Healthcare Transformation > Charting Her Own Path

Charting Her Own Path

By Rich Polikoff Photography by Paul Flessland

Whitney Thompson, M.D., M.Phil., was determined to pursue a fellowship that didn’t exist at Mayo Clinic or anywhere else she looked.

It was fitting that Dr. Thompson wanted to take a unique path, as little in her educational journey had been traditional up to that point. She was a Latin major in college who developed an interest in genetics. She traveled to England after graduation to earn a master’s in medical genetics from the University of Cambridge.

She was accepted into the University of Minnesota Medical School and fell in love with the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) during her third-year rotations. Dr. Thompson was certain that she wanted to pursue a residency and fellowship at the intersection of genetics and neonatology.

The problem was, she couldn’t find any organization that offered an educational pathway with this focus.

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“My mentor said there wasn’t really going to be much of a space for this because it was too niche,” Dr. Thompson says. “I didn’t listen. I told everybody this was my plan when I was interviewing for residencies. Mayo Clinic was the one place where the program director immediately said, ‘We can make that happen.’”

Dr. Thompson came to Mayo Clinic in Rochester in 2020 to begin a three-year pediatrics residency. She quickly made a mark for herself, helping to launch a rapid whole-genome sequencing (rWGS) program in the NICU, after benefactor support made a successful pilot possible.

Dr. Thompson decided to remain in Rochester after she finished her pediatrics residency, embarking on something that had never been done before at Mayo Clinic: a four-year dual integrated fellowship in neonatal medicine and clinical genomics.

To make this fellowship happen, Dr. Thompson worked closely with William A. Carey, M.D., the program director of Mayo Clinic’s Neonatal Perinatal Medicine Fellowship and the senior associate dean for Medicine and Pediatrics in Mayo Clinic School of Graduate Medical Education. Creating a new dual integrated fellowship required the approval of two governing boards: the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics and the American Board of Pediatrics.

Dr. Thompson put together a lengthy proposal that outlined what she planned to do every month for the following four years, as well as a personal statement about why she felt this route was necessary for her career goals.

After securing board approvals, Dr. Thompson then needed to get approvals from Mayo Clinic leadership in both the NICU program and Mayo Clinic School of Graduate Medical Education. Drs. Thompson and Carey say they are unaware of this specific dual fellowship previously existing anywhere in the U.S. The fellowship runs through 2027.

Dr. Thompson isn’t the first person to take on a dual integrated fellowship program at Mayo Clinic, just the first to do one in neonatal medicine and clinical genomics.

“This experience has already paid unbelievable dividends for Mayo Clinic. It’s the sort of thing any two training programs can consider,” Dr. Carey says. “Sometimes it's just a matter of asking questions. I can imagine virtually any two subspecialties at Mayo Clinic working together.”

The traditional path for a physician to become a neonatologist and geneticist would be a neonatology fellowship followed by a clinical genomics fellowship, spanning five years in total, after three years of pediatric residency. Combining overlapping components allowed the fellowship to be shaved down to four.

Creating a new fellowship did more than save a year, though.

“While it’s only one more year the traditional way, the point of integrating the two training programs had to do with the educational philosophy of it,” Dr. Carey explains. “We didn't want her to learn genetics in a silo and think about it like a geneticist and then come over here and think about neonatology like my faculty and I think about it.”

In 2023, the same year that Dr. Thompson began her fellowship, she became part of the Center for Individualized Medicine’s Clinician Investigator Training Program. Much of her clinical work in this role builds on the rWGS program she helped start as a pediatric resident, by focusing on the implementation of genomic technologies for NICU patients.

It was through the Clinician Investigator Training Program that Dr. Thompson met Laura Lambert, M.D., the director of Mayo Clinic's Functional Omics Resource (FORce). Drs. Thompson and Lambert co-founded BabyFORce in 2024.

“Being able to do all this has made a huge impact in my career,” says Dr. Thompson, who is a Dorothea Berggren Medical Innovation Scholar. “The teamwork here has been phenomenal. I'm now part of so many different departments and centers and helping build bridges between them.

“Mayo Clinic brings together expertise across different specialties better than anyone else.”