Paul Bryant, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry, and Maya Prabhu, MD, LLB, associate professor of psychiatry, have been named associate program directors for the Law & Psychiatry Division's Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship.
They join Howard Zonana, MD, professor of psychiatry, and Reena Kapoor, MD, associate professor of psychiatry, in leading the fellowship program, which trains five fellows per year and has a national reputation for excellence in forensic education.
Bryant earned his medical degree from the University of North Carolina and completed his general psychiatry residency and child psychiatry fellowship at Dartmouth. He completed his forensic psychiatry training at Yale in 2017.
Since joining the Law & Psychiatry faculty in 2019, Bryant has used his child forensic expertise in both his educational endeavors and in his clinical work as a Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services consulting forensic psychiatrist.
As the director of the didactic seminar Foundations of Forensic Practice, he took the lead in redeveloping the curriculum by focusing on contemporary forensic topics through innovative pedagogical approaches. Using these approaches, Bryant went on to co-create the seminar Fostering Justice to incorporate social justice within forensic studies, and to position Yale’s fellows at the forefront of the evolving field. Within this purview, he founded a didactic series for child forensic psychiatrists which has steadily grown and now includes trainees from other forensic fellowship programs around the U.S.
His academic pursuits revolve around ethical challenges encountered in psychiatry, with a particular focus on the impacts of systemic bias on violence risk assessment.
Prabhu earned her medical degree at Dalhousie Medical School and her law degree at the McGill Faculty of Law. Prior to entering the Yale Adult Psychiatry Residency she practiced corporate litigation at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York and was a deputy counsel with the U.N. Oil-for-Food-Programme.
After completing the Yale forensic psychiatry fellowship in 2011, she joined the Department of Psychiatry as faculty. In 2019, she also joined the Yale Law School faculty as clinical associate professor (adjunct). A nationally recognized expert on refugee mental health, Prabhu has overseen the fellows’ clinical experiences with the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and supported resident involvement in the Yale Refugee Health clinic.
She has taught a variety of topics related to global mental health, international law, climate change and justice, and she plans to expand these endeavors in the Law & Psychiatry Division and beyond.