Dr.
Londino to participate in Harvard program
by Kim Miller
Dr. Donna Londino, assistant professor of psychiatry and health behavior in the School of Medicine, will attend the Harvard Macy Institute’s 13th Program for Educators in the Health Professions.
“This program gives 55 educators in the academic medical field the knowledge and skills to create an educational project and implement it into the curriculum,” Dr. Londino said. “The goals are to enhance our professional development so that medical students are better educated and increase professional publications regarding education.”
The Harvard Macy Institute is run by Harvard Medical School, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Business School. Selected candidates are typically in mid-career without advanced degrees in education.
Dr. Londino will receive financial support to attend the institute through the Lasdon Foundation, which supports medical research and the performing arts. The Boston program consists of an 11-day winter session and a six-day spring session.
Dr. Londino’s proposed project will collaborate with the Essentials of Clinical Medicine course, a two-year sequence that emphasizes skills to prepare medical students for the third year of study. It will target the assessment of multidisciplinary needs of families, children and adolescents with chronic mental health and medical illnesses.
“We hope to introduce medical students early to the concept of patient- and family-centered care, an endeavor that supports the mission both of the medical school and MCGHI, to improve the quality of patient care,” Dr. Londino said. She plans to implement the project in the spring.
Dr. Londino received her medical degree from MCG in 1995 and
completed a psychiatry residency at MCG in 1999. She was a child and adolescent psychiatric fellow in the department’s child/adolescent division and child and adolescent chief resident from 1999-2000. Dr. Londino is a member of the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, National Alliance on Mental Illness and the Mental Health Association of Georgia.
She is an examiner for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in the subspecialty of child and adolescent psychiatry and was recently appointed to the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology Child and Adolescent Written Examination Committee.
Dr. Londino is the co-director of the first-year medical school course, Brain and Behavior, which integrates psychiatry and health behavior with neuroanatomy. Her research interests include pervasive development disorders, specifically Asperger's disorder, and child and adolescent psychopharmacology.