Welcome to the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry training program at the University of Iowa! As the Department Chair, I am excited about our educational mission. We are a highly regarded psychiatry department nationally in clinical care and research. We similarly believe we are a top department in the educational domain, as we are deeply committed to excellence in teaching, and have had great success in turning out well trained and highly sought after residents. Certainly our Child and Adolescent Psychiatry residents have consistently been superb.
We are very proud of the success of our Child and Adolescent Psychiatry program. Its roots stretch back to the beginning of our department in 1920, when Department Chair Samuel Orton, pioneered the study of dyslexia. He worked with a student here named Lauretta Bender, who went on to become one of the founders of the field of child psychiatry. Since that time many distinguished child psychiatrists have graced our halls, including Richard Jenkins, among the first to successfully treat Tourette syndrome, Mark Stewart, an expert on ADD and conduct disorder, and Joe Piven, a current leader in autism research.
The department has been training psychiatrists since the 1920s, with the first of these being Dr. George Sprague, who graduated in 1922. He went on to a distinguished career that included being on the committee that wrote the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or DSM, in 1952. Recently retired past Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division head Sam Kuperman has been active in the training program since 1989 and continues to be an active educator. His success is reflected in the recent establishment, by a grateful former trainee, of the Sam Kuperman Career Development Fund in Child Psychiatry.
Our Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Training Program Director, Dr. Carissa Gunderson, is a master clinician and a tireless advocate for trainees. Dr. Gunderson has a stellar reputation here in Iowa for her insightful clinical care, particularly in the interdisciplinary ADHD clinic she created, but has made a mark at the national level with her involvement in medical student career development within the Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation program which she brought to Iowa in 2015. Associate Program Director, Dr. Emira Deumic Schultz, while new to this position, brings years of teaching experience with medical and undergraduate students and a strong interest in interventions for sleep and physical health within child psychiatry.
Our goal is to provide residents with a broad education that will prepare them for life-long self-learning and dedication to the practice of psychiatry at the forefront of evolving knowledge. We seek to provide residents with a variety of educational experiences so that they may choose among the many available career options. Our residents consistently score high on national examinations and frequently receive awards. These have recently included election to an APA/Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Minority Fellowship. While many of our Child and Adolescent Psychiatry residents have gone into clinical positions, others have headed towards fellowships and academics, including faculty positions at Iowa and a recent fellowship at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. We are quite proud of all of our trainees as their success points to the high quality of the people who train here, and the high quality of the educational experience that is provided by our training directors and by all of our teaching faculty.
We welcome your interest in the department, and look forward to getting to know you and letting you know more about the terrific opportunities that exist here in lovely Iowa City, a UNESCO World Heritage City of Culture. Both the city and the department are wonderfully friendly places with a strong sense of community. Come have a look. You’ll like what you find!
Peggy Nopoulos, MD
Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Pediatrics
Chair and Department Executive Officer of Psychiatry