I’m Tolu! I grew up predominantly in High Point, North Carolina. My family is of Nigerian heritage, and I am the oldest of 3 girls in my family. We moved to Doha, Qatar in 2008 and after graduating from high school at the American School of Doha, I attended Columbia University as a Biomedical Engineering/ pre-med major. During college, my interest in medicine broadened to encompass biomedical research and I spent four years working in a tissue engineering lab. My passions for both medicine and biomedical research led me on the path to pursuing my MD/PhD at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physician & Surgeons. I was closely involved in the Black and Latino students’ organization (BALSO) where I served as the mentorship chair, and APOYO, a group providing mentorship and prenatal/childcare classes for pregnant adolescents. I also had the opportunity to work as a senior clinician with Columbia’s CoSMO Behavioral Health Clinic which was a formative experience in my path to pursuing Psychiatry. During my free time, I enjoy spending time in nature with my husband & our dog Mochi, doing Pilates, listening to podcasts, and discovering new restaurants.
Current Residents
Organizations on this page
First Year Residents (PGY-1)
- In Public Health and Sociology in France; MA in Sociology and Public health policies; MS in Transcultural Psychology; MS Molecular Biology from France. Dr. Laelia Benoit has published 43 peer-reviewed publications including 6 first-authored publications and 13 senior- authored publications. She is the creator and director of GroundedLab, a qualitative methods and Grounded Theory workshop for healthcare professionals. She has provided international consultations in qualitative methods for large corporations and universities. At Yale, she was initially awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to work with Andres Martin and is now the co-director of QUALab, a Qualitative and Mixed Methods Lab at Yale with Andres Martin, MD, Ph.D. She is a leader in research examining eco-anxiety among children and has also done seminal work examining school refusal. Laelia Benoit is of African and Hispanic descent growing up in France. She also speaks five languages fluently (English, French, Italian, German and Portuguese). Her research training during Solnit in Years 5 and 6 will be generously supported by the Yale International Physician-Scientist Resident and Fellow Research Award from the Yale School of Medicine Office of Physician-Scientist Development.
- Hi everyone! I’m Amy (she/her). I was born and raised on Long Island, New York. I’m the sister of two older brothers and proud daughter of immigrant parents who work in the food service industry. It wasn’t until I was an undergraduate student at Stony Brook University that I first thought about medicine as a career (thanks to the encouragement of my now spouse). There, I joined a basic behavioral neuroscience lab which sparked my journey into the world of research. I began my MD/PhD training at UMass Chan in 2015 which allowed me to combine my passion for behavioral research into a thesis project studying how the synaptic protein neurexin is involved in serotonin signaling. I was fortunate to receive the support of the NIMH through an F30 fellowship. During my time at UMass, I co-founded UMass MIND’s community outreach program called CIP (Community Intervention Program). Working alongside community members with serious mental illness, local mental health organizations, and academic institutions, we developed interventions including the Food4Thought nutrition program and drama therapy program, both supported by Remillard Family Community Service Fund grants. I aim to continue collaborating with the community to develop sustainable interventions focused on whole health and reducing stigma. I am someone who believes in the value of learning about the diverse experiences of everyone we meet as well as paying forward the support we receive. Outside of work, I love all things food (cooking, eating spicy food, trying new restaurants), staying active, and spending time with friends and family.
- I am from the ancestral lands of the Hewisedawi people from Northern California. I grew up in Shasta Lake/Redding, CA where sports, school, and community were my life. Driven by being a positive role model from my two younger brothers, I decided to become the first one in my family to attend a university. At UCSD I met my first Native American physician, Dr. Dan Calac, and became inspired to pursue a career in medicine and work with underserved Indigenous communities. After college, I participated in the post bac program at the NIH where I studied insulin sensitivity to explain the physiological basis for the high prevalence of obesity and diabetes in Asian and African American communities. At the NIH, I met my husband and we ventured next to New Haven, CT where he began his MD/PhD program at Yale and I worked as an EMT. I matriculated into medical school at the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine. During medical school, co-founded the Perspectives on Equity Advancement: Research and Learning Symposium (PEARLS) where students receive grant funding to pursue DEI initiatives programs alongside placement of a supportive mentorship team. With an interest in rural medicine, I was 1 of 5 students who completed their clerkship in Fort Kent, Maine. It was there that I discovered my love for psychiatry and holistic care. I am interested in developing Indigenous-based mental health care models, the influence of structural racism on mental health inequities, child psychiatry, and psychotherapy. Outside of the hospital, you can find me at the Branford CrossFit gym, exploring different cuisines, attending concerts/plays, going on weekend camping/hiking adventures, and playing with my dog, Tilly!
- Hi, I’m Evan. I was born and raised in Montpelier, Vermont. I attended public schools along with my sister and brother. My childhood was a mishmash of sports, adventures with my dog, and reading. I completed my undergraduate studies Harvard, where I majored in biological anthropology and had my eyes opened to a broader world while studying in France for a semester. I gained a law degree from George Washington University, afterward practicing as a general defense attorney for several years. Wanting to work more with people, I joined a team improving access to outpatient medical care at Cooper hospital in Camden, New Jersey. As a project manager, I was trained in lean six sigma and worked alongside doctors, nurses, medical assistants, IT staff, and social workers to collaborate on ways to better serve the health of our community. Observing the impact of healthcare on our patients was intense. I became the manager of clinical operations for our multispecialty clinic and travelled to Madurai, India, where I was embedded in a local healthcare organization to learn about their solutions to the same problem facing communities in Camden and across America: inadequate access to healthcare. I went on to join Doctors Without Borders, where my work focused on risk management and negotiations. To build upon these experiences and to continue to support access to medicine, I entered medical school at the Larner College of Medicine at UVM, where I discovered my passion for psychiatry. I am excited to integrate perspectives of healthcare systems and global health into my psychiatry residency and future clinical practice. In my personal life, I still spend more time than I should reading stories of magic and adventure not intended for serious people and I aspire to own a dog that takes me on walks.
- Hello! My name is Faduma Hassan and I was born in Tomball, Texas. I was raised in the Houston Metropolitan area and my family is from Somalia. They settled down after the civil war of ‘91 and we have been in Texas since! I, along with over 20 family members, attended Prairie View A&M University for undergrad. My time at an HBCU shaped a significant part of who I am today. As a premed student, I majored in biology and minored in chemistry. During my time in college, our student body learned about the tragic death of a former student by the name of Sandra Bland. Her death moved me and several students to participate in the movement to pursue justice for her and her loved ones, as well as address racism and voter suppression in Waller County, Texas. This fueled my already existing passion as an activist even further and eventually led me down the path of mental health, health equity, and justice (Feel free to ask me how!). In medical school, I began working with populations from underserved backgrounds including houseless and formerly incarcerated persons. My knowledge on the topic of equity and justice continues to grow. I’m excited to work with other residents who are just as passionate as I am about health equity and advocacy work. When I’m not in a healthcare setting, you can find me at a coffee shop reading a book, on my couch watching a Netflix series, or driving around with friends!
- Hey, I'm Simone! I spent the first four years of my life living in a Harvard dorm while my parents taught neuroscience. I spent the rest of my childhood in Belmont, MA before returning to Harvard for undergrad. I studied Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, writing a thesis about the neurobiology of social awareness and cognition in school age children. I fell in love with working with children and teens, and hope to continue to do so throughout my career in psychiatry. My unofficial second major was in cartooning. I served as an art editor for the Harvard Lampoon, the campus comedy magazine, and as the design editor for the school's literary magazine the Advocate. After graduation, I moved to New Haven to pursue a research fellowship studying autism spectrum disorder through EEG and eye-tracking in the McPartland lab at the Yale Child Study Center. I fell in love with New Haven, bewitched by its art scene, the ease of making new friends, and the proximity to the beach, which I frequent (even through the winter). I opted to stay for 5 more years at Yale School of Medicine, where I spent a fifth research year working on a graphic novel combining my grandfather's stories of medical education in Nazi Germany with my own experiences. The work is still in progress, but some excerpts can be purchased in zine form at my website (seshcomix.bigcartel.com). I was delighted to have the opportunity to stay in New Haven for residency. I live in East Rock with my partner and two cats, where I enjoy eating vegan food, reading, lifting weights, and watching reality TV.
- Aloha! I’m Sheri. My birth name was Ryoko, which means “good child” in Japanese. I was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan until I was 10 years old when my family and I moved to Miami, Florida for 4 years. We then moved to the island of Oahu in Hawaii, where I attended high school and later, medical school. I took quite a scenic route on my journey to start a career in medicine. I spent many years on the mainland - in Seattle, Washington to attend University of Washington, where I received my BS in Psychology and PhD in Neuroscience and in Oregon and Arizona for my postdoc training. In my previous life, I was an Assistant Research Professor at Arizona State University investigating why women are more vulnerable than men to anxiety and depression, using molecular biology, neuroendocrinology, and behavioral neuroscience to unravel the link between ovarian hormones, brain serotonin system, and neuropsychiatric disorders. Psychiatry, therefore, was always my passion and I look forward to continuing my training at Yale with my incredible fellow psychiatry residents! Ultimately as a physician scientist, I hope that caring for my patients in the clinic will inform and guide how I can help them best through research and advancement in novel treatment options. In my spare time, I enjoy spending time with my friends and family, including my husband, two daughters, and our little dog, Bear, playing the flute and piccolo in community bands and ensembles, playing the piano, cooking (and eating!) Japanese cuisine, photography, and traveling the world. I look forward to exploring New Haven and the East Coast, as this is my first time living on this side of the country! So excited for new adventures at Yale!
- Hi, I’m Micayla! I was born and raised in Charlotte, NC and attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for college where I majored in psychology and minored in both Deaf Studies/American Sign Language and Chemistry. While there, I worked as a research assistant in a lab that studied group differences in processing of emotional information, particularly among people with certain genetic risk factors. Through this work, I learned how critical it is to evaluate contextual and environmental factors that may affect patient health. I also began to develop my passion for serving underserved populations and this led me to coordinate service-learning trips for other university students to learn about topics such as education for immigrants and refugees and domestic sex trafficking. My interest in serving unhoused individuals began during my first year of medical school at UNC Chapel Hill, where I spent the summer with a PATH (Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness) team on the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina, finding individuals that needed psychiatric treatment and basic living resources. This interest also motivated me to lead a student mobile clinic at a men’s shelter while at UNC. Additionally, I am interested in suicide prevention and Addiction Psychiatry. Outside of medicine, I enjoy listening to music, trying new restaurants, and binge-watching TV series!
- Hi, I’m Henry! I was born the youngest of three siblings in Mystic, CT to a chemical engineer and author. I soon moved to Aurora, Ontario, then to Midland, Michigan, then back to Mystic before graduating high school. I did work at Mystic Pizza for several years, where the 1988 Julia Roberts movie is playing on loop (so I’ve seen it many, many times). I attended Swarthmore College for undergrad where I majored in Neuroscience while also participating in musicals as well as the DIII swim team. After graduating, I spent a year working as a research technician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine prior to enrolling in the MD/PhD Program at Emory University School of Medicine. During my clinical years at Emory, I was involved in student wellness initiatives focusing on fostering resilience through connection. I also served as president of the MD/PhD Student Association and the Psychiatry Student Interest Group, as well as the service chair of the Emory LGBTQ+ student group. I became involved in the Persistent Symptoms Treatment and Recovery (PSTAR) clinic for patients with psychosis during my M1 year and continued to work there throughout my time in the program. When I transitioned to my PhD, I joined the lab of Dr. Shannon Gourley, and became very interested in how our experiences sculpt our choices, particularly those choices that are dependent upon the prefrontal cortex. Particularly, my PhD investigated how rodents incorporate social information into their decisions, and the underlying necessary neural circuits. Going forward, I hope to continue investigating social cognition in rodents and humans in the lab, while also providing clinical care for LGBTQ+ populations. Outside of lab and clinic, I love watching campy or artsy horror films, going to drag shows, running, hiking, canoeing, and spending time with my cat and fiancé (soon to be husband!). I’m excited and honored to be joining the Yale Psychiatry community.
- Hello everyone! This is Idil. I was born in Istanbul, Turkey and went to medical school in Ege University in Izmir, Turkey. Growing up in the political climate I did gave me the chance to cultivate a sense of social justice and political/structural awareness at an early age. In 7th grade I wrote blogs about sociopolitical factors leading to displacement within my country, started forums with kids across the globe, and dreamt of becoming a "doctor without border" in UNICEF (excuse the corporate identity crisis, I was 12) . This dream I had, and my passion for human rights brought me to medical school, that I expected to be a place where I could work with people and learn from them to create a fairer world. This vision quickly evolved into a reality after I started working for a student-lead organization called IFMSA. I went around the world and served medical students as they shaped the future of healthcare through human rights advocacy, policy making and capacity building - locally, nationally, and globally. Here I also discovered my passion for mental health. Not only every human rights issue we sought to overcome had a mental health component to it, but mental health was also critical for us, healthcare workers, to sustainably drive change. Afterwards, with my new passion and curiosity, I turned to psychiatry. I joined World Psychiatry Association work groups for students and took part in organizing global mental health seminars, conducted research on human rights in psychiatry education as a part of World Network of Psychiatric Trainees and also had the chance to briefly work as a psychiatry resident in Turkey before moving to New Haven and starting my residency at Yale. So here I am, a place where I can work with and learn from people, people who inspire me to create a fairer world. When I'm not busy providing for and learning from my patients and admiring my co-residents, you can catch me taking random walks around the town, discovering the Yale Campus, and hopping libraries, religiously following the Yale Arts Calendar, and scavenging books from secondhand shops (I also crochet).
