What Oncology Fellowship Is Really Like: Jonathan Lee, MD, and Chinmay Jani, MD

In this episode of The Moonlight Shift, Gina Mauro sits down with two rising stars in hematology-oncology at the same terrifying threshold: the end of fellowship and the beginning of independent practice. Jonathan Lee, MD, MSc, completed his chief fellowship at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell before joining Stanford Health Care as incoming faculty, and Chinmay Jani, MD, finished at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami, where he is now incoming faculty in thoracic oncology. The episode is the first of The Moonlight Shift's format to feature two fellows — and the result is one of the most candid conversations about what medical training actually feels like that oncology media has produced.

The Friendship

Lee and Jani met at an OncLive event at the International Lung Cancer Congress, an event hosted by Physicians’ Education Resource, LLC, in Huntington Beach, California, where Lee noticed Jani giving unusually raw and honest answers during a focus group on the fellowship experience. What followed was an organic, text-heavy friendship built on shared ambition, mutual amplification, and a willingness to be honest with each other that neither found easily in their training environments. "Collaboration runs into our blood," Jani said. "And if it's not running, we need to inject it." They have since co-founded a FLASCO fellowship chapter, collaborated on patient and medical education initiatives, and appeared together on multiple MJH Life Sciences platforms — including CancerNetwork’s Career Center and the OncLive Fellows Forums.

The Loneliness Nobody Names

Lee opens the episode's most honest exchange by describing fellowship as "a very lonely experience" — a stark contrast to residency, where interns and senior residents move as a team. In fellowship, he explains, you are often alone with an attending, working in a fellows' room where everyone is on different services, isolated from the shared rhythm of residency training. His prescription is the same one that produced his friendship with Jani: find your people deliberately, across programs and across the country.

"Keep an open mind. Seek your friends. Seek your partners across the country."

The Fear of Autonomy

When asked what scares them most about becoming attendings, both Lee and Jani point to the same thing: the weight of independent clinical decision-making. Lee describes it plainly — "quaking in my boots" — noting that the comfort of saying "I'll ask my attending" disappears the moment you realize you are the attending. Jani adds a second fear specific to academic medicine: how to write grants, secure funding, and sustain the research programs they have already begun in fellowship.

What They're Building

The episode closes on the resources Lee and Jani collaborate on to build for incoming fellows, residents, medical students, and pre-meds that provide the next generation a more honest picture of what training actually looks like. "There's nothing that will make it less terrifying," Lee says. "But being able to provide that resource and education — that's a big part of why we do what we do."

The final exchange of the episode, in the game segment "Same Page or Different Chapter," ends with the question of whether they'll still be friends in ten years. Lee's answer: "We're not going to be friends. We'll be best friends."

The Moonlight Shift is available on YouTube and across MJH Life Sciences’ oncology platforms. New episodes, released bi-weekly, feature leading and early-career oncologists from the Tri-State corridor in peer-level conversations about where the field is going — and what it still has to work out.