Child and Adolescent Fellowship

Our Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (CAP) fellowship program at West Virginia University offers supportive faculty facilitating a well-rounded experience in child and adolescent development and psychopathology that includes training in assessment, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment including care for youth and their families. This two-year ACGME accredited program prepares fellows for comprehensive clinical care as well as national board examinations. Our program shares the WVU Medicine mission of excellence in patient care, research and education as well as values of wellness, personal development, and diversity.

We are a small (2 per year) fellowship within a growing academic health system that serves a large portion of our state’s rural Appalachian population. Our program provides opportunities for excellent and valued clinical care, collaboration with interdisciplinary colleagues, scholarship, outreach and advocacy, all while settled in a college town surrounded by outdoor recreational opportunities and proximity to major metropolitan areas.

The primary training site, Chestnut Ridge Center, is the psychiatric center for WVU Medicine, located on the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center campus. This campus also includes J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital. Psychiatric outpatient, inpatient and consult/liaison core rotations all occur at this campus. The hospital is a regional referral center providing fellows with the quantity and diversity of patient experience necessary for training. Other training sites include WVU Medicine Children's Hospital on the same campus, pediatric outpatient clinics & Monongalia County Schools. Clinical experience opportunities will include multidisciplinary therapy clinic, PCIT clinic, ReACT clinic with focus on trauma, pediatric neurology clinic, Neurodevelopmental Center clinic, PREVENT clinic with focus on substance use, EDIT clinic with focus on eating disorders, and others. Fellows will learn to function as a part of a multidisciplinary team working toward the best interest of the child. The multidisciplinary faculty includes child and adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and therapists.

Our robust formal curriculum includes protected time on Wednesday afternoons for learning in a socially engaging, supportive, and flexible manner. Various clinical experiences also contain built-in educational time, in addition to clinical instruction during supervision through inpatient, outpatient, consult/liaison, schools and community involvement. As part of the larger academic center, there are opportunities to engage educationally with other departments and programs for both learning and teaching. We are also part of the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, enabling connections with Departments of Neurology, Neuroscience and Neurosurgery.

Our fellowship maintains connections with the core psychiatry residency, and enjoys shared benefits and resources within the institution and community. We encourage a look at our psychiatry residency pages for even more information on collective teaching and education, research, service and outreach, connection with colleagues, and community experience.