- Born in Chengdu, China, I emigrated to the U.S at the age of nine, where I spent the next decade moving across the country from California, Georgia, Maryland, to North Carolina. After entering Emory University to pursue a career in film score composition, I switched gears to dual-major in music and neuroscience. After studying relational memory formation with Dr. Elizabeth Buffalo in undergrad, I joined Dr. Leslie Ungerleider’s lab at the NIH to investigate facial processing – both in the Rhesus macaque monkey model. I then continued my pursuit of understanding how the brain inputs information and outputs behavior at the Boston University School of Medicine MD/PhD program, where I completed my dissertation with Dr. Ziv Williams at Mass General Hospital evaluating single-neuronal responses during complex social decision making in mice. Our work has, thus far, revealed a putative executive mechanism in the prefrontal cortical network that allows animals to evaluate social information about others that can adaptively influence pro-social decisions, competitive effort, and sociability. However, during the final years of my training, I discovered a passion to connect psychiatry with the basic sciences to help transform discoveries into treatments. I am currently most motivated by understanding how the brain processes and encodes socially motivated behaviors, uncovering the mechanisms that go awry in psychosocial disorders using rodent models, and exploring novel treatment options – such as neuromodulation and psychedelics – to restore behavioral function. I am also interested in optimizing digital tools and wearable technologies to detect and track psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD. Outside of the clinic and lab, you may find my family and me exploring unbeaten paths, attempting new food and beer recipes, making furniture and cutting boards, and doing much more fishing than catching.
- Hi! I was born in Lima, Peru, and grew up with my parents, sister, and grandparents. My sister Ariana was born with disabilities, and we had to watch her stay at hospitals for long periods. I used to spend those days with my grandparents and developed a strong connection with them, which allowed me to enjoy helping older adult patients and understand their perspectives on life when I was in medical school. There were many struggles during all those years, but my parents could afford my sister’s health care, my education, and everything we needed. Unfortunately, Ariana passed away when I was 15, it was a difficult time for all of us, but I felt my sister left me this huge desire to help kids like her. By then, we had already moved to Cajamarca, a city in the highlands of Peru, and decided to donate Ariana’s wheelchair to a little girl. When we visited her house, I realized how, besides the disabilities, many other social and economic factors were affecting this little girl and her family’s physical and mental health. During medical school, I enjoyed my psychiatry rotations and the public health courses, which made me realize that I would love to join both during my professional career. In 2022, I became a volunteer at Manuela Ramos, a Peruvian feminist organization, where I was able to learn about intersectional feminism. With them, I found a diverse community that discussed what I had always enjoyed learning about and helped me realize how the medical system has, for many years, harmed patients by not taking into consideration all these social disparities. During my training at Yale, I look forward to exploring child and adolescent, public and community psychiatry; additionally, I am excited to share my culture, contribute to the Latinx community and help to improve their access to mental health care. I enjoy dancing, reading, trying new food, and attending cultural events.
- Hi! I’m Jada. I was born and raised in New York by my father, mother, older brother and sister. We shared a lively home in the suburbs of Nassau County. Black history was an integral part of our household, so I decided to minor in Africana Studies along with my Biology major at SUNY Binghamton. After my mother passed away from breast cancer in 2008, I developed a fascination with not only her medical condition but understanding Black womanhood and her life experiences that resonated with my own. As I explored the psychology of race in my undergraduate courses, I applied to medical school with the intent to focus my work on community healing within whichever specialty I pursued. I attended SUNY Upstate and was awarded the Sarah Loguen Fraser Dean’s Distinction Award given to an incoming African American woman based on academic achievement and commitment to serving underserved communities. Through medical school I’ve had the honor of tutoring refugee youth, providing mental health support to adolescent mothers, and participating in other outreach opportunities in the community. I’ve also conducted Bioethics research with Dr. Rachel Fabi creating a database of fictional pieces (books, short stories, poetry, etc) to be used to teach students about community health. I was inducted to the Gold Humanism Honor Society (GHHS) and the Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) honor society and served as the co-chair of diversity and inclusion for AOA. I’m also a proud alumna of our Student National Medical Association chapter, of which I served as president. My interests in psychiatry include community psychiatry, child/adolescent psychiatry, psychotherapy, LGBTQ + care, and correctional psychiatry particularly for incarcerated youth. My hobbies outside of medicine include reading blues literature, singing, romantic comedies and buying more skin products than I need to.
- Dr. Mirabella is a Clinical Fellow (PGY-1) in the Solnit Integrated Training Program in Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center. He grew up in rural New Jersey and majored in Psychology and Biochemistry at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. He completed his medical school and graduate school training through the Rutgers RWJMS-Princeton MD/PhD program where he studied neurodevelopmental disorders using stem cell models under an NIH National Ruth L. Kirschstein Pre Doctoral Fellowship. He also contributed to an understanding of NRXN1 gene loss of function in the pathogenesis of early onset psychosis as a visiting student at Stanford University and as an NIH National Cooperative Reprogrammed Cell Research Group student investigator. Moreover, he developed new methods to understand the role of neuropeptides and local hormonal signaling in the pathogenies of stress, anxiety, and eating disorders. Dr. Mirabella has worked in child mental health advocacy with the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry on improving access to care for marginalized populations and at-risk youth. He is passionate about combining his clinical and research backgrounds to translate findings from contemporary neuroscience to advance the care of children impacted by neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism, OCD, stress, anxiety, and eating disorders, as well as developing interventional approaches for treatment resistant psychiatric conditions in youth. Personal interests include recreational sports (basketball, pickle ball, and tennis especially!), hiking, coffee, tea making, and spending time with friends and family.
- Hi all! My name is Alyssa (she/her) and I hail from northwest Florida. I studied neuroscience and dance at Tulane University where I was a resident advisor, dance company member, and proud bagel shop employee. I found myself fascinated by the interaction of neuroscience, behavior, and community; medicine – and particularly psychiatry – was the field that seemed best poised to investigate this intersection. I transferred to the University of Florida as part of a 7-year combined BS-MD program where I worked at a local coffee shop, continued neuroscience research, and discovered a passion for working with underserved and otherwise vulnerable populations. In medical school, I worked with the Equal Access Clinic Network (EACN), a network of student-run free clinics, as an officer and eventual director of a weekly primary care site with an emphasis on gender-affirming medical therapy. Working with LGBTQ+ folk in clinic and at the coffee shop (I was fortunate to remain employed there during the first two years of medical school) and having a transgender sibling highlighted the mental health disparities experienced by this and other minoritized groups. This led me to start a bi-monthly psychiatry clinic with EACN. My other medical school ventures included being elected to serve as Curriculum Debriefing Chair, leading the UF COM HealthQueer Alliance, and assisting with various research projects on health equity and medical education. My non-medical hobbies include weightlifting, biking, baking, and cuddling up to my tabby cat, Bear. I am excited to pursue my interests in community psychiatry and medical education and cannot imagine a more thrilling place to do so than Yale!
- Hi everyone! My name is Abiba (Ah-bee-bah) and I am a second- generation American from Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire. I grew up in Syracuse, NY, where I developed a curiosity for medicine and advocacy while translating for my grandmother at her medical appointments. I am extremely passionate about community organizing, restorative social justice work, and creative writing. I studied biology at Bard College in Annandale-on- Hudson, NY, and completed a senior thesis on the effects of fluoxetine on Xenopus laevis tadpole feeding behavior. After undergrad, I spent two gap years working as a Clinical Research Assistant at Mount Sinai Hospital in East Harlem and became further involved in community advocacy through the NYC Chapter of Million Hoodies Movement for Justice. As a medical student, I was inducted into the Gold Humanism National Honor Society and also served as a mentor to six POC students in the class below me. I was able to maintain my strong interest in advocacy and discover a new interest in medical education through creating a “Call to Action” Anti-Racism medical education initiative to improve diversity within the preclinical curriculum at my medical school. I also served as a student leader in my school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council, SNMA, and interdisciplinary Pediatric Health Equity Grand Rounds. My strong interest in child and adolescent psychiatry led to my involvement in AACAP and I presented on the ongoing Black youth suicide crisis at the 2022 AACAP conference. I am also interested in academic psychiatry, immigrant mental health, psychotherapy, and the intersection of Islam and mental health. Outside of medicine, I love creative writing (especially poetry), thrift shopping, horror movies, and cooking. Participating in the 2022-2023 Doximity Op-Med Writing Fellowship cohort this year has allowed me to meld my interests in advocacy, medicine, and writing. As a recently inducted member of “Yelp Elite” and a budding food blogger, I am super excited to try out new restaurants in New Haven and explore the area with my new family at Yale!
- I was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, where I attended medical school at the Fundación Universitaria Ciencias de la Salud. My undergraduate training was in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and I hold a PhD in Health Policy from Harvard University, where I studied under the mentorship of Norman Daniels. For over ten years, my research, advocacy, and policy work has been devoted to promoting the health and human rights of vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, particularly inmates in Colombia. My work has included conducting policy-oriented research, consulting for government and multilateral agencies, and contributing to strategic, public-interest litigation. I have also published academic research in the field of population-level bioethics, specifically on topics related to theories of justice and health, medical ethics and professionalism, normative issues in health technology assessments, and the ethics of priority- setting for resource allocation. Going forward I hope to broaden my research agenda to the growing field of psychedelic medicine. I'm interested in pursuing both clinical research and policy-related questions about how to provide access to such treatments in different societal contexts and the related ethical, social, and public health implications of doing so. On land I like running outside and hiking up or skiing down mountains. And I love being on the ocean even more, especially if it involves sailing or swimming among sea creatures. I’d love to meet a kitesurfing buddy, or someone who’ll teach me how to row! I struggle finishing novels, so I mostly read non-fiction and poetry.
Second Year Residents (PGY-2)
- I grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, and am the oldest of three siblings.I attended MIT for college, where I majored in Chemistry and minored in Biology and Political Science. At MIT, I was an undergraduate researcher in Ed Boyden’s lab and used optogenetics approaches to silence epileptic seizures. I then joined the MD/PhD program at NYU, where I completed my thesis work in GordFishell’slab, using single-cell genomics and lineage tracing approaches to study cortical interneuron development. After my first medical school rotation on an inpatient psychiatry unit at Bellevue Hospital, I knew psychiatry was the specialty for me. Going forward, I hope to apply basic neuroscience research tools to better understand, and eventually treat, neuropsychiatric illnesses. I am particularly interested in disorders with a developmental origin, including autism and schizophrenia. I am so excited to move back to Connecticut to join the NRTP at Yale for residency, where I plan to continue my research on fetal brain development. For fun, I love to paint, go to Broadway shows, visit art museums, and play tennis and board games with friends and family.
- Emily Behling is a resident physician in the Albert J. Solnit IntegratedAdult/Child/Adolescent Psychiatry Program. Emily grew up in rural northeastern Connecticut. She received her B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of Connecticut and her M.D. from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Prior to entering medical school, Emily worked as a mental health worker on the inpatient adolescent psychiatry unit at NatchaugHospital. During medical school, Emily became involved in clinical and research work at the Yale Child Study Center. She conducts research in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Bloch and is involved clinically at the Yale Tic Disorder/OCD Clinic. Her research interests involve using advanced meta-analytic techniques and clinical trials to improve the understanding and pharmacological treatments of conditions affecting children and adults including Tourette syndrome, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and anxiety disorders. In her spare time, Emily enjoys reading classic novels, cross-country skiing and cooking.
- Hey everyone! I was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona by mygrandmother, aunt, and mother. These women taught me what it is to love and helped me find my path as a healer. I studied psychology at Grand Canyon University where I got my taste of college athletics by becoming the university mascot. After finishing college, I got a job working with youth from underserved backgrounds in the foster care system where I got to teach them how to navigate life while carrying a psychiatric diagnosis. It is through this work that I decided I wanted to pursue psychiatry. I attended medical school at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Medical school was a transformative period in my life as it began to give me the language to talk about the inequities I witnessed/lived growing up. Diversity, equity, and inclusion became an integral part of my training as I served on various committees while also helping establish the inaugural antiracism in medicine committees on our campus. I further developed my leadership capabilities through becoming president of my school’s SNMA, Psychiatry Interest Group as well as vice president of the student body and the African American Student Association. During medical school, I spent a large amount of my time serving in our school’s free clinics, focusing on our psychiatric clinic, allowing me to earn a distinction in community service. Working with patients from various cultures opened my eyes to other healing practices and inspired me to pursue further training in Integrative psychiatry. Through the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, I was able to gain a new framework for how to approach healing while also earning a distinction in Integrative medicine. As I begin residency, I look forward to exploring my interests in integrative psychiatry, psychedelic medicine, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and addiction psychiatry all within the community setting. Outside of medicine, I love to dance, eat, rhythm skate, travel, and take naps with my Chihuahua son, Wentworth.
