Clinical Pharmacology Fellowship

Walter Kraft, MD, MS, FACP,  serves as a Program Co-Director of the training program. After medical school at the University of Pittsburgh (’91-95), he served as intern, resident, and chief resident in medicine at Jefferson (’95-99). Following a two-year fellowship in this program, he joined the faculty. Presently, he serves as the Director of the Clinical Research Unit and of the Division of Pharmacology and Physiology in the department of Pharmacology, Physiology and Cancer Biology. He has secondary appointments in the Departments of Surgery and Medicine, and maintains a clinical practice in vascular medicine. His research focuses on treating the neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome, anticoagulant PK, and phase I clinical trials with an emphasis in first-in-human and experimental medicine trials in both healthy volunteers, neonates, and special populations. Dr. Kraft is Director of the Office of Human Research Protection, which oversees the 18 hospital Jefferson Health and University Institutional Review Boards (IRB). He is a national leader in clinical pharmacology organizations, serving as the immediate past President of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (ASCPT) and chair of the FDA Pharmaceutical Science and Clinical Pharmacology Advisory Committee (through 2026). Past leadership includes as a trustee and executive board member of American Board of Clinical Pharmacology  (’07-12), board of directors for the Association of Clinical Pharmacology Units (’10-12), and chair of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology (ACCP) meeting program committee (’15). In the past 15 years he has served on 28 NIH and PCORI review panels. He is Jefferson representative to the United States Pharmacopeia (‘07-19, ‘24-). He has a variety of awards, most recently Faculty Team Achievement Award (2019), Henry W. Elliott Distinguished Service Award (2022), and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Education (2022), and Provosts award in Institutional Service (2023). He has advised 42 clinical pharmacology fellows and has served on 47 master’s or PhD students’ thesis committees.

Dr. Kraft's Faculty Profile

Dr. Kraft's Bibliography at the National Library of Medicine

Kevin Downes, MD, attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. He then completed a residency in Pediatrics and fellowships in Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Pediatric Clinical and Developmental Pharmacology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.  He joined the faculty at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in 2015. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and is an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at CHOP. He is also a core faculty member of Clinical Futures, a CHOP Center of Emphasis. He attends on both the General and Immune Compromised Infectious Diseases services and is the Clinical Director of the Solid Organ Transplant ID program at CHOP. He is additionally the co-Director of the Clinical Pharmacology Research Affinity Group and Associate Director of the Small Molecules and Metabolites Core Laboratory at CHOP. Dr. Downes serves as the Vice Chair of the Transplant ID Research Subcommittee of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and has been elected to serve on the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics Executive Committee (2024-27). Dr. Downes’ research focuses on antimicrobial pharmacokinetics/ pharmacodynamics (PK/PD), pharmacometrics, and antibiotic-associated drug toxicities in vulnerable pediatric patients, including critically ill and immunocompromised children. Dr. Downes has particular interests in individualized dose optimization of antimicrobials, the roles of biomarkers in the management of children with infectious diseases, and patient-centric approaches to therapeutic drug monitoring and clinical pharmacology studies in children.

Dr. Downes' Faculty Profile

Frank Balis, MD, Program Co-Director. Dr. Balis is a Professor of Pediatrics and The Louis and Amelia Canuso Family Endowed Chair for Clinical Research in Oncology in the UPENN’s Perlman School of Medicine and a member of the Division of Oncology at CHOP. Dr. Balis received his MD from Vanderbilt University where he also completed his residency training in Pediatrics. He completed his fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Seattle Children’s Hospital/Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center before joining the NCI’s intramural research program. Dr. Balis’ research at the NCI focused on anticancer drug development and clinical pharmacology, including studies of their CNS pharmacology. Dr. Balis served as the NCI’s Clinical Director for 6 years, and he also served on the FDA’s Oncology Drug Advisory Committee and chaired the Pediatric Subcommittee. He chaired the NCI’s Institutional Review Board and later established and chaired the NCI’s Scientific Protocol Review Committee. Dr. Balis joined CHOP as the inaugural Director of Clinical Research in the Center Childhood Cancer Research, and he was co-Program Director for the Pediatric Oncology Program in UPENN’s Abramson Cancer Center. He was CHOP’s Institutional PI for the NCI’s Children’s Oncology Group (COG). Dr. Balis’ research focuses on circulating tumor biomarkers and the PK of anticancer drugs in infants. Dr. Balis’ mentees have served as Chair of the COG (Adamson), Chair of the COG’s phase I Consortium (Adamson, Blaney), co-Chair of the Pediatric Early Phase Clinical Trial Network (Fox), Chief of the NCI’s Pediatric Oncology Branch (Widemann), and Associate Dean for Research Assurance at Baylor College of Medicine (Berg), to name a few.

Dr. Balis' Faculty Profile