No more than two (2) attempts to pass any of the steps.
No more than five (5) years since completing either medical school or a training program.
We do not sponsor H-1 visas; J-1 only.
We do not offer observerships.
Three letters of recommendation are required.
U.S. clinical experience is not required but is looked upon highly when the applications are reviewed.
Deadline for completed applications is December 1st
Overview of the Program
The pediatric residency program at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School prepares residents for any specialty in pediatrics whether in private practice, academic medicine, or a sub-specialty, accomplished through a comprehensive educational experience and broad exposure to clinical pediatrics. The Department of Pediatrics is housed within the Child Health Institute of New Jersey, the cornerstone of the children's academic health campus adjacent to the institute’s research facilities, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Children's Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and PSE&G Children's Specialized Hospital, both of which are part of RWJ Barnabas Health. Together, they form a unique partnership of world-class institutions representing an exciting opportunity for collaboration and improved pediatric care.
Program Highlights
Residents are involved in the direct care of pediatric patients, both outpatient and inpatient; on the children’s hospital’s general floor and intensive care unit; and from primary to tertiary care
Protected learning time for academic half-day, morning reports, case conferences and grand rounds
UpToDate and Lexicomp access
Medical school library with extensive electronic resources
Our program transitioned to the X+Y curriculum in July 2022
Clinical training complemented by a curriculum designed to develop the skills a pediatrician requires, as a patient advocate, educator and researcher
Membership in the American Academy of Pediatrics with access to pedialink learning center
New England Journal of Medicine pediatric board preparation program
Emphasis on individualized curriculum
Reasons for Choosing Robert Wood Johnson Pediatric Residency Program
An integrated program utilizing a university hospital and an academically oriented community hospital.
Busy clinical services with a large variety of patients.
All pediatric subspecialties represented on the full-time faculty.
Graduated responsibility and independence.
Wide diversity of outpatient experience, including primary and subspecialty care.
Excellent ancillary staff
Faculty dedicated to giving their patients state of the art and compassionate medical care, and to instill these qualities in students and residents.
Supportive environment with open relationships between residents and faculty.
Regional Children's Center offering care across the entire clinical spectrum
Stimulating case conferences.
Nationally renowned Institute for the Study of Child Development and Boggs Center.
Research opportunities and support.
Professional, dedicated nursing and ancillary staff who work collaboratively with pediatricians.
Residency and fellowship programs training at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School benefit from the resources and interprofessional opportunities available through the Rutgers Health institutional sponsorship. Learn more about all of the Rutgers Health sponsored graduate medical education programs on our sponsoring institution webpage.
Our program is unique in that we are centralized in a strong Children’s Health campus where you can explore your various interests. The partnerships between the Department of Pediatrics of RWJMS and Child Health Institute of New Jersey, Bristol-Myers Squibb Children's Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and PSE&G Children's Specialized Hospital along with the many partners of Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health opens a door of exploration to many career paths.
Simon Li, MD
Interim Chair and Professor Department of Pediatrics
Who We Are
Simon Li, MD
Interim Chair and Professor
Department of Pediatrics
Thank you so much for visiting our website! We are so excited to share with you the highlights of our residency program. As the world around us is changing, we are ready to face the new challenges of residency training and building virtual learning curriculums. Our main goal continues to be to train excellent, well-rounded, and dedicated pediatricians.
My favorite part of our program is certainly the people. We have amazing faculty in all of the subspecialties who are not only astute clinicians but also incredible educators who love to teach. We also are so lucky to have extraordinary residents. Our residents continue to impress me throughout their training with their dedication to their patients, to learning and to each other. It is privilege to both teach and mentor them. We see their hard work paying off when they become true leaders in both general pediatrics and the subspecialities. Our graduates are one of the best ways to measure our program’s success. Please review our website but I encourage you all to contact us for more information and any questions you have. I am thrilled to be the program director and hope through this website you can start to see why I love being a leader in the residency program at RWJ/Rutgers. Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you!
Welcome to our website! We are so excited to share with you all the exciting opportunities that we have in our program. We have a diverse resident physician population that reflects the population that we care for in the New Brunswick area. Our close knit team of attending physicians are able to form close working relationships with resident physicians. One of the strong points of our program is the group of physicians and nurses that make this program a close-knit and welcoming learning environment. I look forward to discussing with you all more about how we provide inclusive patient care and graduate strong, well-rounded pediatricians.
