Dr. Rameshwari Tumuluru Receives the 2018 Outstanding Academician Award from the Indo-American Psychiatric Association
The Indo-American Psychiatric Association (IAPA) has selected Rameshwari Tumuluru, MD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, to receive its 2018 Outstanding Academician Award. She will receive the award at the organization’s annual scientific/business meeting to be held May 5, just prior to the American Psychiatry Association meeting in New York City. At the meeting, Dr. Tumuluru also will present a talk on the challenges and rewards of being a clinician-educator. Mary Ganguli, MD, MPH, Professor of Psychiatry, nominated Dr. Tumuluru because of the leadership, originality, and dedication she brings to the department, noting that “she enhances the academic environment of clinical service programs while maintaining clinical excellence and compassion for the troubled youth and their families that the programs serve."
The IAPA award recognizes outstanding members of the organization that have made significant research or clinical contributions to the mental health field. Dr. Tumuluru was instrumental in developing, and is Medical Director, of Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic’s (WPIC’s) Adolescent Acute Partial Hospitalization Program (AAPHP), the first hospital diversion initiative in the region for adolescents with various psychiatric diagnoses. She also is Medical Director of the program’s Afterschool Intensive Outpatient Program and pioneered the Virtual School Consultation Initiative, which facilitates maintaining contact with patients’ schools during treatment so they can participate in discharge planning and provide support for transitioning back to school. Dr. Tumuluru also is an attending psychiatrist at the Merck Child Outpatient Clinic at WPIC, caring for the program’s most challenging patients who have severe developmental and behavioral disorders.
As a committed educator and mentor, Dr. Tumuluru is highly involved with residents, fellows, and medical students and continuously endeavors to help create the next generation of child and adolescent psychiatrists. As a researcher, for 10 years she participated on an NIMH-funded project on risk factors for children with depression. For the past 10 years, she has collaborated on several treatment trials with children and adults with developmental disabilities, as well as a large, NIMH-funded multicenter study of atomoxetine for the treatment of ADHD in children with autism.