The Fellows Program
A six-month, cohort-based fellowship that guides health sector professionals from deep expertise to finished, field-ready work.
You know what you’d build if someone gave you the time, the standard, and the right people in the room.
The expertise is already yours. What the program provides is the conditions.
Most educational and workforce projects get built in whatever time is left over, without expert guidance, without peers working at the same level, and without a standard that pushes the work further than it would go alone. The Fellowship changes that.
Fellows do not simply produce better work. They become better at producing work, and they carry that raised standard into everything they do afterward. That is the difference between a credential and a genuine development experience.
WHO THIS PROGRAM IS FOR
The professionals already leading the work.
The Fellowship is built for health sector professionals who are advancing educational, clinical, and workforce capability and are ready to do that work at a higher level. Every fellow brings a specific piece of work to produce. Every fellow leaves a more capable practitioner. The three profile patterns describe most of them.
01
FACULTY DEVELOPER
Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing, Public health, Health sciences.
Working toward promotion, scholarship, or accreditation readiness
You have a curriculum, faculty development model, or scholarship piece the field needs. This is the structure to get it done and the standard to make it defensible.
02
HEALTH SYSTEM EDUCATION LEAD
Directors, Residency & Workforce Leads, VPs of Learning
Building the programs and systems others learn and develop within
You are building residency programs, workforce frameworks, or models that the institution and regulators depend on. This sharpens how you build them.
03
MEDICAL EDUCATION PROFESSIONAL
Pharma Medical Affairs, CME Directors, NGO Workforce Leads.
Producing work that holds up under clinical, scientific, and regulatory scrutiny
You operate across science, education, and compliance simultaneously. This develops the production discipline to build work that satisfies all of them.
THE FELLOWS PROGRAM
Rigorous. Selective.
Built to produce work that lasts.
THE STRUCTURE
A six-month, cohort-based fellowship for health sector professionals building educational and workforce systems their fields depend on. Built for professionals who have serious work to do and need the structure to do it well. The fellowship is selective and merit-based. Fellows are admitted through a structured written application and a faculty conversation.
THE CURRICULUM
The program runs four parallel tracks across six months. Artifact production is the spine. Three additional tracks deliver the curriculum, the leadership development (including executive coaching and forums), and the field placement that supports the work's circulation after the program. The Faculty Chair provides direct review at every structural turning point.
FELLOWS PROGRAM LOGISTICS
What it costs. When it runs. Join us.
COHORT SIZE
Up to 12 Fellows
FORMAT
Fully Online, Live Sessions
FACULTY CHAIR
Dr. Rola Kaakeh
DESIGNATION
Salus Vitae Group Fellow
FOUNDING COHORT TUITION
$12,500
DURATION
6 months: Nov 2026 - Apr 2027
TIME COMMITMENT
6 - 8 hours per month on average; 10-12 hours in peak months
SPONSORSHIP
Fellows can be sponsored, in part or in full, by their employers as part of professional development. A sponsorship kit is provided to every admitted fellow whose institution will be part of the conversation.
Applications open summer 2026
WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT
Four things no other program delivers together.
01
Faculty-led editorial review on every artifact
Three structured reviews across the six months. The Faculty Chair reads every artifact and addresses the decisions already made and the ones that still need to be resolved.
02
Placed where the field reads.
A finished, field-ready artifact positioned for the audience it was built to reach. Six months of editorial review behind it and a placement strategy to move it forward, all under your name.
03
A peer cohort who raise your standard, building in parallel
A selective group of health sector professionals, each producing a different piece of work in the same production environment. They understand exactly what you carry.
04
A four-track curriculum, not a single focus
Four tracks run in parallel. The methodology is taught through the lens of the work each fellow is producing. It address realities and produces results that outlasts program.
THE TRANSFORMATION
After six months, something is different.
The finished, field-ready artifact is the evidence of the shift. But what changes is deeper than any single piece of work. What actually changes is how you work, how you are seen, and what you are capable of producing next, without us.
BEFORE
Work produced in isolation, without editorial scrutiny or a clear standard to work against
Structural decisions made by intuition, difficult to explain or defend under external review
A credential that documents attendance, not a piece of work that documents what you produced.
The same standard applied to the next piece of work, with no real mechanism for raising it
AFTER
A finished, field-ready piece of work under your name built to a defensible standard
A method that is now yours. The next piece of work is faster, clearer, and more rigorous
Field standing that reflects what you actually built, not just the roles you have held
A permanently higher bar, for your own work and for the clinicians and leaders you are training
You arrive as someone the field respects.
You leave as someone the field looks to.
WHAT FELLOW RECEIVE
Seven things every fellow holds at the completion.
What the Fellow carries out of that moment is designed to remain useful and relevant across the long arc of a career.
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Salus Vitae Group Fellow, is conferred at the Symposium and held for life. Signals to accreditors, leadership, and field peers that the fellow has produced work to a defensible standard.
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A submission strategy built around the artifact you produced, with the faculty chair’s editorial backing to move it forward.
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Every fellow presents their completed artifact at the virtual Symposium, a public, field-facing event open to an audience well beyond the cohort. This is the moment the work enters professional circulation.
