Yale Psychiatry Department welcomes new faculty, announces promotions

Hilary Blumberg, MD

Professor

Clinician-Scholar

Steve Martino, PhD

Professor

Clinician-Educator

Nathan Hansen, PhD

Associate Professor

Clinician-Scholar

Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, PhD

Associate Professor

Clinician-Educator

Benjamin Toll, PhD

Associate Professor

Clinician-Scholar

Jorge Aguilar-Zanatta, MD
Clinician
Dr. Jorge Aguilar-Zanatta came to Yale as a Psychosomatic Medicine Fellow after completing an Adult Psychiatry Residency at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York. He obtained his medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine and Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara, Mexico. He joined Yale-New Haven Hospital's Psychological Medicine Department as a Consult Psychiatrist for the Behavioral Intervention Team and Consult Psychiatry Service. In addition, Dr. Aguilar-Zanatta will serve as an HIV Psychiatry Attending at the Nathan Smith Clinic. His interests include Psychosomatic Medicine, HIV Psychiatry in Hispanic Communities, Transplant Psychiatry, Trauma Psychiatry, and instructing fellows, residents, and medical students.

Andres Barkil-Oteo, MD
Assistant Professor
Andres attended medical school at the University Of Damascus, Syria. As a medical student, Andres collaborated with an effort organized by local and international NGOs to provide psychological assistance to Iraqi and Sudanese war refugees. After medical school, Andres engaged in a two-year joint program between University College London and Yale University. At the Anna Freud Center in London, he studied psychodynamic theories and at Yale, he performed functional MRI studies to investigate resting functional connectivity in epilepsy patients. During psychiatry residency at Yale, Andres was involved in providing mental health services to diverse groups, including University students, a large, uninsured Hispanic population, and Iraqi refugees. His work at the refugee clinic resulted in a publication that describes the Prevalence of Psychiatric and Medical Illnesses in this sample. Last year Andres pursued a public psychiatry fellowship at Columbia University in New York City. At Yale, Andres will be an attending at the Hispanic Clinic at CMHC.

Ariadna Forray, MD
Assistant Professor
Dr. Ariadna Forray, originally from Mexico, graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in psychiatry at Yale. During her residency training she joined the Neuroscience Research Training Program and conducted clinical research on perinatal mental health through funding by a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award. Upon completion of her residency she was awarded funding through the competitive Yale Clinician Scientist Training in Substance Abuse Research (K12) program. Through this award she received research training in clinical investigations on substance abuse in women, under the mentorship of Dr. Kimberly Yonkers. Her current research focuses on developing interventions for perinatal smoking. The overarching goal of Dr. Forray's research is to better understand the role of the hormonal milieu and psychological factors during the perinatal period on substance use disorders, in order to enhance treatment and long-term abstinence.

Theddeus Iheanacho, MD
Assistant Professor
Dr. Theddeus Iheanacho completed medical school at Abia State University, Nigeria followed by Basic Specialist Training in General Psychiatry at the Dublin Rotational Psychiatry Training Scheme based at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He thereafter immigrated to United States and completed psychiatry residency in New York and Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship at Yale. Dr. Iheanacho has joined Yale faculty and will be providing clinical services at the Sub-acute and Residential Services at Connecticut Mental Health Center. His academic and research interests include addiction psychopharmacology in dually diagnosed patients and mental health services in low and middle income countries.

Brian Kiluk, PhD
Assistant Professor
Dr. Brian Kiluk completed his postdoctoral training at Yale through a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) T32 Fellowship, where he worked with Dr. Kathleen Carroll on the development of a web-based program for delivering cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for substance use disorders. He also examined the mechanisms of action of computerized CBT, which led to the discovery of the acquisition of coping skills as a mediator of treatment effects. He joined the Yale Department of Psychiatry faculty in 2011 as an Associate Research Scientist, and was recently appointed to the rank of Assistant Professor, where he will continue his work leading a program of research on technology-based interventions within the Division of Substance Abuse. He is currently Project Director for several trials evaluating the web-based CBT program at the Substance Abuse Treatment Unit, where he also provides clinical services as a staff psychologist.

