Program Mission Statement
The UVMMC Psychiatry Residency Program is a four-year training program designed to provide the necessary clinical settings, supervision, and didactics to produce well-rounded board-eligible psychiatrists capable of practicing in a variety of settings. Two of our five positions are designated as integrated child track positions in which years four and five are spent in our child fellowship program which features training informed by the Vermont family-based approach. Core training takes place in academic adult general inpatient and outpatient settings with additional rotations in community mental health, Veterans Administration settings, and global mental health. Residents take pride in their role of teacher for medical students, and the program provides specialized didactics, faculty development workshops, and Teaching Academy retreats to enhance their skills as educators. Our location in Vermont gives residents exposure to rural practice, practicing in under resourced areas, and to academic medicine that is strongly community focused. The cultural background of our patients is primarily white/non-Hispanic based on the demographics of our rural New England state; however, Vermont offers a wide range of socioeconomic diversity. Burlington has been a site for refugee resettlement for over twenty years and also has a large and growing LGBTQ+ community.
About the Program
The Psychiatry Residency Program in Vermont is celebrating its 61st year in 2022. We are proud of our history and take pride in our graduates. Our long affiliation with the University of Vermont Larner College Of Medicine provides the vital academic grounding for educating our residents, while the sponsorship of UVM Medical Center affords both institutional context and a modern workplace. Our strength lies in our size, which promotes individual attention to each resident's learning and facilitates the building of lifelong professional friendships.
The program accepts five residents per year, two of whom participate in a combined five-year general/child and adolescent psychiatry program. More information about the combined program and the VCCYF can be found at Child Psychiatry and About Us. All five residents function as a single group until the PGY-4 year when the two child track residents begin full-time child psychiatry training.
The natural beauty of our location, the vibrancy of a surprisingly cosmopolitan small city, and the livability of Vermont itself are the reasons so many of us have come here to stay. If you would like additional information, please contact us.
About the Program Director
Welcome and thank you for your interest in our wonderful Vermont program! After growing up in a small rural town in Central New York, and attending college and medical school in New York, I fell in love with the Burlington area when I first interviewed for residency in the fall of 2004. I had the privilege of completing my adult and child psychiatry training here at UVM and in 2011 took a faculty position within the department. My wife (also a psychiatrist), my twin children, and two dogs love spending time on the shores of Lake Champlain and we all look forward to welcoming you into UVM’s psychiatry family.
Clinically, my work centers on providing team-based autism diagnostic evaluations, supporting gender-diverse youth, and seeing patients of all ages in the outpatient setting. For the past handful of years, I was the director of Medical Student Education in our department, overseeing the six-week psychiatry clerkship and facilitating other psychiatry-related teaching across the College of Medicine curriculum. In 2021, I was offered the position of Associate Training Director and in July 2022, officially took on the role of Program Director. It’s an exciting endeavor to be in a leadership position in a program that was so influential for my professional and personal development. My training at UVM was undeniably formative in fostering my clinical and academic interests while allowing me to build collaborative relationships within the Medical Center, the Larner College of Medicine, the broader University, and throughout Vermont.
Academically, I also love teaching and am energized by channeling my creativity and passion to create undergraduate courses focusing on the neuroscience of relationships and psychiatry’s association with pop culture. I’ve also developed a medical student elective centered on Graphic Medicine and am eager to find different ways to incorporate the humanities in medical education.
I have such pride in our program and our department, and I am eager to help instill this pride in our trainees in a manner that appreciates shifting perspectives around mental health, illness, and wellness - perspectives that are embedded in larger cultural and systemic contexts and attend to the psychological, social, and spiritual complexities that define our humanity. More than ever, psychiatric care is critical for individual and collective health across the lifespan and I take my role seriously in ensuring that our graduates are trained to humbly and confidently provide state-of-the-science care while not losing sight of their own wellness and the rich history of psychiatry that values the understanding of one’s story. I look forward to learning from you!
Jeremiah Dickerson, MD
Associate Program Director, Psychiatry Residency Program
Psychiatrist and Child Psychiatrist, UVM Medical Center
Assistant Professor, University of Vermont College of Medicine
About the Program Administrator
We are excited to show you our residency program and the people in it! I grew up a short bus ride away from NYC in New Jersey and left many years ago to explore and work. I have lived in Quebec, British Columbia, and have been in Vermont for many years. I have been working in this role for over 20 years while continuing college part time. Many of our faculty including our current PD and Chair were once one of my residents! I thoroughly love this program, as well as our residents and faculty in the department who continue to be a supportive and warm bunch. I invest in our program by meeting applicants individually and getting to know everyone and staying connected. I discovered after moving to a smaller location that it didn’t limit my activity, but expanded it. I met my husband in Vermont. We have two teenage children and a silly dog. We enjoy walking, the abundance of hiking trails all around, and connecting with our community here in Vermont. I look forward to connecting with you all and hopefully allowing you to get a clearer picture of what it would be like to work, play and live here in Vermont
Michele Peliel
GME Program Administrator, Psychiatry