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Six months of practice under genuine editorial scrutiny produces something lasting: an internalized production process that makes the next piece of work faster to scope, clearer to develop, and more defensible at completion. The next artifact is faster, clearer, and more defensible because the method is now theirs.
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Up to eleven senior health sector professionals who built work alongside you. Each producing something different, each navigating the same pressures. They understand the work from the inside in a way most colleagues don't. They become a community in the Circle that holds the network after the fellowship.
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Before the Symposium, every fellow identifies and scopes their next area of work. Fellows leave with a clear direction forward, not only a credential marking where they have been.
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The Circle is our long-term professional community designed to keep fellows, alumni, and practitioners in working relationship across institutions. Year one is included with tuition. From Year two, membership is $720 per year. The founding cohort members holds lifetime access.
THE FACULTY CHAIR
Dr. Rola Kaakeh
Dr. Kaakeh is an award-winning, fellowship-trained pharmacist who has spent more than two decades building curricula, developing faculty, and advising health systems, academia, pharmaceutical organizations, NGOs, and public health institutions globally. She has held faculty appointments at Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California San Diego, and others, across schools of pharmacy, medicine, and public health. That range of institutional appointments, across disciplines and some of the most respected health professions programs in the country, is the foundation the Fellowship's editorial standard is built on. Her peer-reviewed research has been cited more than 500 times. Her conviction, developed across that body of work, is straightforward: the people responsible for building the field deserve the same rigorous structure for their own production that they would demand of any clinical or scientific work. The Fellowship is the institutional expression of that conviction. She reads every fellow's artifact personally. She identifies what is structurally unsound. She specifies what needs to be rebuilt and why.
WHAT YOUR INVESTMENT INCLUDES
Three ways to enter.
Join now as a founding fellow, come in at standard terms, or have your institution sponsor your seat. What you receive depends on how you enter.
STANDARD
$14,500
per fellowship spot
FOUNDING COHORT
$12,500
per fellowship spot
INSTITUTIONAL SPONSORSHIP
Custom
co-pay or full-sponsor
FOR INSTITUTIONS
Sponsoring a fellow is a way institutions invest in the people who build their capability.
Fellows may enter the program with institutional support. We provide a sponsorship kit to every admitted fellow pursuing organizational backing, including a structured document designed to support the internal conversation. If your institution should be part of this, the institutions page has what you need.
COHORT 1 · November 2026
The founding cohort helps shape what this program becomes.
The founding cohort receives $2000 off standard tuition, lifetime Circle access, a Fellow designation, and direct access to the Faculty Chair across the program duration. These terms reflect our belief that the professionals who commit earliest to a new standard should be recognized for it. These terms are specific to Cohort 1 and will not be offered again.
THE WAITLIST IS OPEN NOW. APPLICATIONS OPEN IN SUMMER 2026.
Waitlist members receive complete program details when available, early access to apply, and an optional 30-minute conversation with the Faculty Chair before the application window opens.
The waitlist is not the application. It takes 5 minutes and there’s no commitment to apply.
Join the waitlist.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What most people ask first.
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The Fellowship is built for health sector professionals who have a specific piece of educational or workforce work to produce and who are ready to develop as practitioners in the process.
Faculty working toward promotion or accreditation review, health system education leads building residency programs or workforce frameworks, and medical education professionals in pharmaceutical or CME roles all fit well. So do practitioners who have had a curriculum, position paper, or framework in mind for years but have not had the right structure around them to finish it.
What every fellow shares is this: they want to produce something serious, and they are ready to elevate the standard of how they do it.
If you are looking only for a credential without the work and development that earns it, this is not the right fit.
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Three structured reviews across the six months, each delivered as a direct written response to the fellow's artifact. Each is specific, structural, and honest. Each is a written response from the Faculty Chair, followed by a conversation, specific about what holds and what does not yet.
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An artifact is a real, finishable, specific piece of educational or workforce work: a curriculum framework, program design, educational scholarship article, implementation guide, or position paper.
It may be something the institution has asked for, or something the fellow has been carrying the intention to build for years. Both are equally valid starting points, and neither requires institutional backing to proceed.
The scope is developed collaboratively with the Faculty Chair during the admissions process. What matters is that the work is real, specific, and completable within six months.
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Six to eight hours per month in standard months, and ten to twelve hours during the peak production periods. The time is structured and purposeful. Production milestones are set in advance, sessions are scheduled, and the expectation is sustained engagement rather than open-ended availability.
The Fellowship is built for working professionals with full calendars, but it does require a genuine and consistent time commitment across all eight months.
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The cohort is limited to twelve fellows, and that ceiling is deliberate. It is what makes the level of editorial attention, peer cohesion, and production scrutiny the Fellowship promises possible to actually sustain.
Applications are reviewed for the clarity and seriousness of the proposed work, the fellow's professional context, and how the cohort fits together as a whole. Admission is not first-come, first-served.
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Yes. Fellows can be sponsored in full or in part by their employing institution or other organization. Every admitted fellow pursuing that conversation receives a sponsorship kit designed to make that internal conversation as straightforward as possible.
If you don’t see your question here, the admissions conversation is the right place to ask it.
The work you’ve been meaning to build deserves a structure that sees it through.
Founding cohort terms are available now. The waitlist takes five minutes.