Grace Kong, PhD
Associate Research Scientist
Dr. Grace Kong, trained in Clinical Psychology, came to Yale as a NIDA T32 postdoctoral fellow in Division of Substance Abuse in the Department of Psychiatry and worked with Dr. Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin on NIDA-funded adolescent tobacco cessation and prevention studies. As an Associate Research Scientist, she will continue to work with Dr. Krishnan-Sarin on developing adolescent smoking interventions with a specific focus on reducing ethnic/racial and gender disparities.

Jiacheng Liu, PhD
Associate Research Scientist

Carla Marienfeld, MD
Assistant Professor
Dr. Carla Marienfeld came to Yale from Texas for psychiatry residency after completing medical school at Baylor College of Medicine. During residency, she served as Psychiatry Residents' Association president, program-wide Chief Resident, and course director and founder of the Yale Global Mental Health Program, and she received several awards. She started research in the area of education in Global Mental Health and on methadone treatment outcomes in Wuhan, China. During training as a fellow in Addiction Psychiatry at Yale, she expanded her interests to include research in health service outcomes for the dually-diagnosed populations and training for motivational interviewing skills. As faculty, she plans to continue her interests in education and training, global mental health, and health services research, and will continue her clinical work on medication assisted treatment for opioid dependence at the APT Foundation.

Maya Prabhu, MSc, MD, LLB
Assistant Professor
Dr. Maya Prabhu obtained her medical degree from Dalhousie Medical School in Halifax, Nova Scotia and completed residency training in adult psychiatry and a fellowship in forensic psychiatry at Yale. Between medical school and residency, she graduated from the McGill Faculty of Law in Montreal, Canada and was a lawyer with Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York and the United Nations Independent Inquiry Committee into the Iraq Oil-for-Food program. She will join the faculty with the Psychological Medicine Service and the Nathan Smith Clinic; she will also be continuing her work with the Law and Psychiatry Division. Her research interests include forensic psychiatry, PTSD especially in post-conflict situations and various issues at the nexus of health and international law.

Xoli Redmond, PsyD
Clinician
Dr. Xoli Redmond came to Yale School of Medicine as a predoctoral fellow and continued his postdoctoral training through the Department of Psychiatry at the Substance Abuse Treatment Unit of CMHC. Dr. Redmond specializes in mindfulness-based and cognitive therapeutic approaches specifically focusing on domains such as acceptance, compassion, truth, and awakening. He is a trained meditation instructor with over eight years of experience in insight-based and non-dual meditative practices. He is currently a Clinician at the Yale Stress Center where he will serve their client population and continue the development of beneficial treatments.

R. Andrew Sewell, MD
Assistant Professor
Born in England, Dr. Sewell received his undergraduate degree in physics from Cornell University, graduated medical school at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, then completed a combined residency in neurology and psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine. He completed an Alcohol and Drug Abuse Fellowship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School where he also studied functional MRI as a tool for assessing the effects of acute drug administration. Finally, after a MIRECC Fellowship in Schizophrenia Research at Yale University, he joined the Yale faculty in 2010. His research focuses on reducing the burden of alcohol and drug abuse in dual-diagnosis patients by testing hypotheses regarding the pathophysiology of alcohol and drug abuse through acute neuropsychopharmacological probes. He recently won both a VISN 1 Career Award to use PET imaging to study familial vulnerability to alcoholism and a NARSAD to study the contributions of the cannabinoid system to extinction learning.

Tomoko Udo Schaller PhD, MSc
Associate Research Scientist
Dr. Udo earned an MS in behavioral neuroscience from Rutgers University, and a PhD in public health from a UMDNJ/Rutgers University joint program in 2009. She completed her postdoctoral training at the Center of Alcohol Studies, Rutgers University. During her graduate and postdoctoral training, she was an active member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (Director: Marsha Bates, PhD) of the Center of Alcohol Studies, where she studied the relationship between heart rate variability (HRV) and risk for hazardous alcohol use in college students. She joined Yale Department of Psychiatry as an associate research scientist through the K12 BIRCWH scholar program in August, 2011. Her current research focuses are: 1) to develop a human laboratory study to understand gender differences in the relationship between self-control, food choice, and ad-lib eating behaviors with Dr. Sherry McKee, and 2) to investigate neural mechanisms underlying sex-differences in self-control of food intake through the rodent models with Dr. Ralph DiLeone.

