Department of Pediatrics

Dr. Fennelly

Welcome to the Department of Pediatrics at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso and the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine. Please browse our webpages to get to know our outstanding faculty, residents and staff, and to discover exciting opportunities to learn, teach, innovate and serve with us.

Since it was established in 2013 as the first four-year medical school on the U.S.-Mexico border, the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine has been joined by the Gayle Greve Hunt School of Nursing, the L. Frederick Francis Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and most recently by the Woody L. Hunt School of Dental Medicine on the TTUHSC El Paso campus. The institution continues to recruit the highest caliber of faculty to achieve its educational, research and clinical missions, and to address the needs of the historically underserved border population.

The Department of Pediatrics is fully committed to advancing TTUHSC El Paso’s vision to promote wellness and relieve human suffering through excellence in health care, intellectual innovation and service beyond borders. At the heart of all we do is a firm commitment to provide an inclusive environment for learning and growth for a diverse group of students, residents and faculty, and to foster research and cutting-edge clinical care to achieve the best possible outcomes.

The department offers a postgraduate pediatric residency training program (with a total of 35 residents), as well as pediatric selectives and electives for medical students. These include a border health curriculum. The department also houses the Texas Tech Physicians of El Paso pediatrics primary care and subspecialty clinic that provides accessible, comprehensive and compassionate care to the El Paso community.

In partnership with El Paso Children’s Hospital, our faculty provides exceptional care in over 30 specialties for children in West Texas, Southern New Mexico and Juárez, Mexico, including staffing a level IV NICU, PICU, and general pediatrics ward. Additionally, our partnership provides access to state-of-the-art clinical research protocols to understand the causes of cancer and improve treatments for children living with cancer through the Children’s Oncology Group.

Through collaborations with our colleagues in other Foster School of Medicine departments and alignment between the school of medicine, The Hospitals of Providence, and El Paso’s community pediatricians, we are building a virtual academic medical center to promote cutting-edge evidenced based care. Clinical research in the department focuses on cancer treatment and is supported by various sources, including the National Cancer Institute. Opportunities for collaborative research exist with faculty in the Department of Molecular and Translational Medicine, which oversees Centers of Emphasis in Cancer; Diabetes and Metabolism; Infectious Diseases; and Neurosciences, as well as the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology.

The city of El Paso, nestled between the beautiful Franklin Mountains and the Rio Grande, rests at the confluence of Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico, and is a fantastic place to live. El Pasoans enjoy more than 300 days of sunshine a year. There are numerous outdoor activities, including mountain hiking with stunning views, as well as a vibrant city life at an affordable cost of living. El Paso has been ranked by AdvisorSmith as among the top five safest large cities in the United States, and among the 10 best cities in the nation for quality of life by the U.S. News and World Report.

Chair’s Bio:

Glenn Fennelly, M.D., M.P.H., joined Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center’s Paul L. Foster School of Medicine in August of 2020. He formerly was professor and chair of pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, New Jersey, where he also served as chief of service for pediatrics at Newark University Hospital from 2013 to 2019.

After he obtained his medical degree from NJMS, he completed a residency in pediatrics, a fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases, and postdoctoral training at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. Dr. Fennelly received his M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health. Before his appointments at Rutgers in 2013, he was professor of pediatrics at Einstein, and chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Lewis M. Fraad Department of Pediatrics at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx.

During Dr. Fennelly’s tenure at NJMS, the department established innovative approaches to avert hospitalizations for mental health, asthma and other chronic illness, in collaboration with Newark University Hospital, Rutgers School of Nursing and Rutgers Behavioral Health Clinics. He also led improvements in the quality of education, clinical services and research, including the recruitment of over seventeen faculty in cardiology, pulmonology, endocrinology and adolescent health.

Dr. Fennelly is a well-recognized pediatric infectious diseases specialist, providing expert consultations for physicians and patients, most recently related to the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 in children. He has volunteered with Doctors of the World, USA, in Mexico and Kosovo and is currently vice president of their board. He also served with Family Health International during scale-up of HIV treatment for children in Vietnam. His research has focused on the development of vaccines against HIV, measles, influenza and tuberculosis in infants. This work has contributed to the understanding of determinants of immunity that protect or increase risk of infection. He also has been a co-investigator on several clinical studies of antiretrovirals, HIV immunity and vaccines in children. His research programs have been continuously funded by the NIH and other agencies for over 20 years, and he has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and several book chapters.