The psychiatric epidemiology fellowship training program is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and open to qualified candidates with an M.D. or Ph.D. degree. This program has been an important stepping stone for many successful psychiatric researchers. This fellowship is designed to provide experience and skills for research including structured approaches to psychiatric diagnosis and symptom assessment, comparison of rates of psychiatric morbidity in sample populations, and the use of appropriate statistics for reliability, validity, and hypothesis testing.
Special emphasis is given to grant writing skills and summarizing results for publications.
Fellows complete a combination of formal course work in research methodology and statistics as well as supervised research. Most psychiatry residents who enter the program choose to complete a master's degree in Preventive Medicine during the first year. It is possible to participate in the fellowship for one, two, or three years. Most fellows choose to continue some type of clinical assignment one day a week throughout the fellowship in order to maintain patient care skills and supplement the fellowship stipend. The genetics fellowship allows an individual to spend one or more years in full-time research activities related to the genetics of mental illness.