Jonathan Slater, M.D., is a triple-board-certified psychiatrist — in Psychiatry, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Psychosomatic Medicine — and a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where he is also a Senior Attending Psychiatrist on the Consultation Service at New York–Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital. He has run his own private practice since 1990.
Slater received his B.A. from Harvard University and his M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he completed his adult psychiatry residency, child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship, and a post-doctoral research fellowship in the pharmacological treatment of aggression. He earned a certification in psychoanalysis at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He served as Chief of Pediatric Psychiatry Consultation-Liaison and Attending for the Pediatric Cardiac Transplant Team at Columbia from 1992 to 2014, and directed the Pediatric Psychiatry Emergency Service from 2011 to 2014. He teaches narrative medicine to child psychiatry fellows, served on the Pediatric Bioethics Committee, and has been a preceptor in Columbia's medical school curriculum.
Slater's work with pediatric heart transplant patients led to two film projects. In 1992, he produced Second Chance: Heroes of Heart Transplantation in Children, a video used to prepare children and families for the transplant process. That work brought him to the attention of filmmakers Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman, and he served as medical consultant and liaison for their 1998 HBO documentary Heart of a Child, which took the experience of pediatric heart transplantation to a national audience.
He is the co-author, with science writer Mark Fuerst, of Tell Me Where It Hurts: How to Decipher Your Child's Emotional Aches and Physical Pains (Adams Media, 2002), a book for parents on understanding the interface between physical symptoms and psychological distress — a question that has animated Slater's clinical work throughout his career.
A black-belt martial artist, Slater founded Once Upon a River in 2001, a program integrating karate, yoga, fitness, nutrition, and art therapy for children with psychiatric disorders, based in a dojo on the Hudson River in Irvington, New York. Over three years, the program served forty-four children aged six to fourteen, with more than half showing improvement across all eleven behavioral domains measured, and seven earning black belts.
Earlier in his practice, Slater was awarded one of three national research grants from the Big Apple Circus to study the Clown Care Unit, professional clowns deployed into pediatric hospital settings. He found that their presence measurably reduced children's procedural anxiety and made cardiac catheterizations run more smoothly. The research helped secure national expansion of the program and remains one of the few rigorous studies of humor as a clinical intervention.
Slater has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, STAT News, MedPage Today, the New York Daily News, and Columbia Magazine. He is a past participant in the Columbia Medical Journalism Workshop and now serves on its Academy Advisory Board. He publishes "Just the Facts," a Substack newsletter on child psychiatry aimed at making health and science evidence accessible to general readers. He is currently at work on a book of narrative nonfiction that follows twelve patients he has treated across spans of ten to thirty-five years, with the Hudson River as a recurring structural and thematic thread. He is a member of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