Kathrine Baldwin, DO - Pulmonary Fellowship, Westchester Medical Center
Avram Bursky-Tammam, MD - PICU Hospitalist, Cohen's Children's Medical Center
Perel Bursky-Tammam, MD - General Pediatrics
Gabrielle Capozzoli, MD - General Pediatrics
Chika Esochaghi, MD - Chief Resident, Nursery Hospitalist in Maryland
Michelle Gaglia, DO - Anesthesia Residency, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
Courtney Greene, DO - Sports Medicine Fellowship, Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital
Daniel Helfgott, MD - Neonatal-Perinatal Fellowship, Stony Brook Children's Hospital
Lauren Sall, DO - General Pediatrics, California
Alexandria Speakman, DO - Gastroenterology Fellowship, Cincinnati Children's Hospital
Graduates 2021
Marianne Armanious, MD - General Pediatrics, New Jersey
Madhusree Chowdhury, MD - General Pediatrics, Connecticut
Samantha Chu, DO – Fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at Memorial Sloane Kettering
Rannan Kased, DO – Fellowship in Neonatology at Sparrow Hospital, Michigan State University
Jovanna Madray, DO - General Pediatrics, New Jersey
Emily Negroponte, MD - General Pediatrics, New Jersey
Akreeti Maskey-Pagodin, MD-Chief resident then General Pediatrics, New Jersey
Lauretta Oseni, MD- Hospitalist, NYU then Fellowship in Hospitalist Medicine at SUNY Downstate
Aashiki Shah, DO - General Pediatrics, New Jersey
Peter Wu, MD - Urgent Care Fellowship at Children’s National Medical Center
Sarah Yavelberg, MD - Chief resident then Hospitalist/General Pediatrics, New Jersey
Graduates 2020
Tolu Ariyo, MD – General Pediatrics, Maryland
Amy Cheng, MD – General Pediatrics, Maryland
Jaya Isaac, MD - Chief Resident then Fellowship in Pediatric Nephrology at Children’s Hospital of Montefiore
Maaz Jalil, DO – Fellowship in Allergy and Immunology at Case Western Reserve University
Peter Jang, MD - Radiology Residency, Cooper Medical School of Rowan University
Carolyn Ochoa, MD - Newborn Nursery Hospitalist, NYP Weill Cornell Medical Center
Mehrin Sadiq, MD – General Pediatrics, Virginia
Shivani Shah, DO – Fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Newark Beth Israel
Karen Teoh, MD – General Pediatrics, Brooklyn NY
Debra Zharnest, MD - Chief Resident then Fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at St Christopher’s Hospital for Children
Dr. Patricia Whitley Williams, Associate Dean for Inclusion and Diversity and Professor of Pediatrics, discusses diversity in our residency program.
Dr. Uche Azubuine, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics is now the leader of a new task force for Diversity and Inclusion. The description of this task force is below.
This task force will address three areas for improvement:
Recruitment and retention of Underrepresented in Medicine (URM) faculty, residents and staff
Education
Health Inequity
Recruitment - The Pediatric Department has made efforts in the past to increase URM physicians and residents including attending recruitment fairs held by national organizations such as Student National Medical Association and Latino Medical Student Association. These organizations were created for the support of African American and Latino students and physicians. We look to improve our efforts by including task force members on the search committee for new employees and mandating that all members of the search committee attend implicit bias training, on an annual basis, prior to interviewing candidates.
Education - In the past few years there have been many lectures for residents and faculty on implicit bias and all employees are required to complete web based educational modules on racism and sexism in the workplace. Our Task Force will strengthen our educational efforts by implementing formal curriculum that includes in-person lectures and workshops for residents and nurses regarding implicit bias, microaggressions and health disparities. Improving the insight of our faculty, residents and staff will allow us to meet the needs of the diverse population we serve.
Health Inequity - Our Task Force will also work to improve the patient experience by ensuring care is equal regardless of ethnicity or gender. We will implement a feedback system where every patient and their family will have a voice to critique their experience in the children’s hospital and allow us to improve the care that we provide. We plan to objectively create quality improvement projects that identify biases and strive to create a solution.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”- Maya Angelou
Our mission is to create an environment where every employee feels their ideas and contributions are respected and hold merit, and where every patient feels their complaints are valid and their lives have value.
