Program Structure

The Duke Vascular Surgery Fellowship Program is designed to provide a solid grounding in the full spectrum of vascular surgical procedures for talented and motivated surgical trainees. Our fellowship experience is enhanced by the extraordinary clinical volume handled by the Duke hospitals, and the strong commitment of our faculty to education and scholarly achievement. 

The fellowship is based at four clinical training sites; Duke University Hospital, The Durham VA Medical Center, Duke Regional Hospital, and Duke Ambulatory Surgery Center.

  • Duke University Hospital is a large tertiary referral center and a level 1 trauma center. The Vascular Surgery service at the University Hospital is a high volume practice with a large number and variety of complex cases including many major open arterial reconstructions, challenging limb salvage cases, and more esoteric disease processes like thoracic outlet syndrome and arteriovenous malformations.
  • The Durham VA Medical Center is completely integrated into the Duke vascular practice and offers fellows the opportunity to more independently manage the broad array of advanced atherosclerotic vascular disease that is typical in the VA patient population. The VA rotation has a large volume of traditional open vascular procedures that are increasingly rare in the endovascular era.
  • Duke Regional Hospital is a community hospital with a large number of complex dialysis patients as well as more routine limb salvage and cerebrovascular cases.
  • The Duke Raleigh Hospital is a mid-sized community hospital in nearby Raleigh which supports three Duke Vascular Surgeons. These accomplished surgeons have recently joined the Duke team after many years in private practice. This site provides exposure to many of the sorts of cases commonly seen in a large, full-spectrum private practice as well an outpatient angiography procedures.

Our fellowship emphasizes a broad-based training in both open and endovascular procedures. Our fellows will leave the program with the training and experience to manage, with confidence, all arterial and venous pathology with open, endovascular, or non-operative approaches.   

We fully expect that graduating fellows will be able, with equal skill, to do a femoral-tibial bypass with spliced arm vein or a laser atherectomy of the popliteal artery with retrograde tibial access. They will be able to perform open thoracoabdominal repair of an extent IV thoracoabdominal aneurysm as expertly as they deploy a fenestrated aortic endograft. By the end of the two-year fellowship, our trainees should feel comfortable preforming venous interventions of all types — from office-based sclerotherapy to saphenous vein ablation, to central venous recanalization and stenting.  

Finally, our trainees will be adept at non-operatively managing vascular pathology, completing the comprehensive skill set needed to join any type of vascular surgery practice.