Dr. Dueñas completed his medical degree at the University of Santiago in Santiago, Chile, where he also completed his training in child and adolescent psychiatry. After practicing in southern Chile for several years, he relocated to the Valparaiso/Vina del Mar region as one of the few child psychiatrists in the area. He built a busy clinical practice and consulted to hospital and primary clinics throughout the region. He then sought out to develop a new training program in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Valparaiso, and he successfully launched only the seventh such program in the country in the early 2000's. Through his immense effort and collaborative spirit, Dr. Dueñas has built a strong and durable training program and has developed a wide-ranging clinical program in child and adolescent psychiatry in Valparaiso that spans from outpatient care and consultation/liaison psychiatry at Van Buren Hospital in downtown Valparaiso, to both inpatient and outpatient services at El Salvador Hospital outside Valparaiso, and to a system of in-person and telephone consultation to primary care clinics throughout the Valparaiso/Vina del Mar region. He has trained an entire generation of child and adolescent psychiatrists in his program, has built a strong faculty of practicing clinician/educators, and has elevated the visibility of child mental health services in his region.
Dr. Dueñas works closely with Drs. Biel and Stewart to both send his trainees to Georgetown for training each year as well as to send Georgetown students, residents, and fellows to Valparaiso for clinical rotations lasting one to four weeks. In addition, four members of our faculty have traveled to Valparaiso, and Dr. Dueñas has joined us as a visiting scholar at Georgetown once. One of our current residents, in close collaboration with Dr. Dueñas, has designed a clinical research project investigating patient experiences and clinical outcomes on Dr. Dueñas' inpatient unit at El Salvador.