By Marc Shapiro
Each year, Kennedy Krieger Institute works with about 1,000 trainees, from undergrads and recent medical school graduates just beginning their careers to clinicians, social workers, advocates and others with established practices. Its 31 training programs set young trainees on specialized career paths and help professional clinicians expand their skill sets. The impact that training alums go on to have throughout their careers is immeasurable.
“We have some of the best teachers in the field, providing clinical supervision, research, mentorship and other types of training,” says Vice President of Training Dr. Miya Asato, a pediatric neurologist. “Our goal is to help all doctors realize that disability is a very common part of the human experience, and we want them to feel comfortable and welcoming toward these patients.”
Training programs include postdoctoral training in fields such as psychology and neuropsychology, graduate-level training in psychology and social work, doctoral-level training in physical therapy and audiology, and nursing training. Some training programs and exposure experiences are just a few weeks long, while others last for several years. Trainees come to the Institute from all over the world, the majority for medical training in any one of about 18 different specialties. Because of its affiliation with Johns Hopkins Medicine, trainees are taught in an interdisciplinary manner, with many faculty members holding positions at both Kennedy Krieger and Johns Hopkins.
Kennedy Krieger’s training programs date back to the 1960s, when then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy established a task force to study the research, clinical and training needs for taking care of people with disabilities, particularly developmental disabilities.
“No one really understood the epidemiology, the causes, the treatments and who could help people with developmental disabilities,” says Dr. Asato, who holds the Institute’s Arnold J. Capute, MD, MPH, Endowed Professorship in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities.
As a result of that task force, 16 institutions were awarded grants, with the Institute being one of the first. That enabled Kennedy Krieger to construct its inpatient hospital building at 707 North Broadway, Baltimore, and formally establish its affiliation with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Funding continues into 2026 in the form of other federal grants.
One of the Institute’s flagship programs is its six-year Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (NDD) Residency Program. An international leader in this unique subspeciality, the program builds on child neurology, developmental pediatrics and developmental neuroscience. It offers a triple board certification in neurology, with special qualifications in pediatrics, pediatric neurology and neurodevelopmental disabilities. Some of its trainees complete their two years of preliminary pediatric training elsewhere and come to the Institute for four years. The program also offers a one-year course for pediatric neurologists to gain a deeper understanding of neurodevelopmental disabilities.
“Kennedy Krieger sets the national standard for training in neurodevelopmental disabilities,” Dr. Asato says. “The people we’ve trained are truly unique physicians, and they’re doing really impactful things—all around the world.”
When you start your career learning from people who are not the ones winning awards, but the ones whom the awards are named after, that’s a really wonderful advantage.” – Dr. Joshua Ewen
A Multifaceted Approach
Dr. Mark Batshaw trained at Kennedy Krieger from 1973 to 1975, when the NDD training program was a two-year neurodevelopmental disabilities fellowship. He was recruited by Dr. Robert Haslam, director of the program at the time, and he trained under Dr. Arnold Capute, regarded by many in the field as the father of developmental pediatrics.
“Both of them were such skilled clinicians,” Dr. Batshaw says. “I learned the importance of interdisciplinary care, to look at a child in the broadest possible perspective, and to develop a multifaceted approach toward their treatment.”
The program also taught Dr. Batshaw the importance of research, and of educating general pediatricians in neurodevelopmental disabilities. He went on to spend his entire career caring for children with neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Initially, Dr. Batshaw remained at Johns Hopkins and Kennedy Krieger, primarily doing research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in rare metabolic disorders known as urea cycle disorders. His career then took him to leadership positions at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Children’s Seashore House, which provides inpatient and outpatient care for children with neurodevelopmental disabilities and chronic illnesses, as well as at The George Washington University Hospital and Children’s National. He has published more than 200 articles and is senior editor of the textbook “Children with Disabilities,” a standard in the field. Many of his colleagues and fellow trainees from the Institute have contributed chapters to the book.
At age 80, Dr. Batshaw is once again a developmental pediatrician and doing research at Children’s National.
