We are excited to announce that Larry Wissow, MD, will be joining us as our new Chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry beginning January 1, 2019. Dr. Wissow was identified as the leading candidate after a national search involving several distinguished candidates, and we are thrilled he accepted the offer to join us here in Seattle.

After growing up in central New Jersey and going to school in Massachusetts (Amherst College) Dr. Wissow did a “gap” year in France as an exchange student/language instructor including some part-time work for the Paris bureau of the New York Times. Despite aspirations of becoming a journalist, he found himself in medical school at Duke University and then matched for pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He happily married a fellow resident, Nancy Hutton, and they have been doing two-career juggling ever since. One of the juggles involved Nancy letting him do another residency in exchange for not moving to another city, and thus, a child psychiatrist was born.

After child psychiatry training, Dr. Wissow spent much of his career as a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, working on adaptations of child mental health interventions for primary care and teaching about the social determinants of health and health-related behavior. He became involved in projects both in the US and overseas, including Ethiopia, Iran and Pakistan, and worked clinically in many “non-traditional” settings including Head Start and school-based clinics, outreach programs for new immigrants, the pediatric HIV clinic, and with a mobile treatment team. Dr. Wissow returned to the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins two years ago because he really missed clinical teaching.

Dr. Wissow enjoys swimming and kayaking (tame, not whitewater) and is a perpetual-beginner student of the Renaissance lute. He loves independent community radio and for the last two years, he has worked with a student-run FM station at a high school in rural Maryland on health-related programming. He and Nancy have two adult, married children: one a computer science student in New Hampshire and the other working as an immigration attorney for a non-profit serving asylum seekers in New York City.

We are confident that Dr. Wissow will make an excellent addition to our team and encourage you to meet him at a UW / SCH reception during the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) in Seattle from 5:00-6:30 PM on Thursday, October 25. Please help us welcome Larry and Nancy to UW and the Pacific Northwest!