Integrated Mental Health Fellowship

The proposed T32, Integrated Mental Health Fellowship, is designed to train clinician scientists who are interested in improving the quality of mental health care delivered in primary care, medical subspecialty, and school-based clinics. Faculty supervisors will include senior investigators in the University of Washington (UW) Departments of Psychiatry, Pediatrics, Family Medicine, as well as Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, and the Puget Sound VA Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) Center for Innovation. The training program combines mentored research with didactic opportunities in the nationally renowned UW School of Public Health, the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award funded UW Institute for Translational Health Sciences and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Research training will include graduate level coursework in biostatistics, epidemiology, health services research, and implementation science, seminars led by program faculty from two NIMH-funded P50 Centers, statistical consultation, journal clubs, grant writing bootcamps, and a weekly works-in-progress seminar and one-on-one mentoring. A strength of the proposed training program is the longstanding cross-disciplinary training between psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, family practice physicians, pediatricians, and health services researchers. Our Integrated Mental Health Fellowship is the only NIMH-funded T32 program geographically located in the Pacific Northwest. Over the past 35 years, this continually funded T32 program has trained 43 fellows, including 38 physicians, and 5 psychologists. According to Scopus our former fellows have published 1,568 peer-reviewed journal articles and have been cited 131,464 times. Under the overall leadership of MPIs Drs. Unützer and Fortney, Co-Directors Drs. Comtois, Richardson and Bennett will collaborate in the management of the program including governance, general mentorship, recruitment, selection, progress monitoring, and career planning for fellows. Two postdoctoral fellows will be admitted to the program each year such that four fellows will participate at any given time. At the start of fellowship, each fellow’s educational needs will be formally assessed using a standardized template. This formal assessment of strengths and development areas will be used to generate an Individual Development Plan. The fellow is expected to re-visit and update the plan quarterly, allowing a time for self-reflection and assessment of their productivity and progress towards their scientific career goals. Fellows without advanced research degrees will be encouraged to complete a Master of Science degree in the UW School of Public Health. All fellows will also engage in one or more research projects supervised by their mentors. The fellows mentors and research projects are proposed as part of the fellowship application process, so progress on research projects can being immediately upon program entry. By the end of the two-year fellowship training program, we expect graduates to be capable of independent work and to be highly competitive for academic research faculty positions.