Award Description
The Clinical Research Fellowship provides recent college graduates with the opportunity to spend two years engaged in cutting-edge clinical research and to learn various assessment measures commonly used for clinical and diagnostic characterization of autism and related disabilities. Clinical fellows will learn assessments across a variety of domains including cognitive/development, social-behavioral, language, and adaptive functioning. Additionally, they will learn to interpret the commonly used instruments as well as writing up the results for families into a clinical report.
Fellows are directly mentored by clinicians and program directors and involved in a highly active and productive community of interdisciplinary research scientists who study ASD. This fellowship aims to serve as a stepping stone for doctoral programs in clinical psychology and PsyD or MD programs.
Award Amount
$38,000 in the first year, $39,000 in the second year (with full healthcare coverage across both years)
Sponsor Institution
Marcus Autism Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Emory University School of Medicine
Program Directors
Ami Klin, Warren Jones, Cheryl Klaiman
For more information on the Faculty at the Marcus Autism Center, visit our website.
Eligibility Requirements
College graduates who will have received a bachelor's degree by the start of the fellowship are eligible to apply.
For the Clinical Research Fellowship, previous experience with infants and toddlers; coursework and/or research in cognitive science, experimental, clinical, or developmental psychology; or work with young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) will be favorably reviewed. Some experience administering psychological assessments, whether they be standardized or experimental, is preferred. However, we prize a diversity of interests, skills, and backgrounds in our group, and alternate routes into clinical research with children with ASD will not be seen as a detractor.
Please note that this fellowship is not offered concurrently with graduate studies. However, for fellows leaving the program, we do hope that the fellowship will serve as an important stepping-stone towards future graduate studies or careers in computer science.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please refer to the FAQ page for questions regarding this fellowship and the How to Apply page for more information on application.
Research at the Marcus Autism Center
Marcus Autism Center is the largest center for clinical care of children with ASD and their families in the US, seeing more than 5,000 patients per year. The center also works in partnership with Emory National Primate Research Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Georgia Institute of Technology. These partnerships enable a multidisciplinary and translational approach to ASD research, spanning projects in behavioral neuroscience, neuroimaging, molecular and population genetics, and treatment.
The directors of the fellowship program lead the social neuroscience, spoken communication, and neuroimaging research cores within Marcus Autism Center. These research cores use eye-tracking technology, neuroimaging, computational modeling, and behavioral neuroscience methods to better understand the causes and developmental mechanisms underlying ASD and to develop new tools to improve early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of ASD.
For additional questions, please contact the Marcus Fellowship Committee at marcus.predoc-fellowships@emory.edu or (404) 785-9554.