DO is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Associate Program Director of Critical Care Medicine Fellowship, focused on research and scholarship.
He completed combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics training at Western Michigan University and subsequently trained in the Critical Care Fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic where he served as chief fellow. He completed a Master of Science in Clinical Research program at Case Western Reserve University in 2022. In 2020, he was awarded Critical Care Medicine Teacher of the Year.
His primary areas of both clinical and research interest are respiratory failure (especially ARDS), mechanical ventilation, vascular access, and shock/hemodynamics. He achieved testamur status in the NBE Critical Care Echocardiography (CCEeXAM) the first year the test was offered, and is enthusiastic about teaching clinical integration of POCUS findings.
About Cleveland
Cleveland is a vibrant city situated on the southern shore of Lake Erie, with a population of 400,000 within the city proper and over 2 million in the Cleveland metropolitan area.