- Howdy! I was born in Houston, TX to two immigrant parents from ElSalvador. I have two older twin brothers who wouldn’t let me play video games as a child but who I love dearly now. My senior year of high school I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and two weeks after my eighteenth birthday I stepped on the yellow footprints to being recruit training in San Diego. At the time I wanted to get away from my community because of the drugs, gangs, and ultimately following a visceral feeling telling me that there was something bigger out there for me. I was deployed twice in my four-year active-duty enlistment, including a combat deployment to Afghanistan. Within the same year of my return from Afghanistan I started my academic career at the University of Southern California (Fight On!) where I majored in Psychology and minored in Health Care studies. While in LA I volunteered at the busy ED in LA County Hospital and volunteered at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) where I helped folx prepare for their citizenship exam. I was also part of the Culture and Mental Health Research Lab at USC involved in multiple projects surrounding schizophrenia and Mexican-American families. I traded my shades and the view of palm trees for snow cleats and sunsets provided by Lake Champlain in Burlington, VT, where I started medical school at the University of Vermont. My proudest accomplishment in medical school aside from being inducted in the Gold Humanism Honor Society and going to the Dominican Republic for a global health elective was being the founder and co-president of the Latino Medical Student Association (LMSA) chapter; helping migrant farmworkers receive vaccines and the initiatives behind implementing Medical Spanish in the curriculum have come to light as a result of this chapter. As the first doctor in my family, I do hope to one day return backto a community similar tothe one that raised and one I was running away from at the age of eighteen. In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy anything related to sports, music concerts nearby, and improve on the art of maintaining my plants alive.
- Hi, I’m Dan! I was born into a family of Portugueseimmigrants in Connecticut, where I grew up getting lost in books and learning to play the cello. I studied chemistry and minored in music at the University of Michigan, during which time I worked in bookstores and interned for an education nonprofit. While there, I developed a passion for scientific research and medicine, and pursued a master’s degree in biomedical engineering. I continued my studies at the University of Chicago’s combined MD/PhD program with a specialization in immunology. My research at that time focused on understanding the immunologic mechanisms of allergic responses in the lungs. These days, my research aim is to elucidate roles for the immune system in psychiatric illness. Outside the lab or clinical settings, my professional interests include science communication and outreach. Apart from medicine, I enjoy running or strolling outdoors, making and listening to music, playing board games, and spending time with my husband and two cats. I’ve practiced yoga for many years and am still trying to figure out whether I have a green thumb.
- Hi there! I’m Laila. I was born in Beirut, Lebanon and raised in a village south of the capital by a Lebanese/Sunni Muslimdad and North Carolinian/Methodist mom. I grew up with a great appreciation for the multiplicity of identity –the way that we are formed by people, place, story, and language. I moved to North Carolina with my family when I was 11 years old, following the July War of 2006. I attended NC State University on a Park Scholarship, majoring in Psychology and minoring in French. I spent two summers in France, one studying abroad at the Université Catholiquede Lille and another conducting research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. While attending medical school at UNC-Chapel Hill I discovered that my academic interests, which lie at the intersection of healthcare and story, are well-suited for conducting qualitative research. I worked with a medical anthropologist to study the impact of Vermont's Act 39 (legalizing physician aid-in-dying) on caregivers –and, more recently –the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on moral stress among frontline physicians in NYC and New Orleans. I took a gap year between my MS3and MS4years to complete an MS in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. My scholarship from this year is published in Intima, Synapsis, Voices in Bioethics, and KevinMD. Since graduating, I have administered Narrative Medicine workshops in various settings, including a didactics series for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Hematology-Oncology Fellows at UNC, and two parallel workshop series (exploring the phenomenology of identity) for patients living with eating disorders and the providers who care for them. I am interested in work that grazes the space between psychiatry and medicine, including CL-psychiatry, eating disorders, and palliative care. In my free time I enjoy reading and writing creative nonfiction, propagating houseplants, and learning to play the cello. I don’t have any furry friends, but I do have a (brand new) husband who sports a killer beard, which maybe counts. I am excited and honored to be joining Yale Psychiatry!
- Hi! I was born in Seoul, South Korea and grew up in the suburbs outside ofAtlanta. I went to Dartmouth College and majored in Spanish. In college, I directed an open dance troupe called Street Soul and was also a campus DJ. I moved to Ridgewood, Queens after college and worked in public health doing breastfeeding promotion work in New York. During my time in the city, I joined a competitive hip hop dance team called Unique Movement. I returned to Dartmouth and attended Geisel School of Medicine. There I spent my time gathering local LGBTQ+ youth to do fun activities together like bowling, picnicking, and pottery making as part of an Albert Schweitzer fellowship. As chair of Diversity and Inclusion on our student government executive board, I worked with students and faculty to create intentional community programming for minoritized groups at Geisel. I was drawn towards the field of psychiatry because I was struck by the privilege of hearing people’s rich stories and hold space with one another. My interests include public and child/adolescent psychiatry. I continue dancing as a means of grounding myself, and one of my goals is to integrate dance and movement into my practice.
- Hi! I was born and raised in New Haven by two psychiatrists and amgrateful Yale offered me the opportunity to return home. As an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, I was admitted into medical school via Mount Sinai’s Humanities and Medicine program. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the role of medicine in the Attica Prison Uprising. How and why Attica became a prelude to mass incarceration, and not the transformation in the criminal punishment system that the protesting prisoners envisioned, has been an abiding interest of mine ever since. In medical school, I was a co-leader of Sinai’s Human Rights and Social Justice program. I also began an ethnographic project on solitary confinement at Rikers Island, which inspired me to take a leave and pursue a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at UCLA. My dissertation is an analysis of a program imagined, developed and run by incarcerated men who care for their peers with serious mental illness, and an examination of the entangled histories of mass incarceration and the public mental health system. It draws on the writings of my two heroes, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Frantz Fanon. As a PhD student, I organized with a group of health workers supporting advocacy efforts against the criminal legal system and was part of a successful campaign to stop plans for jail construction in Los Angeles. I also co-taught sessions to undergraduates, medical students and residents on racial essentialism and the health case for prison abolition. My interests include care for people experiencing psychosis, addiction, psychoanalysis, global mental health and the history and political economy of psychiatry. Outside of work, I love everything basketball (but especially the 76ers), early 00sTV, regional Indian cinema, running and exploring alternate food geographies with my partner, an anthropologist of food/media/capitalism.
- I was born at Yale-New Haven Hospital, grew up in Guilford, CT, andwent to high school in New Haven, before my family moved to Dallas, TX for eight years. I went to college in Middlebury, Vermont, and lived at various points in Istanbul, Boston, Colorado, Montreal, New York, and Dallas, before returning to New Haven in 2012. I studied philosophy and Middle Eastern political history as an undergraduate. I spent a year and half trying my hand at creative writing, before having an epiphany that I wanted to go to medical school. While taking my pre-medical courses, primarily at UT Dallas, I did clinical research in pediatric depression with Graham Emslie, MD, and then worked in a basic science laboratory studying schizophrenia with Carol Tamminga, MD, both at UT Southwestern. In medical school, I did my graduate research in the laboratory of Michael Crair, PhD, using in vivo wide-field imaging to study genes involved in cortical circuit development and neuropsychiatric disorders. During residency, I plan to apply analytic approaches for assessing large-scale brain dynamics to pediatric psychiatry, especially in the context of schizophrenia, depression, and suicidality. I am particularly interested in “interventional” treatments, including ketamine, rTMS, and ECT, and how these approaches can be integrated with psychotherapeutic techniques to maximize their potential and sustain clinical response. Outside of medicine, my interests include playing and watching soccer, dancing to live music, reading and writing, medical school theater, and spending time with family and friends, old and new.
- Hi! I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and enjoyed playingvarious sports as a kid, especially football. At the end of high school, I spent two weeks on an expedition in the Alaskan wilderness. Thereafter, sharing a dehydrated meal with friends while watching the sun set behind the mountains became my kind of luxury. I then moved to Cleveland to attend a small liberal arts school called Baldwin Wallace. There, I majored in neuroscience, psychology, and physics with minors in biology and chemistry. My physics professor gave me a passion for puzzles (eventually, we put a book of riddles together). You have a 5-gallon pail, a 3-gallon pail, and a water source (e.g., a hose). How can you measure exactly 4 gallons? Most importantly, I met an exchange student named Christelle three weeks before her study abroad ended. Following a linguistic faux-pas-filled year living with her family in France, we married the week after starting medical school in Nashville, Tennessee. Shortly after meeting her, I unofficially broke the world record for the world’s longest handshake, only to miss out on the actual record due to my partner’s syncopal episode during the Guinness sanctioned attempt in Times Square. At Vanderbilt School of Medicine, I was the president of my class before starting graduate work on the neurobiology of stress and addiction in the Winder lab. The best part of my PhD was the incredible people I worked with and learned from. I also got into advocacy during grad school and traveled to DC multiple times to talk about science funding with members of congress and their staff. On weekends, I cycle with classmates to an old biker bar. Our spandex cycling outfits are conspicuous when surrounded by leather jackets, but we carry on for the unbeatable pancakes.
- Ricky was born in London, England in the Caribbean enclave ofLewishamand lived in Malaysia before moving to Florida. He had a rather nontraditional path to medicine and is the first MD in his family. He concentrated his early career on serving homeless and uninsured behavioral health populations in the urban and rural Florida populations before, during, and after college. Ricky completed a BA in Psychology with a minor in Sociology at the University of South Florida. There, he led a team in increasing municipal funding to Pinellas Hope, a private-public effort providing critical mobile health services and shelter to the neediest in the Tampa Bay area. He spent multiple years contributing to research teams investigating Mood and Anxiety Disorders as well as designing an FMRI study for chronic pain and fatigue while at the University of Florida. While initially considering Clinical Psychology, almost two years of working in non-profit community mental health helped him make the big switch to medicine. He completed his Post Baccalaureate Pre-Medical requirements at the University of Florida in the inaugural cohort of the program. He was extremely honored and humbled to be accepted to Harvard Medical School and was granted the HMS Dean’s Public Service Achievement and the Presidential Public Service award upon matriculation. As Community Service Chair of the SNMA, he led community outreach efforts to give preventive health seminars and promote science curriculum in urban schools. Ricky sees no better avenue where he could better serve others than Psychiatry. Psychiatry’s approach to interconnectedness of the individual, their environment, and mental illness never ceases to amaze him. Psychotherapy and narrative, to him, are invaluable tools for empowering patients to have the most agency in their own outcomes. As a Yale resident, he envisions himself becoming psychiatrist contributing to an integrative approach to healthcare and health education. Most of his free time is spent with his wife, Meriem, and their cat, Misty, and German Shepherd, Brock. Ricky is an avid Green Bay Packers fan and hardly misses a game. He enjoys podcasts, Youtube, and reading on various topics including public policy, philosophy, and various social phenomena.
- Alex was born and raised in sunny San Diego, CA. He had an early interest inmedicine, but briefly entertained the idea of becoming a constitutional rights lawyer. The result was him graduating with a degree in Political Science and being exposed to topics including immigration, border politics, and philosophy. He worked in a restaurant throughout college and gained a second family in his Latinx co-workers. Witnessing the struggles they faced, especially linguistic gaps in healthcare, he attended a 6 monthSpanish language immersion program in Guatemala. Afterwards, he was accepted into the Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community (PRIME-LC) at UC Irvine School of Medicine, where he received additional training to become an advocate for Latinx communities. In medical school, he also ran the Health Policy elective, co-founded the Anti-racism Coalition Task force (ACT), and was President of the Psychiatry Interest Group. His proudest achievement was leading the Bridging the Gap LGBTQ+ project where he reformatted his medical school’s curriculum to include LGBTQ+ health content throughout all 4 years. For his work he received the Lauds and Laurels Outstanding Graduate Student Award; the first time a medical student received the award in its 50-year history. During this timehe also earned an MBA with a specialization in Healthcare Management and Policy and had the amazing opportunity to appear in a Lady Gaga documentary about mental health. His interest in Psychiatry stems from his own experiences as a Transgender man as transitioning is inherently a medical and psychological process. He hopes to give back to LGBTQ+, Latinx, and other marginalized communities by creating genuine connections and recognizing the diverse forms of trauma and intersectionality. In his free timehe plays multiple musical instruments, tends to his garden, and practices woodworking.
