Education & Training
Learn from the best. The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM) continues to lead the burgeoning field of adolescent medicine. Our fellowship program, led by Director Elizabeth M. Alderman, MD, was among the first adolescent medicine programs to be accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) in 1994 when adolescent medicine became a recognized, board-certified subspecialty.
The three-year fellowship program is designed to provide training through a variety of clinical experiences, formal educational activities and structured research opportunities. The eight faculty members of the Division are committed to personal, supportive mentoring of each fellow in both clinical and scholarly pursuits.
Applying for Our Fellowship
The fellowship program is applicable to those interested in a career in academic medicine or in clinical practice; the successful candidate will qualify for subspecialty board certification in adolescent medicine. Our fellows consistently score highly on the board examination and secure positions in academic adolescent medicine, college health and adolescent private practices after graduation. Fellows are required to have at least three years of house officer training in Pediatrics, Internal Medicine or Family Medicine.
Applicants should complete the ERAS common application for adolescent medicine fellowships and submit three letters of reference, including one from the applicant's department chairman or director of training. A scheduled visit and interview is required for all applicants except where this presents a severe hardship.
What Our Fellowship Offers
At CHAM and in other community sites, adolescent medicine fellows have the opportunity to utilize multiple resources for clinical learning, including:
- A dedicated adolescent inpatient unit
- Eight weekly adolescent medicine subspecialty practice sessions
- A multidisciplinary adolescent weight management program
- A Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives (LARC) clinic for adolescents
- The largest school-based health program in New York State
- A college-based student health service
- Health services for adolescents in foster care and juvenile justice
- The nation’s first adolescent HIV/AIDS program
- A teen pregnancy program
- Sports medicine
Subspecialty support for the Division is provided by the Departments of Pediatrics in the areas of dermatology, pulmonary diseases, rheumatology, hematology, oncology, nephrology, cardiology, endocrinology, immunology, infectious disease, gastroenterology, genetics and neurology. Consultation in all the surgical subspecialties is available. The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences provides thorough support, consultation and education through the Division of Child/Adolescent Psychiatry.
Clinical Settings
The Michael I. Cohen, MD, Adolescent Inpatient Floor
The 28-bed unit provides care for adolescents and young adults with diverse acute and chronic medical, surgical, gynecological, and psychosocial problems. There are approximately 1,600 admissions per year. Each fellow, with faculty mentoring and supervision, spends four to six weeks each year as the attending physician on the inpatient service, providing a rich teaching experience for our pediatric residents and medical student sub-interns. Fellows also provide consultation services throughout the children’s hospital.
The Adolescent Medicine Subspecialty Practice
The Adolescent Medicine Subspecialty Practice at CHAM, averaging 3,000 visits per year, provides primary care and consultation services for self- or physician-referred adolescents and young adults aged 13 through 21 years, in addition to patients discharged from the adolescent medicine inpatient service.
In-depth experience in adolescent gynecology is stressed, with emphasis on reproductive endocrinology, contraception, including IUDs and implants, menstrual disorders, and congenital reproductive tract anomalies. We are a referral center for the evaluation and medical management of eating disorders in adolescents. In addition, we provide comprehensive health services and consultations for adolescents with chronic illnesses, enabling our fellows to participate in the care for teenagers with asthma, sickle cell anemia, cancer, renal disease, organ transplants, rheumatologic diseases, diabetes mellitus and more.
The Adolescent AIDS Program provides counseling and medical care for young people with HIV or AIDS, while providing testing and counseling services for those at risk; the program also participates in AIDS clinical trials.
The Bronx Nutrition and Fitness Initiative for Teens (B’N Fit) is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary weight management program for obese adolescents. B'N Fit clinicians provide in-depth medical, nutritional and psychosocial evaluations in addition to ongoing medical care for complications arising from obesity. Over the three years of the fellowship, fellows participate in all of these services, with additional clinical activities in the first year and fewer in the second and third to allow for protected time dedicated to research and scholarly activities.
School Settings & More
Fellows also gain experience managing adolescents in settings outside the traditional academic medical center.
- Adolescent Medicine at CHAM has contracts with three social service agencies to provide health services to their clients at Pleasantville/Edenwald and Graham Windham residential schools for adolescents with behavioral, emotional and psychosocial challenges. We also serve the Children’s Aid Society’s Bronx Family Health Center, where fellows provide family planning services to adolescents in foster care and act as consultants for nurse practitioners. We average more than 2,000 visits per year at these three sites.
- The fellows’ curriculum also includes experience working in the school-based health center at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx.
- Experience in college health is available to fellows at the student health service at Purchase College of the State University of New York in Westchester County.
- A sports medicine rotation, taught by pediatric/adolescent orthopaedists, is also part of the clinical curriculum.
- Fellows learn about substance abuse in an outpatient community clinic setting.
- Fellows may wish to spend time working in the Teen Pregnancy Program at Montefiore Medical Center, where care is provided for adolescent mothers and their newborns.
- Fellows also may elect to work with homeless and runaway youth at Streetworks, a drop-in center in Manhattan.
A wide variety of other clinical electives are available, including an adolescent medicine private practice, adolescent psychiatry, care of transgender youth, rehabilitation medicine, endocrinology, dermatology, diabetes and rheumatology.
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Albert Einstein College of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation's leaders in research support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Einstein and Montefiore Medical Center have been awarded a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) by the NIH that supports the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR), one of only 39 such centers in the nation.
Faculty members of the Division of Adolescent Medicine enjoy strong connections to the ICTR and utilize these to link our fellows to mentors who can help with study design and statistical analysis, if needed, for the fellow’s scholarly project. The Department of Pediatrics provides a required course in research design and career development for all subspecialty fellows, and the Division of Adolescent Medicine provides a weekly informal seminar designed to support our fellows in their scholarly work.
Fellows may pursue investigative interests in clinical, translational, epidemiological and healthcare delivery areas. Our adolescent medicine fellows regularly present their research at annual meetings of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, Pediatric Academic Societies and the North American Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology.
Fellows' Research Projects