Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship

Addiction is a brain disease that strikes nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population and stands as a leading root cause of medical illness, accidental injury and premature death. Through its Addiction Psychiatry Program, Indiana University School of Medicine is addressing the critical shortage of physicians with both psychiatric and addictions expertise.

The school’s Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship is one of fewer than 50 ACGME-accredited programs in the United States that trains psychiatrists in the neuroscience, diagnosis and treatment of patients with addictions. It is the first program in the country to publish a training textbook and practice guide for the field of addiction psychiatry—the “2 x 4 Model”—and to adopt this textbook as its curriculum guide, leading to American Board of Medical Sciences (ABMS)/ American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) certification in Addiction Psychiatry.

Begin Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship Training

The application-interview-decision-acceptance process happens year-round outside “the match.” Applicants can start the process at any time.

Application Information

The IU Addiction Psychiatry Expansion Project

Beginning in the summer of 2020 the IU School of Medicine Addiction Psychiatry fellowship program will be funded by a multi-million dollar five-year Health Resources & Services Administration Addiction Medicine Fellowship (HRSA-AMF) award that will support the IU-Addiction Psychiatry Expansion (IU-APE) Project. This federal support will:

1) Grow the addiction psychiatry physician workforce by increasing the annual class size to four fellowship positions and greatly increasing addiction psychiatry fellowship stipends to $100,000/year.

2) Grow the addiction psychiatry faculty, training and clinical care treatment infrastructure at IU School of Medicine as part of a new Division of Addiction Psychiatry.

3) Design, implement and manage a new internet-based platform (the We-2 x 4 Model) that will interlink and support training, clinical services, and research across a regional and national network of integrated dual diagnosis clinics and inpatient units led by addiction psychiatrists.

The HRSA funded IU-APE Project will support the largest expansion of addiction psychiatry training and clinical services in the history of the IU School of Medicine. Building on the institution’s deep foundation of basic and clinical neuroscience research on addiction, the IU-APE project will provide fellows with a powerful and integrated training experience to equip them as leaders of clinical, research and/or educational teams.

IU School of Medicine Addiction Psychiatry Fellows will rotate across a range of venues (community mental health centers, university hospital settings, Veterans Administration) all equipped with addiction psychiatry mentoring faculty working in clinics that follow a 2 x 4 Model-informed design. These training sites provide treatment training for patients that span the life cycle across pregnancy, perinatal, adolescent, young and older adulthood. Fellows have access to world-renowned basic and clinical research faculty funded by NIMH, NIDA and NIAAA, based at the IU School of Medicine, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and IU-Bloomington (IUB). These faculty conduct a diverse portfolio of research on addictions including trans-species animal modeling focused on alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, opioid, nicotine and nicotine addictions (and their combinations), as well as human studies involving neuroimaging, genetics, virtual reality and pharmacological treatment approaches. Addictions faculty have conducted pioneering work in characterizing the neurobiological and developmental connections between mental illness and addictions in the mammalian brain, contributing to a new translational neuroscience for addiction psychiatry, training and clinical practice. IU School of Medicine's NIAAA-funded Alcohol Research Center, developed the Alcohol-P rat (one of the most influential rodent models of alcohol addiction in the world) and produced a director of NIAAA (Ting-Kai Li, MD; 2002-2008).