Overview - Postdoctoral Fellowship Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Training Program

The UC Davis Medical Center, located in Sacramento, California, is an integrated, academic health system that is consistently ranked among the nation’s top medical schools. Within the UC Davis School of Medicine, the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences has strong collaborative relationships with Sacramento County’s Department of Health Services and UC Davis Health. Our postdoctoral fellowship program in clinical child and adolescent psychology offers fellows the best of both worlds: training from a strong academic approach that emphasizes evidence-based treatment within the context of providing complex clinical work in a variety of outpatient, community mental health, primary care, and public school settings.

Alongside UC Davis Clinical Faculty, doctoral psychology interns, as well as psychiatry residents and fellows, our clinical child and adolescent psychology fellows will receive their advanced training and provide direct psychological services at clinic sites in Sacramento.

Learn more about clinical rotation sites

What to expect from the fellowship experience

Our fellowship program is dynamic and challenging. Successful applicants will have clearly demonstrated interest and experience in clinical child and adolescent psychology, with a strong foundation in conducting clinical intakes/interviewing, therapy, and assessment. Successful fellows typically have experience working within community/integrated mental health settings and/or acute settings and populations (residential treatment facilities, youth detention facilities, foster care, etc.). Our fellows will obtain experience serving diverse (e.g., age, ethnicity, race, culture, religion, immigration status, sexuality, gender identity, ability, etc.) child and family populations including: Sacramento County Medi-Cal/EPSDT (0-21), UC Davis Health/MIND Institute (ages 8-17), or Washington Unified School District (ages 5-18).

By the end of the fellowship year, our fellows will build upon their comprehensive, evidence-based skills in intervention, assessment, screening/consultation, supervision, and teaching/training with a general child and adolescent population. There is an emphasis on trauma-informed care interventions and approaches, as well as strong commitment to advancing social justice across our clinical work. Our program offers fellows specialized training in various evidence-based therapeutic models for the 0-5 population as well as adolescents, including but not limited to: CBT, PC-CARE, CPP, TFCBT, DBT, and ACT.

In addition, fellows complete an advanced assessment series that provides hands-on training in neurodevelopmental assessment, neuropsychological assessment, and personality testing (including the Rorschach- RPAS). Fellows also receive advanced training to support their progress towards licensure and independent practice. These advanced topics include: ethics, individual/cultural diversity, integration of science and practice, supervision, and teaching. Lastly, fellows will receive training opportunities in neurodevelopmental disorders through our training collaboration with the MIND Institute. By participating in these trainings, fellows are considered “short-term” LEND trainee.

See our program brochure for further details on eligibility criteria

Visit the APPIC website for more details on postdoctoral selection standards

How to apply

Consistent with the licensure requirements in many states, including California, our postdoctoral fellows receive 1,800 hours of supervised professional experience. Fellows receive a minimum of four hours of individual and group supervision with up to four different licensed psychologists and one psychiatrist. At least two hours of supervision each week is face-to-face with a licensed psychologist. In addition, fellows meet with individual and group supervisors regarding their psychotherapy and assessment cases, as well as their professional development and supervision skills. It is our goal that at the end of their postdoctoral fellowship, fellows will have obtained the necessary professional competencies for independent, entry level practice, delivering both psychotherapy and psychological assessment in various multidisciplinary settings, with a specialization in clinical child and adolescent psychology.

Our commitment to diversity

As a training program, the UC Davis Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Postdoctoral Fellowship stands for diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice. We are committed to creating a welcoming training and teaching environment that respects individual differences while supporting the attainment of nationally recognized competencies for becoming a health service psychologist. To this end, we commit to: recognizing and addressing unconscious bias within our training organization, making efforts to recruit and retain diverse trainees and faculty from historically underrepresented groups in the field, engaging our team to create a more just and inclusive environment, developing the space for all team members to gather, share, and learn from one another, and to increase our awareness for inequality, power and privilege, discrimination, and various forms of oppression across clinical, professional, and personal settings to better engage in respectful and inclusive practices.

Learn more about justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in mental health