- Elizabeth Mensah was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, toGhanaian parents. The relative homogeneity of her hometown coupled with her experiences at PA Governor’s School for Global Entrepreneurship during high school sparked her pursuit of global citizenship and an enduring curiosity about the human experience. Led by these intentions to the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at the Wharton School & University of Pennsylvania, she studied and worked in a variety of contexts, including Alicante, Spain, Mochudi, Botswana, and Havana, Cuba. She then spent several years as a project manager on the business side of healthcare. More interested in the stories behind the numbers, she enrolled in medical school at Emory University where she was president of Gold Humanism Honor Society chapter and active in SNMA. Liz’s passions include documentary film, spending time with her niece and nephew, and exploring various dipping sauces.
- I was born in Mexico City, raised in Brazil, and completed my medicaleducation at Rio de Janeiro in 2020. There, I experienced first-hand the reality of public care in a developing country, having worked with severely underserved populations and victims of narcotrafficking violence. I am currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Center for Clinical Research where I focus my work on matters of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in clinical trials. Proudly Latin-American, I believe that communication and cultural learning are some of the keys to reduce health disparities and increase the quality of medical assistance: for everyone. In my free-time you will find me hunting for new places to eat, running, stand-up paddling, hiking, or looking for the closest live music performance.
- Hello! I’m Nick. I’m from Lima, Ohio a small metro in northwest Ohio that is surrounded by rural communities. I enjoyed a circuitous path to medicine. Growing up my family experienced bankruptcy, foreclosure, and financial instability. At age 16 I started working full-time construction jobs to help contribute to the familial income. By 18, I was promoted to warehouse manager. I initially didn’t plan to attend college after high school. One afternoon while hanging sheet metal, suspended by a harness forty-feet off of the ground, I reconsidered. I wanted a career where I could serve others, so I enrolled in an EMT program. I was enthralled by the medical sciences and went on to earn my RN from our community college, Rhodes State. I found my passion caring for patients. I earned a BS in nursing from Ohio State, while working full-time as an RN. With the encouragement of physician mentors, I decided to make the plunge into medicine. I continued on to the Northeast Ohio Medical University- Cleveland State University Partnership for Urban Health, where I completed another BS and my MD. I discerned many specialties. However, psychiatrists’ unique means to alleviate suffering made for an easy choice. My scholarly interests have included work in palliative care, opiate intercept mapping, and interdisciplinary models of care. Some of my favorite service works have included caring for individuals without housing and coaching youth soccer teams. I enjoy spending time with my wife, Olivia, and nature photography. I feel incredibly humbled to become a member of such a diverse, hard-working, and intelligent group. I hope to leverage my lived experiences and social privileges to make our community a better place. I look forward to caring for patients together.
- I was raised in Bloomfield, CT, a suburb right outside of Hartford. I decided in high school that my career would center around the coolest thing I read on Wikipedia- the brain. I knew at that time that I wanted to work closely with people, so I combined my love of the brain, science, and helping others and decided at a young age to pursue neurology.After graduating from Bloomfield High, I attended the University of Connecticut where I (spoiler alert) was initially a physiology and neurobiology major but found myself drawn to psychology and switched majors. At UConn, my research focused on understanding effort related behaviors in depression and treatments that would target motivation. After graduating, I attended a post-baccalaureate program and spent time working at a physical therapy office until I attended Quinnipiac University School of Medicine. I continued to conduct research, this time focused on epilepsy and psychiatric co-morbidities and side effects of anti-seizure medications all while still pursuing neurology. However, as medical school progressed, I noticed that what I loved most was speaking with patients, hearing, and validating them, and diving into their past while helping them prepare to handle their current reality. Neurology residency began and I continued to think of my career. I found myself gravitating more towards patients with psychiatric illness and their stories. When I envisioned my day-to-day life, I knew that psychiatry would be the best fit for me and I decided to go for it.Since I have arrived at psychiatry as my foundation, I am currently in the process of learning my specific interests. Throughout my life, community focused work has always filled my cup and I know that it will be a large portion of my career as a psychiatrist. My interest outside of psychiatry include trying new restaurants and foods with friends, relaxing with my two cats, learning how to keep plants alive, pottery, traveling (my last trip was to South Korea for the amazing food!), aerial hoop, and sewing what I hope will be wearable clothing.
- Hello! My name is Alana (pronounced Uh-lah-na) Slavin. I was born in Los Angeles, California, and I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, at ten years old. I attended college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where I pursued majors in Economics and Spanish. During my time at Loyola Marymount, I was first able to explore my interests in patient-centered and trauma-informed care as a Clinic Assistant at the Venice Family Clinic, a free clinic providing healthcare to underserved patients in Los Angeles. After college, I pursued my MSc in Economics with a specialization in Development Economics as a Fulbright Scholar in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. During my year with Fulbright, I researched socioeconomic determinants of healthcare, focusing on gender discrimination in the provision of healthcare to young girls in under-resourced healthcare settings. After my Fulbright, I joined AmeriCorp’s National Health Corps and served as a Health Educator and Patient Advocate in Chicago, Illinois. I subsequently matriculated to the University of Michigan Medical School (Go Blue!) in 2018. At Michigan Medicine, I have participated in many research and advocacy projects. My research has primarily focused on how trauma influences mental health outcomes, with projects ranging from studying the psychiatric health of asylum seekers at the United States-Mexico border to exploring the mental health impact of hospitalization during the COVID pandemic. I have also worked on various advocacy projects focused on asylum-seekers mental health with Physicians for Human Rights and as a leader with the University of Michigan Asylum Collaborative. I am incredibly passionate about this advocacy work, and I hope to continue advocating for this population at Yale! I would love to explore my interests in asylum-seeker mental health, women’s and children’s mental health, trauma-informed care, and integrative psychiatry throughout my training at Yale. I enjoy cooking, traveling, spending time with my family/friends/dogs, and pursuing film photography during my free time.
- Talia Stewart is the second eldest of 5 siblings—Taccara, Tabitha, Tim, & Tavis—and grew up in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. She attended Johns Hopkins University for undergrad, majoring in Spanish, and graduated from Dartmouth Medical School. As a young girl Talia and her eldest sister Taccara began competing in pageants, which became a family event! In her two decades of experience, Talia grew her confidence in public speaking, practiced interviewing and effective communication skills, and learned the importance of advocacy and giving back to her community. Conversely, competing with and watching other contestants showed her how lack of confidence and self image could have negative impacts on mental health, which led to her interest in body image and eating disorders. She further explored this while attending Johns Hopkins School of Public Health from where she obtained her masters degree in mental health, worked on the inpatient eating disorder unit and completed her thesis on the prevalence of marijuana depictions in popular films. Talia has varied research experiences, ranging from investigating transgender access to gynecological care in rural New Hampshire and Vermont, to publishing a systematic review determining gastrostomy tube predictors in individuals receiving free flap reconstruction after head and neck surgery. Though she initially began residency in general surgery, kismet returned her to psychiatry, where she is humbled to join the Yale PGY2 class! She is excited to explore the breadth of the field, including eating disorders, forensic psychiatry, CL, ECT and inpatient psychiatry. In her free time Talia loves distance running, spending time with her family, friends and significant other, Rainier, completing escape rooms and watching horror movies!
- Hello! My name is Meghan (she/her) and I hail fromPortland, Oregon. Performance arts and artistic exploration defined my childhood: it taught me the beauty of camaraderie, the power of creative leadership, and the importance of expression. I made art one of my many hobbies when I decided to study the intricacies of protein dynamics and cell biology at Oregon State University. While joyfully learning and teaching biochemistry, I hosted a radio show, dabbled in science journalism, volunteered with kiddos living with disabilities, and found a powerful calling for medicine. After college, I took a teaching job in the ancient city of Madrid having never studied Spanish. I taught English in a bilingual elementary school, traveled extensively, and successfully applied to medical school where I was, early on, elected as student council President of my cohort. As a student leader, I created and facilitated opportunities for mentorship and community-building through art, food, and friendship. I acted as a liaison between administration and students through the upheavals of the COVID pandemic. As a student advocate, I was passionate about gender-based misconduct prevention and later joined a coalition of students who demonstrated with and supported protesters during the Black Lives Matter movement. I found home in psychiatry because I aligned with the providers’ drive to consider the patient as a complex human being. I loved the variety, multidisciplinary teamwork, rich medicolegal ethics, and ability to create safety for patients in vulnerable moments. Throughout medical school, I developed my glass art practice, fermented oodles of food, and adopted two good cats. I look forward for getting to know this community and embracing the opportunities that abound at Yale!
- I grew up in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon in a tight-knit family. I attendedEmory University majoring in Chemistry. I delayed graduation to spend a fifth year studying abroad in Costa Rica and London. Afterwards, I worked full-time at the NIH in Bethesda, MD as a post-baccalaureate research fellow in cardiac imaging for a couple of years. I moonlighted as a bartender during this time hoping to save up cash (government pay was stingy) to travel abroad again. When I entered medical school, my dream was to run a free clinic as a primary care physician. After my first week rotating in psychiatry, however, I knew this was my calling. I decided to postpone graduation after discovering the best specialty ever and earn a Master’s in Clinical Research. I researched the social support of veterans with depression during this time. My current research interests include outcomes of at-risk youth, health disparities of sexual and ethnic minorities, and psilocybin medicine. I’m interested in CAP, forensic, and addiction fellowships. My greatest accomplishment in life is befriending down-to-earth and kind-hearted humans. My family is the biggest source of my joy and purpose. I look forward to surrounding myself with warm and curious people at Yale. Outside of work, I like to endlessly scroll through pictures of my baby nephew Jadon, train for half marathons, and attempt new recipes with my partner.
Third Year Residents (PGY-3)
- Hi! I’m Seyi (pronounced shay-yee). I grew up in Farmington, CT, and stayed in Connecticut to attend Yale for undergrad and graduate school. While in college, I studied medical anthropology. During my Master’s in Public Health, I studied chronic disease epidemiology and global health. After school, I joined the ESTEEM lab at Yale, headed by Dr. John Pachankis, as the project study coordinator for the NYC office. My research has focused primarily on women’s health and racial and sexual health disparities. During my MPH, I went to Mexico to study public policy interventions to lower the teenage pregnancy rate and wrote my thesis on prenatal care satisfaction in American Samoa. In addition to my academic work, I have a background in reproductive justice as an activist and advocate. I worked with Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights as an advisor and served as a representative at the United Nations. I’m also passionate about preventative medicine and holistic approaches to health. As a breathwork facilitator, I teach community workshops on stress management, burnout, and breathwork meditation. I am also a full-spectrum doula. During medical school, I received the Rudin Fellowship of Ethics and Humanities to interview OB/GYNs and doulas about their perspectives on the patient experience during labor. I spend my free time gardening, cooking, dancing, going to concerts, and traveling. I love music, and while in New York, I hosted a radio show called Diasporadic that traced the African roots of house music and its evolution over time. Over the course of my training, I would like to explore my interests in women’s mental health, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and integrative psychiatry.
- What’s up! I was born in Hollywood, Florida and shortly afterwards moved about an hour south to Miami, Florida where I was raised by my Nigerian parents along with my older sister, twin brother, and younger sister. I am a product of Miami- Dade County Public Schools which fully immersed me in so much of the diversity Miami had to offer as well as all the holes within our society when it comes to supporting Black and other minoritized children. I attended college at the University of Florida (Go Gators! Go SEC!) where I studied biology but more importantly it was there that I was first able to explore and develop my interests in humanistic, patient-centered and trauma-informed care through an adolescent and young adult palliative care organization called Streetlight. After graduating, I went straight through to medical school in NYC where I attended Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S) and the Mailman School of Public Health. In medical school I was able to better operationalize and practice providing care to underserved Black and Brown communities in upper Manhattan and the Bronx and in public health school I was able to take a deeper dive into understanding how our current domestic and global policies and systems are not designed with the intention of affirming life particularly for minoritized people, incarcerated individuals, and those who are houseless and/or impoverished. I dabbled quite a bit in several specialties throughout medical school (pediatrics, family med, CT surgery, and orthopedics to name a few) but ultimately and very happily found my home in psychiatry. My interests in the health and wellbeing of minoritized children, adolescents, and adults as well as honoring and affirming the humanity of people left to struggle along the margins through love and abolition fit seamlessly within psychiatry. In addition to all of the above, I love playing and watching sports, music (hip-hop, R&B, and afrobeats), reading, cooking, and taking care of my plants!
- I’m a Boston native who was always puzzled about howour materially advanced society still has people living on the streets. I was very grateful to attend Harvard College, concentrating in Social Studies and completing a senior thesis advised by the late Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician-anthropologist. After college, I taught a course with Dr. Farmer, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, and Dr. Arthur Kleinman that attempted to reframe global health. Together we produced a textbook from the class, Reimagining Global Health (UCP2013). I lived in Malawi for two years focused on rural healthcare delivery, half of which was supported by a Fulbright grant. I went on to complete an MD-PhD in Economics at Harvard, with a dissertation that focused on issues of opioid misuse, homelessness, racial bias in prescribing, and major depressive disorder. I completed a year of the categorical general surgery residency at Johns Hopkins, where I saw repeated examples of how mental illness shaped the life-arc of trauma patients, leading me to transition to this program. This past year I served on faculty at Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Economics at Harvard FAS, teaching a lecture course on the Economics of Development and Global Health. I also served as core faculty at the University of Global Health Equity in Kigali, Rwanda, teaching on economic inequality, global health delivery and African history. I hope to build a clinical and academic career around the complex interplay between society and health, what Kleinman terms “social suffering.” I enjoy backpacking, Avicii, and spending time with my niece and nephew.
