Geriatric Medicine Fellows

Charles Semelka

Wake Forest really prepares you to really do anything you want. Looking at the graduates from my class, they're going in all different directions. Someone's out doing private practice. Another person's joining the family medicine faculty, we have someone joining clinical geriatrics practice here.

Morgan Mickalis

The opportunities here are just unlimited. If you want to do research, you can do research and we have such a great department for that, multiple departments for that. It's like a family here and whatever you want to do, they can get you connected with the right person and you can pursue that. And so a university atmosphere and a family atmosphere, it's unusual and that's a unique thing to Wake Forest, I feel like.

Charles Semelka

Connecting with patients in geriatrics fellowship just felt very different from residency where everything felt rushed and really hodgepodge. Now, I think as a geriatrician I feel competent and prepared to take care of older adults and to think about things a little more intentionally.

Nikki Gordon

I love the function first model that Wake Forest offered, so I think it's imperative as a geriatrician to really focus on preserving the functionality and dependence and resilience of that patient population. I love that that's something that Wake Forest focused on and knew that that was something I wanted to become better at and wanted to incorporate into my practice.

Morgan Mickalis

Getting into the geriatrics, the conferences, the research, the clinical, the home visits, everything, I'm really excited about that I'm finally where I wanted to be.

Ava Moore Thomas

Wake really impressed me with just how the fellowship is set up and having very defined focuses for each of the quadrants and making sure that I was going to a place with world-class faculty and being able to just get the best geriatric education I could get.

Priscilla Tutu

I chose Wake Forest because it was all about the people that I met on the interview trail. Everybody seemed passionate about geriatric medicine and what they were doing and they were very much clinicians at heart who also liked research, some of them, and they were striving for to improve the quality of health for their patients and that really drove me here.

Julia Mazza

The moment I walked in the door here at Wake Forest, just the sense of community and scholarly activity. I also really liked how the didactics are set up. You have four different quadrants, kind of like the four M's in geriatrics and it really does make sense on how to think like a geriatrician rather than just internal medicine or family medicine like we were trained in residency. There's so much research going on in the geriatrics department here, it's world renowned. Researchers, clinicians, medical education, there's just so much happening here and you can get so much out of this program.

Morgan Mickalis

Thoughts after orientation week? Wow, everyone is very welcoming. It's definitely a family here. Pretty much no one leaves and for good reason. It's just such a learning environment. If I had a question, everyone was helpful. With the lectures set up for the year, I'm just super excited about that. I already have a ton of resources at my fingertips. I've already met most of the faculty. We've had lunch. I'm just very excited to get to work with everybody and get going.

Charles Semelka

This is an excellent place to train because we have really strong clinical training here and if you want to do more, you're welcome to. This is a place where they encourage people to pursue their interests and to be a little bit creative and you don't necessarily have to fit into a square box model. I certainly feel that they've encouraged me to be myself.