Duke Emergency Medicine offers a one-year fellowship in Emergency Ultrasound, with a multitude of resources.

The fellowship is led by Fellowship Director Dr. Erica Peethumnongsin, MD, PhD, FPD-AEMUS and Assistant Fellowship Director Dr. Shawn Sethi, DO, FPD-AEMUS, with 4 additional fellowship-trained ultrasound faculty. Our US faculty have a range of passions including regional anesthesia, medical student and resident teaching, machine learning, simulation-related research and more. Additionally,

our US faculty have strong connections at both the local and national level including leadership positions within ACEP, SAEM, AAEM, and SCUF.

Fellows lead monthly ultrasound journal clubs, perform novel research, and participate in teaching shifts with rotating residents, ultrasound-related simulation, and weekly ultrasound didactics and image review/QA. Fellows are also exposed to a wide variety of inter-departmental educational opportunities, including transvaginal ultrasound experience with OB/Gyn, both intra-operative TEE and regional nerve block experience with Anesthesiology, and longitudinal pediatric exposure. Fellows also participate in at least 1 national US conference during the fellowship year.

The Emergency Department has 10 ultrasound machines (including GE Venues, Sonosite PX, Sonosite M-Turbos, Sonosite Edge, Sonosite S-Nerves, and Butterfly IQs for educational use), that are wirelessly linked to an electronic archiving and quality assurance system (Butterfly Enterprise). Our simulation lab includes multiple high fidelity ultrasound simulators for both training and education, including diagnostic and procedural point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS), transesophageal echocardiogram (TEE), and transvaginal ultrasound (TVUS).

We also have an active research program, with participation in multi-center collaborations such as the Reason3 POCUS in cardiac arrest trial and the SIREN clinical trials research network. Our residency program director, Dr. Joshua Broder, previously collaborated with partners at the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering and Stanford University on studies involving an innovative 3DUS-enabling device, receiving $200,000 in grant funding through the Coulter-Stanford Foundation and winning the Emergency Medicine Foundation and GE Healthcare Point-of-Care-Ultrasound Research Challenge in 2017. Our current research work primarily focuses on improving POCUS training and program implementation, with recent projects led by Dr. Rebecca Theophanous identifying facilitators and barriers to ultrasound training and POCUS program implementation at the Durham VAHCS and Duke University (supported by SAEMF-AEUS grant funding in 2022) and assessing a simulation model for ultrasound-guided procedural nerve block training (supported by SAEMF grant funding in 2025)

2025-26 SAEMF Education Project Grant awardee Dr. Theophanous: "Emergency Physician Ultrasound-Guided Nerve Block Training Simulation Assessment" https://www.saem.org/detail-pages/award/award-saemf/2025-saemf-education-project-grant----20-000

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Duke Emergency Ultrasound on X (formerly Twitter)

For more information, please contact Dr. Erica Peethumnongsin, MD, PhD at esp20@duke.edu, Shawn Sethi, DO at shawn.sethi@duke.edu or Kimberly Brown, Duke EM Residency Program Coordinator and Emergency Ultrasound Fellowship Coordinator, at Kimberly.s.brown@duke.edu.