“If you go into developmental disabilities, it’s because you love the field; you’re really committed,” he says. “You feel a calling, which I did.”
That was also the case for Dr. Eliza Gordon-Lipkin, who was in the NDD training program from 2014 to 2018. During medical school, her dream of becoming a pediatric neurologist steered her toward the program, as did her father, Dr. Paul Lipkin, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician at the Institute and a professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
“I really appreciated the comprehensive approach that the NDD program took, integrating training in developmental and behavioral pediatrics, and really incorporating multidisciplinary elements through child psychiatry, developmental pediatrics, rehab and child neurology,” she says. “The program afforded a comprehensive approach to fully understanding these children from many different perspectives.”
Her father served as a mentor, and together, they published research finding that children with both autism spectrum disorder and ADHD have a higher risk for anxiety than those with autism but not ADHD. More recently, they published a book chapter about early developmental screening.
These days, Dr. Gordon-Lipkin is a staff clinician at the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, working with the team that studies immune dysfunction in mitochondrial diseases, many of which cause neurodevelopmental disabilities. She is responsible for the clinical care of individuals participating in her team’s research studies.
“The Kennedy Krieger program was a perfect launching pad for a position like mine at NIH,” she says. “It was a wonderful, foundational experience.”
The people we’ve trained are truly unique physicians, and they’re doing really impactful things—all around the world.” – Dr. Miya Asato
‘The Center of the Universe’
Dr. Joshua Ewen, head of the division of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, has similar sentiments.
“Everything that I’ve been doing is a direct result of that program,” he says. “It’s not a small influence. It’s what has set up the subsequent nearly 20 years of my life.”
In running the division, Dr. Ewen and his team teach primary care physicians in the Chicago area about neurodevelopmental disabilities and how to diagnose autism. They also do research and are actively expanding services. His own research lab is working to identify knowledge gaps in autism and neurodevelopmental disabilities.
At Kennedy Krieger, where Dr. Ewen was in the NDD training program from 2002 to 2006, he studied under Dr. Capute as well as Dr. Bruce Shapiro, associate program director at the Institute, and Dr. Martha Denckla, who directed the Institute’s Developmental Cognitive Neurology Clinic at the time. He also came away with an interdisciplinary mindset, which he says helped him understand links between different aspects of development early in his career.
“In the NDD world, Kennedy Krieger really is the center of the universe,” he says. “When you start your career learning from people who are not the ones winning awards, but the ones whom the awards are named after, that’s a really wonderful advantage.”
Like the program’s other training alums, Dr. Sarah Risen is still profoundly informed by her time in the NDD training program. A 2011 grad of the program, Dr. Risen stayed on as faculty for a time, but is now working to emulate the program as the program director of Texas Children’s Hospital’s own NDD training program. When she became director of that program, she sat down with Texas Children’s neurogenetics program director, Dr. Lisa Emrick, also an NDD training alum, and said, “Let’s think of all of the amazing things from our training at Kennedy Krieger. What is feasible to implement here?”
Dr. Risen was drawn to the subspeciality due to her interest in behavior and cognition, which she found particularly compelling during child neurology rotations.
“I have a passion for the brain, but I have a very hard time not caring for the whole brain, and the whole child and whole family,” she says. “Neurodevelopmental disabilities really provided that opportunity to think about and care for the whole child.”
The importance of every voice in an interdisciplinary setting has stayed with Dr. Risen, as it has for her fellow training alums. So has “learning to peel the onion back,” she says, referring to the intentional process of learning about and caring for each new patient she sees. At Kennedy Kriger, she particularly loved the clinical conferences—she’s recreated three of them in her own program—as well as Dr. Shapiro’s NDD lectures.
“Education, the interdisciplinary approach and collaborative teamwork were really cemented in my brain,” she says.
“Kennedy Krieger in and of itself is an incredibly inspiring place to work,” she adds. “It is like no other place. Everyone really exudes hope and optimism—and a lot of passion. There is passion everywhere.”