Michelle Silva, PsyD
Assistant Professor
Dr. Michelle Silva is a licensed clinical psychologist based at the Hispanic Clinic of the Connecticut Mental Health Center with professional experience and interest in the creation and delivery of culturally and linguistically appropriate services for Latino immigrant children, adolescents, and adults in the greater New Haven Community. She came to Yale in 2004 and completed a predoctoral internship in Clinical and Community Psychology with placements at the Hispanic Clinic and the West Haven Mental Health Clinic. Since 2007, Dr. Silva has served as Associate Director of the Connecticut Latino Behavioral Health System, a state-funded collaborative designed to expand access to recovery-oriented clinical services for monolingual Latinos throughout south central Connecticut. In her new appointment, and under the mentorship of Drs. Kathleen Carroll and Manuel Paris, she will also serve as co-investigator in a Spanish-language adaptation of Computer Based Training for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Matthew Steinfeld, PhD
Instructor
Dr. Matthew Steinfeld received his doctorate in clinical psychology from The New School for Social Research, and completed pre- and postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. He has been a Fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a Psychoanalytic Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Dr. Steinfeld’s scholarly, research, and clinical interests include: clinical theory and technique in psychodynamic psychotherapy, the role of mentalization in growth and change processes, and the psychological and sociological correlates of substance use disorders. A classically trained musician, he has also conducted research on the psychodynamics of music making. He will serve as an Instructor in Psychiatry and as a clinical staff member at the Connecticut Mental Health Center’s Substance Abuse Treatment Unit.

Azure Thompson, DrPH
Associate Research Scientist
Azure B. Thompson is a BIRCWH Scholar in women’s health and addictive behaviors. She holds a DrPH and MPH in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University and a BA in journalism from Howard University. She most recently was a NIMH postdoctoral trainee in mental health services research at Rutgers University. She was also a NIDA predoctoral trainee in drug abuse research at the National Development and Research Institute and a W.K. Kellogg Fellow in Health Policy Research. Her research focuses on the social determinants of racial differences in substance use and psychiatric problems. She is particularly interested in studying life course risk and protective factors for cigarette smoking among women, and the intersection of these factors with neighborhood environment. She recently published on the relationship between early life course factors and racial disparities in women's smoking cessation, and racial disparities in access to and quality of psychiatric and substance use treatment.

Sheng Zhang, PhD
Associate Research Scientist
Dr. Sheng Zhang came to Yale University as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Psychiatry, and completed his training with Dr. Chiang-shan Ray Li. As a postdoctoral associate, he played an instrumental role in key aspects of research in Dr. Li’s laboratory. He performed novel exploratory analyses of the imaging data of both healthy individuals and patients with severe psychiatric illnesses. In particular, he performed functional connectivity analyses on both task-related and resting state fMRI data, and presented the research results at scientific meetings and in peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Zhang’s research interests include resting state functional connectivity, skin conductance responses in a cognitive task, diffusion tensor imaging, independent component analysis, multi-voxel pattern analysis. He has joined the Department of Psychiatry as an associate research scientist and will continue his work at Yale University.

Lingjun Zuo, PhD
Assistant Professor
Dr. Zuo received her PhD at Fudan University and her residency training at the Shanghai Mental Health Center in China. She joined Yale as a postdoctoral associate in the Human Genetics Division, Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Zuo is the recipient of a career development award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Her research interests focus on identifying and characterizing genes and genetic mechanisms involved in neuropsychiatric disorders, using emerging and novel approaches to identify causal variants, and interdisciplinary research. Her research has been funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and NARSAD grants. Currently her research is involved in detection of genetic variants and DNA methylation alterations in the endocannabinoid and glutamatergic signaling pathways in substance dependence and schizophrenia.