While a significant amount of attention has been devoted to the national shortage of child psychiatrists performing clinical services, there is an equally critical shortage of child psychiatrists performing research. As a result, many fundamental questions regarding the classification of child and adolescent disorders, their phenomenology, neurobiology, etiology and treatment remain unanswered.
Research training is an integral part of this fellowship. Each fellow will work with a research mentor and their team to develop individual research projects suitable for publication and presentations at national meetings. Fellows will be able to choose among a number of diverse research projects within the Division of Child Psychiatry and affiliated faculty. During the PGY1 through PGY3 years, residents begin to explore opportunities for research among the number of ongoing projects. By the 1st year of the child fellowship, residents will have been assigned a research mentor and will have begun doing background reading for their research project.
It is the expectation of this program that by graduation, each child fellow will have completed one original research project of sufficient quality for publication or presentation at a national or regional conference as well as one other scholarly project (review or case report paper, book chapter, public presentation, etc). While this may sound challenging to people with little or no research experience, fellows are mentored by experienced faculty and partake in a didactic course that covers topics such as study design, statistics, genetics, as well as writing and presentation skills.
Many of the projects described below were done by fellows with little prior research experience. Fellows with additional skills and interest in research are likely to go well beyond the minimum requirement and graduate with several publications and presentations that can provide a solid foundation, if desired, towards a career as an independent investigator.
Research Projects and Publications
Some recent fellow research projects and publications from fellows include the following:
- Article on bullying for Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Clinics of North America (Rettew & Pawlowski, 2016)
- Lack of association between autism-related genetic events and assisted reproduction published in Fertility and Sterility (Ackerman et al., 2014).
- JAACAP Connect article on dysregulated children (Guth & Althoff, 2015).
- Chapter on Autism in recent pediatric textbook (Richards & Rettew, 2015).
- "The Transitional Age Brain: The Best of Times and the Worst of Times" article by Chung & Hudziak in 2017 issue of Child Psychiatry Clinics of North America
- "Mobile Health Interventions for Psychiatric Conditions in Children: A Scoping Review" by Archangeli et al in 2017 issue of Child Psychiatry Clinics of North America
- “Impact of Parental Symptoms on Behavioral Ratings of Their Children” poster presented at the AACAP annual meeting (Heward et al., 2017)
We were also quite proud when one of our fellows, Sean Ackerman, won the 2014 Beatrix Hamburg award for the best poster by a trainee presented at the annual conference of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP).