- Shivani Bhatt grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, and developed afondness for many of the things she still enjoys: singing, cold weather bragging rights, and poring over maps of the world. Making the move to slightly warmer latitudes of New Haven to attend Yale College, she shifted to studying maps of the brain, specifically the formation of intricate visual circuits in newborn mice. Alongside this work, Shivani witnessed how mental illness changed the lives of friends and their loved ones who came together around them in times of crisis and became interested the neurobiology underlying mental illness. She entered the Yale MD-PhD program and joined the laboratory of Kelly Cosgrove, where she used PET brain imaging to study brain immune and stress markers in individuals with PTSD using PET. Shivani enjoyed the multidisciplinary nature of her graduate work, spanning from clinical phenomenology of PTSD to compartmental modeling and pharmacokinetics. Similarly, she was drawn to the biopsychosocial approach of psychiatry, which revealed parallels between study participants and patients with PTSD she saw at the Yale Refugee Clinic: from increased cardiovascular disease burden, to complex feelings of guilt or loss, to social determinants like financial instability or sense of community. Shivani aspires to integrate these multidisciplinary approaches as a physician-scientist to arrive at better outcomes for individuals suffering from trauma-related and substance use disorders. In her free time, she enjoys exploring New Haven on foot or bike with friends and family, and singing, which—from Indian classical to a cappella to jazz—has been a constant grounding presence and inspiration for incorporating multiple perspectives.
- I grew up in the Midwest before moving eastward to Yale for college. After brief experimentation with premed coursework, I discovered this was not (yet) the path for me and ultimately studied cultural anthropology. I then worked for the Clinton Foundation's HIV/AIDS Initiative, which led me to reconsider medicine, and I returned to the Midwest for post-bac coursework before eventually finding my way out to California for medical school at Stanford. During my first year of medical school, I enrolled in an anthropology seminar, a decision that happily influenced the next decade of my life. I decided to (temporarily) leave medical school and join the joint UCSF-UC Berkeley PhD program in medical anthropology. My work as an anthropologist undoubtedly brought me to psychiatry, for reasons I newly discover each day.
- Terrance (They/Them) was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio.As the youngest of seven siblings, Terrance learned the importance of advocating for themself and others at an early age. Their interest in the sciences, arts, and athletics, led them to attend Oberlin College as a QuestBridgeScholar. During undergrad, they ran track, taught a Voguing course, and majored in Biology. Terrance credits their two years as an AmeriCorps math and reading interventionist with City Year Cleveland for awakening their love of teaching, and working with youth. Terrance’s passion for service and education expanded throughout their time in medical school at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN. They were President, and a founding member, of STEP Up: Meharry’s peer-led mentor program for the USMLE Examinations. Terrance served a term as their class Community Service Chair, peer tutored until they graduated, and was inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. After an eight-week medical school summer research experience, Terrance knew they wanted to build a strong foundation for a career involving clinical research, so they went on to earn a Master’s of Science in Clinical Investigations(MSCI) from Washington University School of Medicine. Through their efforts as a member of the Association of LGBTQIA+ Psychiatry(AGLP), they have planned and moderated panels for LGBTQIA+ students applying to psychiatry, including a national panel at the 2021 American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting. Their interests within the field include medical and community education, child and adolescent, addiction, and trauma informed LGBTQIA+ mental health care with a focus on Black individuals. They plan to use research to advocate for curriculum, policy and federal law to change and improve the lives of both Black and LGBTQIA+ communities. Outside of psychiatry, Terrance loves concerts, knitting, cooking, thrift shopping, intramural sports, talking about Beyoncé, and spending time with their partner.
- As an undergraduate at UC Irvine, Kaosoluchi chartered a chapter of the Minority Association for Premedical Students (MAPS) and supported the creation of the Academic Excellence Black Scholars House, which fosters equity in access to resources and a sense of belonging for students underrepresented in academic institutions. Kaosoluchi's advocacy for equity and belonging in higher education continued when she matriculated to the UCI School of Medicine. She is the co-founder of a four-year academic thread entitled LEAD-ABC (Leadership in Education Advancing Diversity- African, Black, and Caribbean) for the purpose of producing physicians who are committed to serving ABC communities. LEAD-ABC is an institutionalized student support structure that also provides scholarships through California state funding, promotes wellbeing, and optimizes each student's ability to excel. The program helped achieve a historic moment in 2020 when UCISOM matriculated a record 12 Black medical students when the classes of 2018 and 2020 graduated without any. She served as her school’s Gold Humanism Honor Society co-president and was also an active leader in the SNMA during her four years of medical school, serving as Chapter President, Associate Regional Director, and Co-Chair of the National Mental Health Initiative Committee. While in medical school, Kaosoluchi also completed her MBA with a Physician and Healthcare Executive concentration to optimize reform efforts to create systems that address the needs of underserved communities through a business of medicine lens. Kaosoluchi is passionate about minoritized trainee mental health and well-being. She participated in an AAMC panel discussing best practices to support minority medical students. She works to address health inequities, with a focus on racial trauma – stress stemming from the experience of racial discrimination. Kaosoluchi also serves on the leadership team of the National Anti-Racism in Medicine Curriculum Coalition, designing curriculum, teaching courses, and presenting at various conferences and grand rounds. Eventually, Kaosoluchi would like to consult on the creation of mission-based programs like LEAD-ABC around the country. For fun, she loves to travel, work on graphic designs for her clothing line, and spend time with loved ones.
- Diego was born and raised in Pamplona, in Northern Spain close to the French border. After finishing his first year of medical school at the Universidad de Navarra, at the age of 19, he moved to the United States to pursue a more well-rounded education. He attended Middlebury College, where he graduated in 2014 with a major in Molecular Biology and a minor in Music. He then worked as a research assistant in a basic science lab for two years at Boston Children’s Hospital and Middlebury College. While in New England, he worked as a Spanish medical interpreter in a free clinic in rural Vermont for Hispanic populations working on local farms, which allowed him to see some of the challenges migrant populations face in accessing healthcare in the US. In 2016, he moved to North Carolina to attend Duke University School of Medicine. While at Duke, he spent his dedicated research time in Singapore carrying out leptospirosis research in rural Borneo. After his year in Singapore, he went on to pursue a Master’s degree in Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge in England, to further grow as an independent investigator and apply these skills to patient care. These research experiences and his clinical rotations at the North Carolina state psychiatric hospital ignited his interest in psychiatry, community medicine, and healthcare disparities. At Yale, he looks forward to learning more about health equity and social justice, and getting involved in epidemiology research to investigate health disparities at the intersection of Hispanic and LGBTQ+ communities. Outside of work, Diego enjoys running, hosting dinner at his house (with his housemate, Taco the cat), and traveling.
- Bria was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by two UNC physician parents. She attended Yale College, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and sang a cappella in The New Blue and Whim ‘n Rhythm. Upon graduation, she was awarded the Cohen Public Service Fellowship, which enabled her to spend the subsequent year traveling the United States and interviewing millennials about their views on race. Her work evolved from a research project into a genre-bending manuscript of personal essays; she signed with Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency in 2017. At the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, she collaborated with the Ackland Art Museum to design ‘Can We Talk About Race?’ a curricular program that uses art to discuss issues of race and representation in medicine. In honor of her late father, she founded the Paul A. Godley Art of Medicine Fellowship, which is awarded annually to two medical students to support their efforts to promote an antiracism at UNC. Her interests within psychiatry include the effects of racism on mental health, as well as the use of ketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Harvard Medical Student Review, The New Journal at Yale, Current Opinion in HIV & AIDS, The Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development, and American Chordata. In 2021, Bria signed a deal with Algonquin Books to publish her memoir about medical school and mental illness. Bria has a black cat named Omen. Her interests outside of psychiatry include playing tennis, reading memoir and essays, and writing. When she’s not hanging out with her friends, she’s usually sleeping, which is a boring pastime, but a rewarding one.
- I am Nigerian-American and was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Go Heels!). I studied Biology and Psychology at UNC- Chapel Hill. My interest in psychiatry stemmed from a biopsychology course I took as an undergrad. I was fascinated to learn how a person’s life experiences could shape their physical health, mental health, and quality of life. Throughout undergrad, I volunteered as an advocate at the local crisis center. By working with sexual assault survivors, I learned about the power of empathy, advocacy, and most importantly, the strength survivors gain when their voices and feelings are validated. My involvement with the crisis center led me to a one-year research fellowship at UNC, where I worked on a study that followed the recovery process and health outcomes of women after experiencing sexual assault. As a medical student at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, I served as chapter president for SNMA and co-president of the Psychiatry Interest Group. During medical school, I participated in the June Jackson Christmas Summer Research Program in Psychiatry at Columbia University. My project focused on gender disparities in leadership positions and authorships in the top psychiatric journals. My decision to pursue a career in psychiatry is guided by a sense of responsibility to advocate for, teach and empower those whose voices are historically not heard and underrepresented in medicine. For this reason, I enjoyed organizing the annual Pre-Medical Conference where minority college and high school students were invited to Brody School of Medicine to learn about medical school and network with students and faculty. My goal is that one day we'll be able to take the "under" out of "underrepresented" and physicians will adequately represent the people we serve! My interests in psychiatry include child and adolescent psychiatry, trauma recovery, trauma-focused psychotherapy, medical education and mentorship. In my free time, I enjoy watching Grey’s Anatomy (I’ve seen every episode), hiking, trying new restaurants, traveling, and photography.
- For the past fifteen years, I have worked as a pediatrician, researcher,educator, and public health practitioner focused on designing, delivering & evaluating interventions to improve outcomes for children and families affected by HIV in Malawi, a country in East Africa. I am the Co-Founding Director of Tingathe(meaning "together we can" in the local Chichewa language), a program which has been supporting HIV and psychosocial programming at >120 health facilities in Malawi. In this role, I have helped garner and manage clinical programming and research grants including those from USAID and the NIH (K01, R01s). I also started and directed a research fellowship program that sought to support and develop young scientists in Malawi. I have led studies examining adolescent depression, healthcare worker burnout, intimate partner violence, adverse childhood events, and the impact of a tele-mental health support program. My career in Global Health/Pediatrics has been an incredible adventure. However, developments in both my personal and professional life have gently but persistently drawn me towards mental health and psychiatry (happy to share the longer version). While I find it very exciting that psychiatry is a field that is actively evolving, with immense potential for innovation, growth, and impact, it is the unique opportunity and privilege to accompany someone in their mental and emotional healing that most motivated me to pursue training in psychiatry. When I first arrived in Malawi, I was receptive to whatever the experience would bring -and I could never have imagined the journey would unfold so beautifully. Therefore, as I start residency, I am open, curious, and excited for what the training experience will bring and so grateful for the opportunity to train at Yale and to be amongst this amazing group of residents. I hope that I will be able to make a meaningful contribution. In my non-work time, I enjoy moving (yoga, running, hiking, dance, snowboarding), meditation, nature, singing, reading, and deep conversation and laughter with family and friends.
- Born with a congenital cataract, Tom had early exposure to the life-changingimpact of both science and relationships, building community with his local sight center in Cleveland. The son of two educators, Tom developed a deep love of learning and lively family dinners consisting of intellectual debates. Upon attending a rigorous magnet high school which largely prioritized test scores, Tom sought a community which instead valued humanity, social justice, and joy. This brought him to Swarthmore College, where he pursued opportunities to explore education and public mental health, punctuated by his junior year abroad in India, China, and South Africa studying the intersectionality of traditional and Western medicine. After graduating with his B.A. in psychology in 2014, Tom spent two years in Madaba, Jordan teaching high school chemistry and AP Psychology at King’s Academy international boarding school where he further cultivated his understanding of culture and pedagogy. In 2016, he deferred acceptance to medical school to work as a Medical Student Design Partner at the Penn State College of Medicine, helping to create and pilot and an innovative new medical school curriculum centered around early clinical exposure and design thinking. During medical school, Tom recognized that his dual passions of education and mental health made him a natural fit for psychiatry, and his personal experience with visual impairment provided a sense of connection for patients struggling with their own invisible disabilities. At Yale, Tom looks forward to further exploring how, implicitly and explicitly, we teach our patients, our colleagues, and ourselves about psychiatry and medicine more broadly. Outside of medicine, Tom loves sports analytics, watching his Philadelphia Eagles and Sixers, karaoke, Zumba, mindfulness food walks, and adventures with his new wife Lizzy and their dog, Norway.
