Director's Welcome
Welcome to the Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship at Indiana University School of Medicine. I am a proud graduate of the Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship myself, and I can personally attest to the wide breadth of clinical exposure and high-quality faculty teaching. We are committed to providing outstanding education in addiction psychiatry in an environment that is supportive, caring and inspirational. We offer a tailored experience that focuses on your career goals and sets you up for success in your future endeavors.
Alex Thomas, MD, director, and Olawale Ojo, MD, assistant director
The Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship was one of a small number of HRSA-supported programs nationwide, and our options for clinical experiences have been rapidly expanding since. We offer inpatient addiction consultations, general outpatient addiction psychiatry clinics at the VA Medical Center Indianapolis, IU Health, and community mental health centers, as well as experiences in specialized clinics such as perinatal addiction psychiatry, fully integrated perinatal psychiatry within a maternal-fetal medicine clinic, embedded liver transplant clinic and a methadone treatment program. By providing these opportunities, you will gain a longitudinal experience in addiction psychiatry spanning the life cycle across a wide diversity of demographic groups. Additionally, and importantly, we value wellness, so you will have no call, no weekend hours, no cross-covering other fellows in case of absences, and have ample vacation, conference, sick and personal time. Faculty are in charge of treatment teams at the various sites while you are away, so you can focus on each clinical site when present. This is all provided within the Indianapolis metropolitan area, which boasts a low cost of living while offering many of the benefits and attractions of a larger city.
Our curriculum also includes weekly addiction psychiatry didactics, multiple teaching opportunities and a half-day of protected time for scholarly activity. You will gain education experience by co-leading a CME-supported regional lecture series, the IU School of Medicine Addiction Psychiatry Symposium, conducting a grand rounds presentation for the Department of Psychiatry, and teaching both medical students and psychiatry residents. You will gain scholarly experience by pursuing a research project, study or analysis within the field of addiction psychiatry to become a peer-reviewed publication. We are the only Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship with a dedicated textbook, The 2 x 4 Model, that enhances your experience by providing a blueprint for fully integrated addiction and mental health treatment programs led by addiction psychiatrists. We provide experiences in such clinics and encourage you to lead the treatment teams at each site by creating comprehensive treatment plans for each individual patient that are then implemented by a team of therapists, case managers, social workers and other support staff.
Our fellows have gone on to become heads of programs, outstanding researchers and international leaders of clinics. I look forward to exploring your goals as an addiction psychiatry fellow.
