Vanderbilt Health’s Transplant Nephrology Fellowship program has become the first in the country to receive accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).
The accreditation recognizes the program’s commitment to excellence in clinical training, education and patient care. Transplant nephrology is a highly specialized field focused on the care of kidney transplant recipients and living donors, as well as the management of complex medical conditions before and after transplantation.
According to Saed Shawar, MBBS, Director of the Transplant Nephrology Fellowship program and Assistant Professor of Medicine, the one-year fellowship program accepts two fellows annually and offers comprehensive training across the full spectrum of kidney transplant care. Fellows spend six months on the inpatient transplant service, caring for deceased-donor and living-donor recipients, collaborating with the transplant surgical team on perioperative management, overseeing immunosuppression and allograft dysfunction, performing kidney allograft biopsies, and supervising renal fellows and residents.
The remaining six months are dedicated to research and elective rotations, with additional training in HLA (human leukocyte antigen) laboratory medicine, renal pathology, transplant infectious diseases and transplant surgery, along with experience in outpatient transplant clinics and the evaluation of transplant candidates and living donors.
The Transplant Nephrology Fellowship program is also accredited by the American Society of Transplantation. As demand for kidney transplantation continues to grow nationwide, highly trained transplant nephrologists are essential to meeting the complex needs of patients with end-stage kidney disease.
With its new ACGME accreditation, Vanderbilt’s Transplant Nephrology Fellowship program is poised to serve as a model for institutions across the country seeking to advance subspecialty training in nephrology. The Vanderbilt Health kidney transplant team performed 397 transplants in 2025, including dual organ pancreas-kidney, heart-kidney and liver-kidney transplants. Across all adult and pediatric solid organ programs, the Vanderbilt Transplant Center performed 960 transplants in 2025 — making it the nation’s No. 1 transplant center by total transplant volume.