- Hi everyone! I was born in Seoul, South Korea, and I have lived ineleven places in five countries on three continents. Inspired by life experiences, travels, and studies, I developed strong interest in global health and development. I received a research and journalism grant to go to Uganda between my junior and senior year of college. From this experience, I won the Mark of Excellence Award for the best student journalism in the United States in my category and conducted global health research from inception to publication. More importantly, I built many lasting relationships with community members and collaborators. After graduating from college, I deferred my acceptance to medical school to travel, and to work with colleagues in Uganda with grants they had received. In 2018, during medical school, I leveraged relationships that I built in Uganda as well as funding networks in the United States to become the founding CEO of Empower Through Health, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We are the main source of healthcare for a catchment area of 70,000 people, and we run a Global Health Institute conducting research and engaging hundreds of students. We work in close collaboration with the government to share resources and foster synergistic work. We are initiating a model for implementation of mental healthcare in rural low-income countries through close collaboration with district health and researchers at Makerere University. I chose to become a physician because of my faith in our common humanity, deep curiosity of other people’s experiences, and a desire to improve the lives of those most marginalized. I think that psychiatry is the best option to meet all objectives. In addition to continuing my current global health work, I seek to find opportunities to synergize my passion of working on humanity’s greatest challenges with practice of clinical psychiatry.
- I was raised in America’s Heartland, Omaha, NE, by a pediatrician, a ballerina, and three older siblings. Despite deep admiration for my parents, I struggled in school and danced with two left feet. So, resigned to chart my own path I focused on athletics, especially soccer. I ended up kicking prolate spheroids better than spheres and was recruited as a placekicker for the Wisconsin Badgers. As a UW student-athlete, I discovered an untapped passion for examining human nature through courses in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Enthralled by this artful and scientific exploration of the human condition, I chose to forgo my senior season to focus on academics which led into a post-baccalaureate route to medical school. During my post-baccyears, I ran an after-school STEM education program for underserved students in Omaha, coached a youth wheelchair basketball team, and worked in a pediatric eating disorders day-program. I also spent hundreds of hours on intensive Vipassana meditation retreats, which played a significant role in my psychospiritual development. As a medical student at the University of Wisconsin, I studied bioethics under the close mentorship of Yale-alum, Dr. Norman Fost, and published a paper on informed consent in youth tackle football. Additionally, I immersed myself in the medical humanities and helped create an introductory elective course as well as a student interest group. I also served on a number of committees advocating for student wellness and frequently led group meditation for peers and faculty. My interests in psychiatry seem endless, but I am particularly drawn to psychotherapy, palliative care, addiction, psychiatric nosology and ethics, and the research/clinical applications of MDMA, psilocybin, and other psychedelic medicines. Outside of work, I am happiest when riding my bicycles, exploring nature, watering houseplants, getting lost in existential musings and discussion, and connecting with others.
- Victoria Lewis was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in cities throughout Los Angeles County, California. She attended UC Berkeley for undergrad where she majored in Public Health with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice. During her time at UC Berkeley, Victoria volunteered for three years at the Berkeley Free Clinic providing health and social service referrals and medical services to underserved populations. It was also at Berkeley where she discovered her passion for community-based participatory research. Victoria was thrilled to continue partnering with marginalized communities as part of the Program in Medical Education Leadership and Advocacy (PRIME-LA) at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. After her third year in medical school, Victoria pursued a dual Master of Public Policy and Master of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. While at Luskin, she worked as a youth and adult substance use treatment counselor, served on Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti's Education Team in the Office of Economic Opportunity, and collaborated with the Drug Policy Alliance to identify barriers to buprenorphine among justice-involved populations in Los Angeles. Victoria has also been actively engaged in research, working on projects to improve mental health services for individuals with severe mental illness, increase resiliency among LGBTQ+ youth with depression, and enhance community-campus partnerships to better meet community needs. As the first physician in her family, Victoria is humbled to be joining the Solnit Integrated Training Program. She is passionate about improving the health of LGBTQ+ and systems-involved youth with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders through research, clinical practice, and policy advocacy and she strives to end reliance on the criminal justice system as an entry point to care. After completing the program, she hopes to pursue an Addiction Psychiatry fellowship. In her free time, Victoria enjoys exploring new restaurants and coffee shops, listening to music, reading, writing, tending to house plants, and learning Spanish to connect with her family in Argentina.
- Marcos A. Moreno was born and raised in a small community in southern Arizona known as the Pascua Yaqui Reservation. The eldest of five children, he is Native American and a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe through his father, and Mexican American through his mother. He attended Cornell University where he studied neuroscience, completing his bachelor’s degree in 2017 and receiving Cornell’s Henry Ricciuti and Solomon Cook awards for engaged research and scholarship. While at Cornell he was involved in research studying the impact of environmental stressors on brain development and neural receptor expression, and later contributed to research studying NK-1R antagonists and their role in addiction pathways. In addition to his interests in neuroscience, Marcos has an interest in public health and medicine for underserved populations. He was selected as one of five recipients in the country for the 2016 Udall Healthcare award for his work in underserved communities, including his medical mission trips to Africa, Latin America, and his contributions to a community health needs assessment for his home community in Arizona. He attended medical school at UND-School of Medicine and Health Sciences, where he published addiction research with Dr. Larry Burd and the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Center and wrote a chapter on Native American public health for the book Global Indigenous Youth: Through Their Eyes, a literary work co-sponsored by the United Nations and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. As the sole author representing the United States, Marcos was a guest speaker at a special United Nations session for the books launch in New York City in 2019. Within psychiatry Marcos’ interests include addiction, child development, and mental health policy. Outside of psychiatry, Marcos’ interests include eating good food, lifting weights, and watching the Raiders play football.
- Max Rolison is a resident physician in the Albert J. Solnit IntegratedAdult/Child/Adolescent Psychiatry program. He received his B.S. with distinction in Psychology (Neuroscience) from Yale University and his M.D. from Yale School of Medicine. Max previously worked as a Sara S. Sparrow Fellow in Clinical Neuroscience in the McPartland Lab and Developmental Disabilities Clinic at the Yale Child Study Center. Since a young age, he has been interested in the care of children and teens with autism spectrum disorder. He has worked for many years with children with autism and other neurodevelopment disorders and their families. Max’s research has focused on understanding the neurobiological bases of autism spectrum disorder through electroencephalogram, eye-tracking, and functional magnetic resonance imaging. He aims to apply our knowledge of biomarkers in autism to develop better treatments and best individualize treatment interventions.
- I grew up in the small town of Haughton, LA hunting for honeysuckles, making forts, and being homeschooled until high school with my 5 younger siblings. I’m also biracial (black and white), and it is a vital piece of my identity. Navigating prejudice and privilege simultaneously has significantly shaped my life thus far. While attending college at the University of Louisiana Monroe, I pursued a major in biology with a chemistry minor and found my passion for education while teaching university classes. I graduated summa cum laude and moved to New Orleans to attend Louisiana State University School of Medicine. During medical school, I spent my time in Aesculapian society, serving as my class coordinator for curriculum development, and on a step-stool in the anatomy lab as a TA. I also married my husband, now of 4 years, and together we raise our fur babies. In collaboration with the health department in New Orleans, I completed a project focusing on strangulation in domestic abuse victims and offender recurrence, and I spent my weekends at the student-run homeless clinics in New Orleans where I served on the executive board. By graduation of medical school, I was inducted into Alpha Omega Alpha honor society and received the George Sam Bel Memorial award from faculty and my classmates for an excellent academic record and representing the “highest ideals of medicine.” I was definitely a late bloomer into psychiatry but, once I experienced it, nothing else made sense. Having a family history of mental illness and finding writing about mental health as an outlet for myself, the collision of my personal and professional interests made my decision to psychiatry effortless. My specific career interests are child and adolescent psychiatry and the complexity of identity in adolescence, educating white parents of black/biracial kids, psychotherapy, nutritional psychiatry, and physical wellness. My hobbies include collecting houseplants, writing, gardening, hiking, brunching on French toast, winning at board games, and bingeing my favorite movie series (Jurassic Park and HP).
- Hello everyone! I was born and raised in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire beforemoving to Virginia at age 11. After relocating to a larger West African immigrant community in Baltimore as a teenager, I became interested in the broader immigrant experience of acclimating to life in the US, including the social justice and healthcare issues facing immigrant populations. This interest stayed with me during my time at Dartmouth College, where I pursued a position as a legal intern for a non-profit immigration firm to learn more about immigration law and explore different ways to become an active advocate. After graduating with a degree in psychology, I spent two years researching the impact of risk behaviors in movies and TV shows on children/teens before starting medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. During medical school, I enjoyed getting involved in the West Philadelphia community and got a chance to practice my French by tutoring and mentoring newly arrived francophone middle schoolers. I continued my work in immigration advocacy through my involvement with the Philadelphia Human Rights Clinic, which facilitates connections between asylum seekers and medical providers, as well as my summer providing resettlement social services to newly arrived refugees in Philadelphia. My interests in psychiatry include community and cultural psychiatry (especially immigrant mental health), forensic psychiatry, women’s mental health, and global psychiatry. I am grateful to be able to work on normalizing and promoting mental health in marginalized populations with the support of the Yale community! Outside of medicine, I enjoy baking, reading fiction, the occasional Netflix binge, and experiencing different cultures through traveling, podcasts, and food.
- My world exists on the off chance that a coal miner from Northeast China would someday meet a farm girl from central Washington State. I was born in Spokane, Washington and at the age of 2 we moved to the Seattle area, resettling on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish and other Coast Salish peoples. Aside from living in my dad’s hometown of Harbin for 6th grade, I had lived there all my life before coming to New Haven for residency. After obtaining a B.S. in Physiology at the University of Washington I helped teach comparative vertebrate anatomy and worked as a medical scribe until starting medical school at UW. As a med student, I had three major passions: Anti-racist curricula development that situated medicine within historical and political contexts; understanding the carceral system and care for people impacted by it; and participating in Chinese diasporic grassroots organizing dedicated to cross-movement solidarity and collective liberation. In order to develop skills in advocacy and systems change I decided to pursue an MPH, during which I engaged with sexual violence prevention, sex work occupational health and decriminalization, police violence as a public health issue, and completed my thesis on racial disparities in youth pretrial detention grounded in critical race theory. My interests in psychiatry lie at these intersections and these are the questions I’m excited to grapple with at Yale and beyond: What are liberatory definitions of mental health? What does it mean to be an abolitionist in psychiatry? How are we reproducing carceral logics in our work and our relationships, and what are our alternatives? Outside of medicine I bounce through various hobbies to stay active, from soccer and badminton to boxing and tai chi. Next up is learning to grow food! I also have a habit of collecting piles of books and am fond of jigsaw puzzles, drawing, video games, coffee and chocolate chip cookies.
Fourth Year Residents (PGY-4)
- I grew up in Ann Arbor, MI, as the oldest of four siblings in a livelyLebanese-American family. I moved to New Haven to attend college at Yale and haven’t left since, although I’m still a Midwesterner at heart! In college, I double-majored in Molecular Biology and Psychology, and along the way I discovered my passion for human genetics. My longstanding research interest is in applying experimental and computational genomics approaches to better understand the etiologies of complex neuropsychiatric disorders. As a medical student at Yale, I spent one year as an HHMI-ASHG research fellow in the Fernandez lab, where I have since continued my work to identify genes and genetic variants that contribute to OCD. I am excited to train as a resident in the Solnit Integrated program and to keep working with the awesome people at the Child Study Center. Outside of medicine, I enjoy running, traveling and competing with the Yale grad touch rugby team, and working on various art and film projects.
- Nientara Anderson grew up in Sri Lanka and immigrated to the U.S. in high school. She attended Yale College where she completed a BA in Fine Art. She then worked as an artist and arts writer, including as the arts editor of the Jackson Free Press (JFP), a progressive investigative journal in Jackson, MS. She was a founding director of the non-profit Bridge2Peace (B2P), based in Sri Lanka. Through her work managing medical and public health outreach for B2P, Nientara became interested in a career in medicine. She attended the Yale School of Medicine (YSM), where she was a founding member of both NextYSM––an activist group dedicated to advancing justice, equity, and inclusion at YSM––and of the Committee for Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (CDISJ). Nientara was also a co-founder of RebPsych, an annual conference on psychiatry and social justice. Her Masters research in History of Science and Medicine focused on the history of physician activism for racial justice and the racialization of student activism in the United States. Nientara was invited to deliver two endowed lectures on this research– –the Rand Lecture at the Yale School of Art and the Duffy Lecture at the Yale School of Medicine. As a medical student, she received the Robert Rock and Tehreem Rehman Student Activism Award and The Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed Award for leadership and commitment to the community at large. In 2022, her research on racial microaggressions in medical education received the honorable mention for the Lustman Award. Nientara is also interested in medical education and serves as her class elected representative on the Psychiatry department’s Graduate Education Committee (GEC) and Yale’s general Graduate Medical Education Committee (GMEC). She also co-leads "Making the Invisible Visible: Art, Identity, and Hierarchies of Power," a mandatory class on bias in medicine for MS1s at YSM. As a resident, she hopes to continue her activism and research on race and racism in medicine and psychiatry.