We will work to create and maintain an atmosphere where differences are valued and celebrated, knowing institutional diversity fuels the advancement of knowledge, promotes improved patient care and fosters excellence.
Benefits and Salary
Our residency and fellowship programs offer a uniform package of benefits consistent with those provided at all graduate medical educational programs operated by the medical school. Full details regarding benefits and salary are continuously updated by the Office of Graduate Medical Education.
The focus of the first year (PGY-1) is to differentiate between well, ill- appearing, and critically ill children. Four months of the year are spent in the inpatient setting at BMSCH. Additional time is spent learning about newborns both in the well-baby unit and in the neonatal intensive care unit.
The second year (PGY-2) lets the resident begin to take on leadership roles in the inpatient setting. Further, the resident is able to start exploring various areas of pediatrics that he/she believe will be helpful in his/her future with several months tailored to individual needs. The resident spends block time in the intensive care units and in the emergency department.
Thefinal year (PGY-3) encourages residents to take ownership of their year developing an individualized curriculum that meets both their educational needs as well as their career goals. Opportunities for electives and completing their individualized curricula are the primary emphasis. However, residents also spend time as the inpatient senior for two blocks, and an additional two blocks in the intensive care unit.
In July 2022, our program transitioned to the X+Y scheduling system. We are using a 3 +1 model and have officially joined the ACGME pilot for pediatric programs. With this system, residents spend 3 weeks in an “X” rotation and then have one “Y” week of outpatient experiences that can include continuity clinic, advocacy, development, research and administrative time. Overall, this scheduling system has been shown to lead to improvements in patient care, educational outcomes and the clinic experience.
For their clinic experience, residents are assigned to either Eric B Chandler Health Center or Robert Wood Johnson Medical Group at Somerset. Accompanying the continuity clinic experience is a well-organized curriculum that rotates and repeats over the course of the residents’ training. During years one and two all residents are required to see general pediatric patients at their primary care continuity site. However, if residents are pursuing subspecialty training and they wish to have a continuity experience in their subspecialty, they are able to arrange an outpatient longitudinal clinic in that venue.
All residents participate in a quality improvement (QI) curriculum and participate in QI workshops during block lecture. In addition, all residents are required to complete a scholarly project.
In addition to teaching and clinical activities, faculty, fellows and residents are involved in basic clinical research. Some of the many research project opportunities include: pediatric HIV; nephrotic syndrome; developmental follow-up of premature infants; control of neonatal respiration; necrotizing enterocolitis; transdermal drug administration; autism; Tourette’s syndrome; childhood rheumatological diseases; learning and motivation in the infant; sexual abuse in children; new treatments of childhood cancer; respiratory mechanics in children with lung disease; molecular genetics; emergency room utilization; and screening for language delay.
Residents are required to complete a scholarly activity prior to graduation. Projects involving quality improvement and community advocacy have been completed to fulfill this requirement and opportunities in the Pediatric Clinical Research Center, located within the Child Health Institute, are available to residents.
Utility of Video Telehealth Implementation in Transport
Project LIGHT
Reducing Pressure Injuries in the PICU
Improving Inpatient Management of Eating Disorders
Parental Food Allergy Survey
Prospective Study of GVHD in Pediatric BMT
Survey of VTE Protocols for Risk Assessment
Erythromycin Microbiome Project
QOL Assessment for Peds Endo Patients
CHPG Hypoxemia Murine Model
Asynchronous Literacy Boost
PGY3:
Transport Study- Telehealth QI Project
Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) in extremely preterm neonates: Risk factors and Outcomes
Transitional Care for Diabetic Adolescents
A pilot study of propranolol to treat behaviors in adolescents
Outcomes and effectiveness of enteral nutrition in IBD patients
Validating Claims of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis
Reach Out & Read: Implementation Among Pediatric Residents
The Characterization of PICC Line Displacement by Upper Extremity Manipulation via Point of Care Ultrasonography
Prognostic use of anti-TPO and anti-thyroglobulin antibodies in children with Autoimmune Thyroiditis
PGY2:
Utility of Video Telehealth Implementation in Transport
Project LIGHT
Reducing Pressure Injuries in the PICU
Improving Inpatient Management of Eating Disorders