Name: Allison Cushman-Vokoun, MD, PhD
Medical school attended: UNMC
Location of your residency/fellowship training:
- Residency, AP/CP Pathology, UNMC Department of Pathology and Microbiology, Omaha
- Fellowship, molecular genetic pathology (Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education), Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennesee
What residency/fellowship program at UNMC are you serving as program director for?
ACGME-accredited Molecular Genetic Pathology (MGP) Fellowship in the UNMC Department of Pathology and Microbiology
Number of trainees:
One per year
How long have you been the program director?
I started the fellowship at UNMC in 2015 and have been the program director ever since.
What made you choose to become the program director?
Molecular pathology and molecular diagnostics are becoming more and more important to the practice of medicine in all areas. I thoroughly enjoyed my fellowship and wanted to bring that experience to UNMC. We have excellent facilities and clinical experiences at Nebraska Medicine/UNMC. These allow us to provide a great experience for the MGP fellows.
What challenges do you foresee in graduate medical education in the future?
I think future funding is the biggest challenge for starting up new fellowships, which will be needed as medicine becomes more specialized. Additionally, in pathology, there are many one-year fellowships in various areas. It becomes difficult for residents to go on to train in more than one fellowship area, although that may be desired by employers, due to the difficulty in relocating to various institutions for each fellowship.
What are the strengths of your training program?
We offer excellent training in molecular oncology due to our cancer expertise at UNMC/Nebraska Medicine. Molecular oncology is the largest area of growth in molecular diagnostics due to ever increasing precision therapeutics that are being introduced into the clinical space. Nebraska Medicine has been extremely supportive of the clinical molecular diagnostics laboratory, allowing us to build our testing infrastructure, which provides for an outstanding experience for the MGP fellow.
List some accomplishments that you are proud of:
- We have a 100% board pass rate thus far.
- The last two MGP fellows were hired by Nebraska Medicine to, in part, increase our molecular testing capability.
Tell us three things about you that others may not know:
- One of my undergraduate majors was in ancient studies.
- I am a huge U2 fan and had the opportunity to meet Bono.
- Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City is my favorite place to be on fall football Saturdays (pre-
COVID . . . and . . . fingers crossed . . . post!)