- I was born in Michigan, but I moved to Massachusetts during middle schooland grew up west of Boston for the remainder of my childhood. I was always fascinated by medicine and science and with a special needs brother, who required significant medical intervention, my desire to work in the medical field grew quickly. I went to Connecticut College in New London, CT and majored in Physics with Chemistry and Math minors. After college, I worked in chemical engineering research for two years at MIT and Aerodyne Research, Inc. I enjoyed research and decided to apply to graduate school rather than medical school. My husband and I were moving to Michigan and I enrolled at Wayne State University in the department of Biomedical Engineering in 2013. I started as a master’s student and wound up leaving 7 years later with two doctorates. Oops! I worked in a PET imaging laboratory and my Ph.D. thesis focused on developing F18 labeled radiotracers for imaging epigenetic regulators in the brain (primarily histone deacetylases). I stayed in Detroit at Wayne State for medical school after my PhD and fell in love with Psychiatry during my third year. At Yale, as part of the NRTP, my work is focused in PTSD, with a particular goal of imaging histone deacetylases in humans using PET to coincide with HDAC targeted novel therapeutic work in animals for PTSD. When not in the hospital or research lab, I am often found running the roads of New Haven, Hamden, Branford and surrounding areas or out hiking and playing with my husband and son.
- Sanya was born and raised in Bangkok,Thailand and moved to Pensacola, Florida at the age of 10. She finds her small family (single mother and older brother) and Thai/Chinese culture/heritage of the utmost importance to her. She attended University of Florida for undergraduate and University of Central Florida for medical school. She participated in ROTC military training program in high school and undergraduate and attributes much of her discipline and love/understanding of different American norms and values to this formative experience. She spent one year (prior to medical school) studying Mandarin in Shanghai, China and this(also) formative experience opened her eyes to the international community emphasizing diverse perspectives, cultures, and traditions. During medical school, she was awarded both peer-elected awards including Student Choice Award ("the person you would most want to care for your family members") and Osler Award ("demonstrated the most perseverance and has overcome obstacles to succeed"). She also obtained UCF’s highest award, the Order of Pegasus. At Yale, she continues her interest in Global Mental Health and Health Equity, always striving to give voice for those who are oppressed, and is currently writing a memoir.
- I was born and raised in Los Angeles and completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Irvine in biology. I then went on to get my medical school degree at Kansas City University, during which time I developed a strong interest in psychiatry because I enjoyed listening to people’s stories and working with marginalized populations. I completed the first three years of my training at University of Missouri and transferred residency programs for my PGY-4 year for the opportunity to care for the most psychiatrically ill on an inpatient setting and to learn to care for a more diverse patient population with all backgrounds. In my free time, I enjoy reading, going to national parks, being in nature, and cooking.
- Dervin was born in Columbus, Georgia to a family with strong Jamaican roots. The eldest of four siblings, he was deeply impacted by his rural upbringing and the friends whose diverse backgrounds enabled them to show him love in myriad ways that influenced his trajectory and worldview. He attended the University of Georgia, where he earned his B.S.A in Biological Sciences. In 2014 he was the recipient of the University President’s “Fulfilling the Dream” award in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., awarded each year to the student who demonstrates excellence in leadership, academics, and social engagement. He then went on to earn his M.D. from Yale University where he was awarded the Leonard Tow Humanism Award. His research and clinical interests lie at the intersection of medicine, psychiatry, social cognition, and spirituality, for this is the pedagogy that he believes allows us to understand what it really means to be human.Much of Dervin’s experience is constituted by firsts: first generation American, first in his family to attend college, and first in his family to become a doctor. Much of his upbringing was marked by a commitment to serving others. It is this guiding principal that grounds his practice as a logo-clinician dedicated to delivering holistic patient care. He is committed to helping patients sort through varying degrees of uncertainty while interrogating the notion that many of the world’s ills originate with improper framing, which may lead to misdiagnosis, missed chances to help, and increased suffering. He challenges himself and others to frame their experience and delivery of patient care by asking not “Why is this happening to me?” but rather, “What is life asking of me?” By modulating the way we see the world, we change the world: one person, and one patient at a time. “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Romans 12:2
- Hi everyone- I’m Erin! I’m originally from the NYC area, spending most of my time between Brooklyn and the suburbs. My interest in the intersection of social justice, human rights, and healthcare policy began with my work with Amnesty International in high school. This interest prompted me to study Medical Anthropology & Global Health in college at SUNY Geneseo to gain further insight into the ways in which marginalized identities are failed by the healthcare system. After graduating Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, I took a couple of years off to live it up in Brooklyn. I went to medical school at Penn State, and living in such a rural area truly radicalized my career approach. I realized the potential I had as a future MD to dismantle and transform the system. My main research focused on understanding reproductive health barriers for women living in rural Zambia and relating these barriers to the effects of climate change. My other research focused on systemic barriers to mental health treatment for WOC and exploring educational gaps in medical education for LGBTQ+ healthcare. Unfortunately, my school didn’t even have a LGBTQ+ student organization (even in 2016!), so I served as co-founder of the LGBTQIA+ student organization. I was involved in the leadership for SNMA (a result of the severe lack of URM representation at my school). Through this position, I implemented an anti-racism contract that I presented and is now signed by every incoming class at their White Coat Ceremony, helped to organize a pipeline program for URM pre-med students to increase representation in medical schools, and implemented a project called Catalyst for Change to increase dialogue/awareness of the racial injustices occurring on campus. A lot of my time was also invested in reproductive justice efforts; as a leader for Medical Students for Choice, I organized several conferences focused on abortion care, domestic violence, and reproductive health policy. I fell in love with Psychiatry when I realized the great potential that exists in this field to work on systemic reform, policy, and public sector work. I am most interested in applying my background to health systems efforts in women’s mental health, incarceration policy, and substance use in pregnancy. I am also very interested in LGBTQ+ mental health. My hobbies include socializing, playing the piano, bubble tea, social justice, and video games! I am so grateful to be here at Yale amongst such innovative, inspiring colleagues and faculty!
- I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado and attended Colorado State University majoring in English Literature. After college I joined a national disaster response and recovery program called the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) and was stationed out of Sacramento, California. As fate would have it, I met future partner on day one, and we recently welcomed our daughter into the world. During my year of service with the AmeriCorps NCCC, I lived and worked in underserved communities in Louisiana, California and Hawaii, and witnessed firsthand the drastic health disparities effecting our communities. It was then I decided to take the first steps towards entering medical school to better serve these populations. During my tenure at the University of Colorado School of Medicine I’ve focused my energy on serving the underserved populations of Denver. This has included a Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC) at our urban safety net hospital, and afterwards a David L. Boren Fellowship in Córdoba, Argentina with a focus on public mental health care in Latin America. As future psychiatrist I am interested in the expanding and destigmatizing treatment for addictions, the evolving interface of psychiatry with other medical specialties and learning/teaching physician advocacy. Outside of medicine I enjoy fly fishing, mountain biking, snowboarding and strumming the guitar.
- I grew up in California and have lived around the country - on the West Coast, in the Midwest and in the Northeast. My motivation for applying to medical school was my interest in studying the human brain and in helping those suffering from diseases of the central nervous system. I plan to utilize the tools of medicine, science, and policy to study diseases at the intersection of Neurology and Psychiatry, to provide compassionate and comprehensive care to my patients, and to optimize healthcare systems to provide support to those patients who so often fall through the cracks. As a physician scientist, I have begun to use the tools of immunology and neuroimaging to study diseases at the intersection of Neurology and Psychiatry. Prior to medical school, my work focused on the use of diffusion tensor imaging and cognitive assessment to characterize the course of mild traumatic brain injury and to develop imaging biomarkers. I continued my neuroimaging work in medical school, studying structural imaging changes to the hippocampus in psychotic disorders. Upon publication and defense of my thesis on this topic in 2017, I graduated from Harvard Medical School with honors in research. I joined Yale for its warmth, its dynamic research environment, and its collaborative nature. I completed my preliminary year in Internal Medicine in 2018 and graduated from the Yale Neurology Residency program in Spring 2021. As a neurology resident, I received the Louis Levy Award in recognition of excellence in clinical care, professional integrity, and scholarship, was awarded an NIH R25 grant to study neuroimmunologic mechanisms of disease, and served as Clinical Chief Resident. Currently as a member of the immunology lab of David Hafler, I study alterations in immune checkpoint regulation and development of autoimmunity. I am excited to join the NRTP track, to train as a dual Psychiatrist and Neurologist, and to continue the study of immunologic mechanisms of diseases such as autoimmune encephalitis, which bridge the fields of Neurology and Psychiatry. I also maintain an active interest in public policy and in developing systems to provide access and to optimize care for our patients. Having received a Masters in Public Policy from Princeton University, I have worked as a graduate consultant for TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid program, and continue my clinical care optimization work as a member of the Neurosciences Care Signature Council. In my free time, I enjoy running, hiking, baking breads and pastries, strolling through open-air markets, and doing just about anything outdoors.
- Nat grew up moving around the United States as an Army kid, learning from an early age that there is no single “normal” way to speak, live, believe, or engage with the world. This wandering way of life continued after high school when he was an exchange student in Germany for a gap year. He then attended Rice University where he majored in Women, Gender, & Sexuality before taking yet another gap year as a Zeff Fellow to travel around the world learning about women’s health nonprofits. Returning to Houston, Nat completed his MD at Baylor College of Medicine where he participated in LGBT+ and women’s health electives as well as pursuing research in pediatric surgery. He then matched to the University of Chicago for general surgery. During his time at U of C, Nat gained a deeper insight into the practice of medicine, basic and clinical research, the evolving healthcare system, and the challenges – internal and external - that providers struggle with. To better care for himself, he stepped away from medicine and worked in medical affairs at biomedical companies. He focused on clinical research protocols, regulatory negotiations, and educational activities. However, his passion for mental health and wholistic care of humans lead him back to psychiatry where he hopes to use his non-linear personal and professional experience to support a medical culture of resilience and well-being. Other activities that occupy his time and mind include his dogs, knitting, meditation, and sci-fi.
- Peace! I grew up in Pleasantville, New Jersey a small city next to Atlantic City. This environment was challenging from a number of perspectives and it was here that I learned about grit, determination, and discipline. Despite the challenges, I was quite interested in nerdy pursuits spending much time replicating experiments from Bill Nye the Science Guy or Beakman’s World, catching bugs, and reading kids fiction. I played varsity basketball and soccer in high school but I always knew a career in science was for me. I majored in Biological Sciences at Rutgers University (RU RAH RAH) and subsequently obtained an MD from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School after being encouraged by a mentor to enter the field of medicine. I chose to pursue psychiatry due to the disparities in mental health access and utilization that exist along ethonoracial lines. Given this, I have a strong desire to promote social justice and equity in practice and to see that the mplementation of these principles becomes commonplace as we progress into the future of the field. I trained for three years in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Howard University College Of Medicine before joining the program in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine for my final year of residency. I am a member of Alpha Omega Alpha as well as a number of professional societies related to my interests. I have enjoyed publishing and presenting on topics that are of importance to me and look forward to entering academia once I’ve completed residency. Clinically, I am particularly interested in novel pharmacological interventions and their application in the treatment of mood disorders and substance use disorders. This interest includes the exciting return of psychedelics to the field of psychiatry. My favorite hobbies include thinking, reading, making photographs, listening to music (jazz, electronic, hip-hop), and fixed-gear cycling.
- Sarah grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She became interested in science early in life, designing overly ambitious science fair projects with her dad that sometimes involved keeping mice in their basement. She attended Schreyer Honors College at Penn State University, where she conducted preclinical thesis research studying mechanisms of myocardial injury in postmenopausal women. After college, she worked as a research technician at the University of Pennsylvania, where she discovered her passion for neuroscience and psychiatry conducting translational research on HPA axis dysregulation in MDD. She returned to Penn State for her MD-PhD training and completed her PhD in neuroscience, studying the effects of GABAergic interneurons on anxiety-and depression-related behaviors in mice. She also engaged in several leadership roles within the MD-PhD program, mentored undergraduate students and worked to create opportunities for students from underrepresented backgrounds to engage with science and medicine. As part of the NRTP, Sarah is conducting preclinical research on antidepressant mechanisms of psychedelics and working with the interventional psychiatry service. In her free time, Sarah enjoys playing with the Yale grad rugby team, rock climbing, curating her cats’ social media page, and visiting local breweries.
