Pediatrics
Department Goals
The faculty of the Department of Pediatrics at BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine are unified by an unflinching commitment to excellence, professionalism, service, and discovery. We believe that our success as a department is dependent upon exceptional achievement in each of our core missions of clinical care, research, and education.
Overview of the Department of Pediatrics
Faculty
The Department of Pediatrics contains 75 full-time faculty and 25 part-time faculty, which includes 7 faculty with a PhD. Of the total, 24 percent are associate or full professors, 20 percent are clinical associate or full professors, 84 percent are women, and 16 percent are from groups underrepresented in medicine.
Clinical Programs
The department’s clinical programs provide a full range of clinical services to an extraordinarily diverse patient population from within Boston as well as the greater New England region. Hospital-based services include the newborn nursery, a neonatal intensive care unit, the pediatric emergency room, a pediatric inpatient ward, and a pediatric intensive care unit. Ambulatory care services encompass the areas of pediatric primary care and pediatric subspecialties. The clinical services have a distinguished history of providing innovative care to vulnerable patient populations, with nationally prominent programs including the Grow Clinic, SOFAR program, CATALYST, CATCH, and EASE clinic, among others. The Pediatric Specialty Group has model programs including care for children with sickle cell disease, asthma, autism, and epilepsy. Additionally, the Ambulatory Programs have been in the forefront of integrating screening and support services for Social Determinants of Health, and a robust team of integrated behavioral health and family navigators. The department has been an incubator for health, literacy, and economic wellness programs, including Reach Out and Read, Medical Legal Partnership, StreetCred, and others. In the wake of the pandemic, the department collaborated with community partners with the Mobile Curbside Care Van, Project REACH, and school-based vaccination programs staffed and run by residents of the Boston Combined Residency in Pediatrics. The integration of the department’s compelling social mission with a rigorous academic tradition creates an especially rich environment for patient care, training, and discovery.
Research Programs
The department has a long history of generating nationally and internationally recognized and highly cited research in child and family health. This research spans from bench to bedside to community/population health, bringing innovative preventive, diagnostic, and treatment modalities and programs to children and families. Areas of focus include, but are not limited to, health inequities, substance use disorder, infectious disease/vaccines, sickle cell disease, epilepsy, health informatics, and behavioral health. The department also does formative work around policies that impact children and families. The department has an outstanding record of recruiting talented early career researchers, many of whom have received K and/or other career development awards, and is home to many large federal, foundation, and industry grants. It is also the home to many large NIH and foundation research awards. Over the past five years, the department has received over $75 million in research grants. Faculty are committed to mentoring and to facilitating a supportive and collaborative research environment that encourages team science, rigorous methodology, and community engagement.
Educational Programs
The department’s educational programs have a long-standing tradition of training national leaders in clinical care, research, health equity, advocacy, innovation, and medical education, among other domains. The present faculty enthusiastically embrace this tradition and are eager to promote the development of the next generation of leaders in medicine within an inclusive environment. The Boston Combined Residency Program (BCRP) in Pediatrics was formed to meet the needs of the future, bringing together the training programs of Boston Medical Center (BMC) (formerly Boston City Hospital) and Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). Boston Medical Center has a long and important history of clinical research, advocacy, public policy, and innovation on behalf of both local and global populations who have been historically marginalized and/or minoritized. Boston Children’s Hospital is one of the nation’s leading research and training institutions dedicated to the care of children and young adults requiring both common, well-established treatments and treatments at the very leading edge of science. Currently, the BCRP has over 170 residents who hail from all over the country and world; residents spend part of their training at BMC and part at BCH. The goals of the department’s educational programs are to attract the most outstanding future pediatric leaders, support diverse personal and professional pathways, develop a learning environment and individualized program that reveal trainees’ full potential, and create an exemplary mixture of clinical excellence, mutual respect, shared passions, and the highest integrity.
Undergraduate medical education is a core mission of the BMC Department of Pediatrics. Our goal is not only to educate our medical students on the fundamental principles of pediatric medicine, but to provide a deeper understanding for the impact of pediatric advocacy, social determinants of health, quality improvement, and scholarly work on the care of pediatric patients and their families. The opportunities for medical student education in the Department of Pediatrics take various forms over the course of the four years of medical school. In the preclinical years, some students will have the opportunity to work with pediatricians as part of a longitudinal preceptorship in the Doctoring course. Here, students will learn the basics of interviewing and examining pediatric and adolescent patients, supervised by their preceptor. The medical school’s pediatric interest group, which is run by first- and second-year students, works closely with the department throughout the year to facilitate and organize lectures, luncheons, and other gatherings with current faculty and residents. The group maintains a website with information about volunteer, research, and shadowing opportunities within the department.
During the third year of medical school, students will rotate through the six-week core clerkship in pediatrics. Students will have a varied exposure to the practice of pediatrics with the opportunities to work in a mixture of pediatric settings, including inpatient medicine, newborn nursery, outpatient primary care, subspecialty clinics, and pediatric emergency department. The patient care experience is supplemented with small-group case-based learning sessions led by BMC pediatric faculty. The fourth-year pediatric subinternships and electives provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate greater independence and mastery of certain aspects of patient care, and deepen their understanding of subspecialty pediatrics. Students can elect to enroll in subinternships at BMC on the inpatient ward, NICU, PICU, and pediatric emergency department. Electives exist in many of the subspecialty divisions and, in addition, there are unique opportunities to use elective time to initiate a project in pediatric advocacy, quality improvement, and pediatric curriculum with our faculty who are committed to these aspects of pediatric care and education.
