Chief, Department of Psychiatry,

IWK Health Centre Professor and Head,

Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry,

Dalhousie University
Phone: (902) 470-8087

Fax: (902) 470-7937

Email: kathleen.pajer@iwk.nshealth.ca

Dr. Pajer is Professor of Psychiatry and Head of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.  She is an expert in antisocial behavior disorders.  The primary focus of her research has been the interaction between stress response system function and long-term outcomes in adolescent girls with antisocial behavior.

Dr. Pajer received her undergraduate degree in Special Education from the University of Connecticut in1973, teaching children with emotional and learning disabilities for several years before deciding to apply to medical school. After pre-requisite coursework, Dr. Pajer started medical school at the University of South Alabama, receiving an M.D. in 1982.  Her residency training in Psychiatry was done at Dartmouth Medical School and Yale School of Medicine.  She was also a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Yale from 1986-88.  During this time, Dr. Pajer also obtained a Master’s in Public Health from Yale School of Public Health.

Upon completing her fellowship, Dr. Pajer joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. During the four years that she was there, she was the Director of the Psychiatry Consultation-Liaison Service, which served four large urban hospitals. She was also the Director of Residency Training and went on to build a new residency program at Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, another medical school in Pittsburgh. After launching that program, she returned to WPIC several years later to focus on her research. 

Prior to joining Dalhousie University, Dr. Pajer was an Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Epidemiology, and Psychiatry at the Ohio State University, where she had been working at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital since 2003.

Child and adolescent psychopathology has always been the focus of Dr. Pajer’s clinical work and research. She is presently working on two new research topics.  One is to determine if abnormalities in maternal stress response system function during pregnancy can explain mother-child transmission of antisocial behaviors.  The second project is the development of a gene expression biosignature to be used as a diagnostic biomarker for child and adolescent major depression.

Dr. Pajer’s research has been funded by the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1995 and she has also received private foundation support. She has over 120 publications and has presented her work at numerous national and international meetings. Dr. Pajer has been a grant reviewer for NIH, as well as for health agencies in other countries.  A frequent manuscript reviewer for journals, she is also on the Editorial Board for the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and also for the Open Psychiatry Journal.