The Center trains undergraduates, graduate students, clinical and postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty, and it treats training as a shared responsibility of every program and core.
Undergraduates: PennKDSAP and the PCEN Summer Scholars Program
Penn undergraduates join kidney research through the Penn Kidney Disease Screening and Awareness Program (PennKDSAP): students apply and interview through the program, are matched with a faculty mentor at HUP or CHOP, commit at least ten hours a week for a semester, attend monthly didactics on the responsible conduct of research and present a poster at the end of the year. The PCEN Summer Scholars Program at CHOP is an eight-week mentored summer for undergraduate, post-baccalaureate and medical students with clinical shadowing in pediatric nephrology, didactics and career seminars. The NIDDK-funded Undergraduate Clinical Scholars Program (nine weeks, June to July) is open to students from any accredited United States university.
MoreGraduate students: PhD programs and the MSTP
Doctoral students enter kidney laboratories through the Biomedical Graduate Studies groups, above all Cell and Molecular Biology, Genomics and Computational Biology, Immunology and Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and through the Penn Medical Scientist Training Program (MD-PhD). Every program welcomes rotation students, and the Center's workshop series and Research-in-Progress talks are open to them from the first week.
MorePhysician-Scientist Career Development Pathway (PSP)
Monthly meetings for fellows and junior faculty on grant preparation, presentation and communication, leadership and mentorship, and academic advancement, led since 2015 by Jordana B. Cohen, MD, MSCE, who is the contact for anyone who would like to join. Grant-writing workshops on conceptualizing a project, building a budget and writing a competitive application are part of the pathway.
MoreFellowships: Penn Renal, CHOP Nephrology and PERFORM-KUH
The Clinical Fellowship in Nephrology at Penn (program director Amanda K. Leonberg-Yoo) and the Nephrology Fellowship at CHOP train the clinicians; research fellows are supported by PERFORM-KUH, the Philadelphia Program for Mentored Research Training in Kidney, Urologic, and Hematologic Diseases, the NIH-funded U2C/TL1 consortium of Penn, CHOP, Drexel, Jefferson, Temple and Fox Chase that replaced the earlier T32 programs. PERFORM-KUH offers at least two years of research salary support for predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows, one-on-one mentored research, seminars, networking events and annual retreats; Lawrence Holzman directs the kidney section, Jordana Cohen the Professional Development Core and Michelle Denburg the Networking Core.
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