How to Choose a Clinical Neurophysiology Fellowship

If you select a program that offers distinct fellowships in EEG/Epilepsy and EMG/Neuromuscular Medicine, you’ll end up vying for procedural experience with fellows in the competing fellowship.

Instead, seek out a single clinical neurophysiology program that offers both subspecialties. You can then spend the majority of your time acquiring expertise in your desired field without risk of shortchanging yourself procedurally.

Make sure that the program you select is equally strong in both tracks. Whether you have determined your subspecialty or prefer to explore both options, you should be assured that the clinical training and didactic sessions provide you with a solid, comprehensive understanding of both fields.

The caliber of the faculty plays a major role in your satisfaction with a fellowship, so familiarize yourself with those who will mentor you before committing.

Find out, for example, how many faculty are in the neurology department and the breakdown between adult neurologists and pediatric neurologists.

Confirm that the department has a good mix of adult and pediatric neurologists with ample numbers of neuromuscular specialists and experts in both adult and pediatric epilepsy.

Faculty should have graduated from quality training programs themselves. They should conduct research, including participating in multicenter clinical trials.

So that you graduate with full confidence in your abilities, faculty should train you in a broadest spectrum of neurophysiological procedures and clinical care.

During your EMG/neuromuscular training, you should have opportunities to perform a wide variety of neuromuscular procedures including routine EMG, nerve conduction studies, repetitive stimulation, single-fiber EMGs and Botox injections.

During your EEG/epilepsy training, you should gain ample experience with routine EEG, long-term digital-video EEG monitoring, presurgical evaluations, invasive monitoring, evoked potentials, epilepsy management and, if you desire, intraoperative monitoring.

To ensure that you’re exposed to the broadest range of complex medical and surgical treatments for epilepsy, a good rule of thumb is to consider only those programs that train you in a Level 4 epilepsy monitoring unit.

Learn about the depth of clinical training you’ll receive in your:

Even if research isn’t required in the program you’re considering, the department should boast a dynamic research arm. This signals a collective commitment to advancing the understanding of neurophysiological disorders and their treatment. Within this stimulating environment, you’ll learn from, and train with, faculty who are shaping new approaches, techniques and treatments for epilepsy and neuromuscular diseases.

At UB, our epilepsy division is nationally recognized for our trials of novel anti-epileptic agents, our investigations into hyperkinetic motor epilepsy and our computerized analyses of electrical dipoles, among other studies. Our neuromuscular disorder specialists are equally renowned for their studies on neuropathy, myasthenia gravis, thymectomy and Guillain-Barre syndrome, to name a few.

We typically participate in about a half-dozen multicenter clinical trials at once. We invite our fellows to help us further these investigations and discover the research opportunities that abound in our fields.

Although the quality of training is the most important characteristic to consider, don’t neglect to explore the quality of life you can expect during your fellowship year.

It helps to live in an affordable city where you can easily commute to and from your training sites. Whether you’ll be living with your family, a partner or alone, a city with a strong sense of community makes you feel welcome from the moment you arrive.

Western New York gives you all that — and more. As our medical school and our downtown medical campus continue to expand, and as our region continues redefining itself as a hub for the biotech and health care industries, it’s an exciting time to train at UB.