The Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) is a full-time clinical fellowship.
We are committed to providing excellent services in a changing healthcare environment, and Psychology Postdoctoral Fellows play a role in these initiatives. A high level of supervision and didactic training is paired with a flexible work environment meant to introduce the trainee to a variety of roles in consultation, assessment and therapy. While Massachusetts no longer requires postdoctoral training for licensure, our full-time fellowship should meet the requirements of other states who require this.
The Postdoctoral Fellow is eligible for appointment as a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Medical School, which provides the appointee with access to university libraries, museums and other benefits. Fellowships are full time (generally 40-50 hours weekly), beginning on the last weekday of August. The Neuropsychology Fellowship is for two-years; all other fellowships are one year. Stipends are $56,880 per year, and training resources include an annual $1900 benefit for educational expenses. All fellows receive four weeks of vacation. Health insurance and other benefits are available to fellows as CHA employees.
How the Fellowship is Structured
The Clinical Psychology Training Program prepares Psychology Fellows in clinical psychology to understand and treat persons suffering with a broad spectrum of emotional distress. Using a scholar-practitioner model, our curriculum emphasizes a biopsychosocial approach to the understanding of people and values the use of psychotherapy and assessment. Our talented and multidisciplinary faculty teaches fellows in a variety of specialty areas through didactics and comprehensive individual and group supervision. With close faculty-trainee interaction, we provide a solid grounding in treatment and assessment that take into account ethnic and cultural influences. We also teach fellows to integrate a variety of treatment modalities while working with persons with an array of psychological problems, including persons diagnosed with major mental illness and severe personality disorders.
At Cambridge Health Alliance, the education of psychologists occurs in multidisciplinary settings. A distinctive feature of our program is that Psychology Fellows can pursue a wide variety of individual specialty interests in the context of a Fellowship program that emphasizes growth as a professional clinical psychologist. All Fellows meet together weekly in a Professional Development Seminar, which includes such topics as providing supervision, teaching in both medical and academic settings, writing for publication, obtaining grants and conducting research, licensing procedures and legal and ethical issues for the psychologist. Fellows are evaluated by supervisors and training directors twice yearly, and the program follows CHA's due process and grievance procedures.
Please note that service delivery has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and may include remote visits with patients as well as protected in-person visits for psychological testing and inpatient rotations. Supervision may also be conducted remotely.
We generally place fellows in one of eight options currently available. The applicant must select and apply for one or more of the following options:
Option I: Adult Neuropsychology Service (two years)
Option II: Primary Care-Behavioral Health/Family Medicine
Option III: Child and Adolescent Acute Services
Option IV: Adult Psychodynamic Treatment in the Program for Psychotherapy
Option V: Adult Psychotherapy/Psychological Assessment Services
Option VI: Treatment of Early Psychosis/Adult Psychotherapy
Option VII: Adolescent Risk Assessment and Violence Prevention
Option VIII: Mindfulness and Psychotherapy
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