UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine-UCLA Medical Center Program

Program Identity & Fit

UCLA Head and Neck Surgery is an academic, research-intensive program explicitly designed to produce teacher-investigators and future department chairs, evidenced by its claim of training more than 25 past chairs of academic otolaryngology departments nationally. Clinical training spans six affiliated sites—Ronald Reagan-UCLA, Harbor-UCLA, Olive View, West LA VA, Santa Monica-UCLA, and Children's Hospital LA—giving residents exposure across quaternary academic care, county safety-net populations, VA medicine, and pediatric subspecialty practice while anchoring didactics and research training at the main UCLA campus. The program has formalized its academic pipeline through an NIH R25-funded Mentored Research and Academic Leadership Pathway (extending residency to 6 years with 80% protected research time for a selected resident) and a structured PGY4 research block with grant-writing milestones and committee review, signaling that scholarly productivity is built into training rather than optional. The department's own language ("residents who will change the way we think about H&N surgery") and its emphasis on hypothesis-driven, extramurally-fundable proposals indicate a strong preference for residents pursuing physician-scientist or academic surgical leadership trajectories.