- Matt is originally from southern New Jersey, and aftergraduating from high school, he went on to enlist in the Marine Corps, starting bootcamp and active duty only 5 days after graduation. During his time in the Marines, he deployed twice to Afghanistan for over a year. He also played French Horn for the Marine band for a period before moving to another unit for his deployments. Shortly after returning from his second deployment, he began attending college full-time at Thomas Jefferson University (then Philadelphia University) where he completed a dual BS degree in Health Sciences and Biological Psychology. He later returned to South Jersey to attend medical school and earned his DO degree at Rowan University. While in residency, Matt also began working toward an MBA at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and plans to graduate before completing his residency training. Outside the hospital, Matt enjoys traveling – having been to nearly 30 countries to-date, playing music, taking care of his pets – and animals in general, and exploring new restaurants and cafes.
- Bradford (Brad) Martins was born in Gloucester,Massachusetts and grew up in Conway, Arkansas. He attended Hendrix College in Arkansas where he graduated with a BA in biochemistry and molecular biology and a minor in neuroscience. As an undergraduate he performed neuroimaging research at University of Southern California to study the development of psychopathic traits in adolescents. Brad then began the MD/PhD program at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), and after completing preclinical training for his MD degree he joined the Brain Imaging Research Center within the UAMS Psychiatric Research Institute. His dissertation work used computational fMRI networks and machine learning to identify unique functional changes that occur in individuals with dual drug use disorder and other psychiatric diagnoses. Brad has additionally served as board president for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Arkansas, founded a local non-profit in Little Rock called the Mind Coalition, and is currently a board member of the CT ACLU. Brad is now a PGY-3 NRTP psychiatry resident at Yale and is pursuing addiction psychiatry with the goal of using psychedelics to develop longer-lasting and more effective treatments and therapies for individuals with substance use disorders.
- Michael is a physician-scientist and engineer at Yale School of Medicine, commissioned officer in the US Army Reserve, and Master of Science in Engineering (MSE) in Data Science student at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School and a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Zuckerman fellow at the Center for Public Leadership. Michael is interested in working at the intersection of healthcare, data science, and technology. Michael has experience with object-oriented languages (e.g., Python, C, C++, Java) and database languages (e.g., SQL), research-oriented software engineering skills, including fluency with libraries for scientific computing (e.g. SciPy ecosystem) and machine learning (e.g. Scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow).
- I was raised in New Rochelle, New York, and received a BSc in Human Development from Cornell University. After graduating college, I worked as a research assistant at the Brain and Behavior Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, investigating electrophysiological correlates of sensory processing in schizophrenia and the psychosis prodrome. Prior to matriculating medical school, I also received an MSc in Philosophy of Mental Disorder at King’s College London, where I focused primarily on conceptual analyses of health concepts and issues in psychiatric nosology. As a medical student at Yale, I served as a student representative on the Medical Student Education Committee in psychiatry, and conducted interdisciplinary research on issues of embodiment and selfhood in borderline personality disorder with Dr. Sarah Fineberg. My current interests include psychodynamic theory and practice, clinical phenomenology, and recovery-oriented approaches.
- Dr. Sondalle is a Solnit Integrated Resident in Child, Adolescent, andAdult Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. He grew up in rural Wisconsin. As a first-generation college graduate, he majored in both Biology and Chemistry at Ripon College in Wisconsin. He participated in summer research as an undergraduate in the Chemistry department at UW-Madison and at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Dr. Sondalle completed his M.D. and Ph.D. training in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Yale University School ofMedicine. His Ph.D. research in Genetics investigated the biological process of makingribosomes, the cellular machines responsible for protein production, and how defects in thisprocess cause human disease. As a resident, Dr. Sondalle has diverse clinical and researchinterests, including psychoanalysis, the treatment of trauma, and the interplay betweeninflammation and psychiatric illness.
- By the mid-20th century, physicians and scientists were discovering antimetabolites and chemotherapeutics to augment the surgeries which had become a mainstay in cancer treatment. The approach to oncologic disease grew in its comprehensiveness—identifying environmental and genetic risk factors, developing screening measures, improving histological and surgical techniques, combining radiation therapy. We continue to improve our approach in fighting cancer; I’m lucky to find myself at a point in time when we know that psychiatric treatment is a valuable tool in improving both quality of life and survival. That’s what drew me to psychiatry. I’ve been looking for ways to improve the lives of those struggling with cancer, and any other serious medical illness, by targeting the inherent, accompanying disconnectedness—a construct that plays out in most ailments mental, physical, environmental, or spiritual.And then, I joined the field of psychiatry and the magnitude and pervasiveness of suicidality in humankind appealed to that desire to target disconnectedness. Suicidality marks a penultimate stage in disconnectedness. Suicide is an alarming epidemic, and we desperately need to improve our approach. I have hope that we will, and I’m lucky to find myself at a point in time when we have started to accept and explore the potential of psychedelic treatments; I’m equally lucky to find myself with incredible support at an institution where many wonderful people have been critically thinking about healing in these areas. Our research aims at constructs contributing to suicidality and a possible application of psychedelic therapies—I am currently conceptualizing a role for MDMA within the stress-diathesis model of suicide with Ben Kelmendi. I’ll be additionally exploring ways to honor and translate a history of humans and psychedelics in a contemporary-digestible medium with NRTP co-resident, Brad Martins.
- Bárbara was born and raised in Puerto Rico, the place she still calls home. She applied to Harvard University out of a sense of curiosity and adventure and was surprised to find herself packing her bags to leave her hometown and move to Cambridge, MA. She studied Biology but fell in love with public health and, after graduating college, moved to Nicaragua for two years to work on an initiative to fortify rice with micronutrients. She was often found traveling the country, visiting rice mills and working with community health workers. At the same time, she learned how to salsa dance, cook delicious vegetarian meals and cultivate a daily meditation practice. Her decision to become a doctor led her to New York City, where she received her MD from Columbia University. Working with minoritized communities in medical school convinced her to become an advocate for improving mental health care for BIPOC patients, especially Spanish-speaking ones. In many ways, her academic and professional interests have intersected with her identity as a Latinx woman and she looks forward to working with communities like those she grew up with. Bárbara enjoys wearing large earrings, reading fiction, painting, cooking, pottery, and tirelessly working to win over the affections of her cat, Mumu.
- Stephen was born and raised in Ghana, where he attendedmedical school at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. He developed his love of psychiatry while working as a medical officer at the Psychiatry Unit of the KomfoAnokyeTeaching Hospital and completed psychiatry residency with the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed the first two years of psychiatry residency in the United States at the University of Michigan and transferred to Yale to be closer to family. Stephen maintains connections with the mental health fraternity in Ghana and continues to volunteer his time to contribute to the field back home. He is interested in research, especially those pertinent to improving mental health data and outcomes in low-and middle-income countries. He has collaborated to assess the prevalence of mental health disorders among primary school children in Ghana and has also worked on projects to assess the validity of assessment tools used to evaluate executive function among children in low-and middle-income countries. Stephen believes that technology can be utilized to address some of the challenges faced in psychiatry and is especially interested in leveraging low-cost technology to address the mental health treatment gap in resource-poor settings. He hopes to pursue a career in Consultation-Liaison psychiatry as he loves the collaborative role it plays between psychiatry and non-psychiatric specialties. Outside medicine, he enjoys soccer, reading and dabbling in mobile photography.
- I am the proud son of Sri Lankan immigrantswho settled in northern New Jersey, where I grew up. Attending Johns Hopkins University for college, I studied Public Health and Sociology, which became the foundation for my interest in the intersection of psychosocial health and HIV. Humbled by community health opportunities in Baltimore, Boston, Kenya, and Ethiopia, I found myself valuing the time I spent learning from the communities I worked with. Wanting to further align myself through community work after graduating from Hopkins, I spent an amazing year teaching English in Phitsanulok, Thailand. Afterward, I aimed to get further experience in the various arenas of community and global health work—at a global health communications firm, with a research team studying the cost-effectiveness of different HIV community interventions, at an HIV policy organization, and with a community-based organization in rural India. I earned my MD at Harvard Medical School, where I found psychiatry to be a strong blend of cultural and clinical humility, empathic listening, and social justice work. I am excited for psychiatry residency at Yale, which provides an enriching atmosphere to pursue my interests in community psychiatry, cultural psychiatry, addiction, and global mental health. Outside of medicine, I take many walks with my wife, son, and dog, cook, read, watch movies, and root for Kansas City football.
- Stephanie was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in thesuburbs of Indiana. As a child, she dreamed of becoming an artist, a tendency that she has always held onto. At Duke University, she found a vibrant and inspiring community in the Visual Arts & Art History departments, which opened her eyes to the ways that modern and contemporary visual artists engage with issues of representation and justice. Compelled by those grappling with ethical representations of tragedy, she developed an interest in psychological trauma, which informed her own audiovisual work exploring the power of radio as a vehicle for mass trauma. She additionally volunteered at a local crisis response center, taking calls from people experiencing domestic and sexual violence. She went on to attend medical school at NYU, where these interests led her to examine models of trauma-informed care and health disparities rooted in sexual-and gender-based violence. Excited about the potential for art to transform activism and empathy, she developed a workshop engaging her peers in critical analysis of contemporary art as anti-racist discourse. She decided to go into psychiatry in pursuit of creativity, social justice, and kind, inspiring colleagues. She finds joy in large dogs, cooking for friends, reading, creative writing, and swapping out concrete for desktop background-worthy scenery.
- Justin hails from Bethesda, Maryland. He was an undergraduate at Yale, where he majored in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, served as a freshman counselor, and was a member of several singing groups including Redhotand Blue, the Yale Glee Club, and the Whiffenpoofs. As a medical student at Columbia, he was involved with numerous advocacy and affinity groups including the Asylum Clinic/Human Rights Initiative, the Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association, and the Black and Latino Student Organization. His interests in psychiatry are broad and he remains fascinated by medical psychiatry, medical education, and college mental health.
Child and Adult Integrated Residents
- Solnit Integrated Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatry Program (2020-2026)After growing up in Ann Arbor, MI, I attended college at Yale and haven’t left since, although I’m still a Midwesterner at heart! My broad research interest is in applying experimental and computational genomics approaches to better understand the etiologies of early-onset neuropsychiatric disorders. I currently am in clinical training as a combined adult and child psychiatry resident at the Yale Child Study Center. I also work in the lab of Dr. Tom Fernandez to identify genes and rare genetic variants that contribute to OCD and Tourette’s. Outside of medicine, I enjoy running, playing touch rugby, and working on art/film projects.
- Amanda Joy Calhoun, MD, MPH is Chief Resident of the Yale Albert J. Solnit Integrated Adult/Child Psychiatry program. She received her BA in Spanish from Yale University and her MD and MPH from Saint Louis University. Amanda J. Calhoun is currently a Viola W. Bernard Social Justice and Health Equity Fellow, a Diversity Equity and Inclusion Emerging Leaders Fellow with American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and an American Medical Association and Satcher Health Leadership Institute Medical Justice in Advocacy Fellow. Dr. Calhoun has authored over 30 publications, 19 of which she is has first-authored, and has presented abstracts and oral presentations in numerous conferences. Her research focuses on the mental health sequelae of anti-Black racism in children and has been funded by the Yale Child Study Center Pilot Research Award and is the recipient of prestigious National Institute of Health Loan Repayment Program award. Dr. Calhoun also specializes in the effects of medical anti-Black racism. She writes for the general press and has published over 20 op-eds in the past 2 years, including, but not limited to, Boston Globe, TIME magazine, Washington Post, and HuffPost. She has been interviewed on countless radio shows and TV platforms, including CBS News, PBS Newshour, and MSNBC, discussing how racism affects the health of Black Americans and most importantly, what we can do about it.
- Max Rolison is a clinical fellow in the Albert J. Solnit Integrated Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatry program. He received his B.S. with distinction in Psychology (Neuroscience) from Yale University and his M.D. Cum Laude from Yale School of Medicine. Max previously worked as a Sara S. Sparrow Fellow in Clinical Neuroscience in the McPartland Lab and Developmental Disabilities Clinic at the Yale Child Study Center. Since a young age, he has been interested in the care of children and teens with autism spectrum disorder. He has worked for many years with children with autism and other neurodevelopment disorders and their families. Max’s research has focused on understanding the neurobiological bases of autism spectrum disorder through electroencephalogram, eye-tracking, and functional magnetic resonance imaging. He aims to apply our knowledge of biomarkers in autism to develop better treatments and best individualize treatment interventions.
- Andrew Sheldon received his undergraduate training at the University of California Berkley with a concentration in Physics before attending the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health for his M.D. PhD where he applied computational methods and modeling to neuroimaging data to better understand the interactions between attention and working memory. After completing this work in 2019, he was accepted into the Solnit integrated research track combined residency and fellowship in adult and child psychiatry, where he currently works in the Al Powers lab using computational modeling approaches to understand the neural mechanisms underlying hallucinations, in addition to his clinical psychiatry duties caring for children and adolescents through the Yale Child Study Center and Yale New Haven Children's hospital.
- Dr. Sondalle is a Solnit Integrated Fellow in Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. He grew up in rural Wisconsin. As a first-generation college graduate, he majored in both Biology and Chemistry at Ripon College in Wisconsin. He participated in summer research as an undergraduate in the Chemistry department at UW-Madison and at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Dr. Sondalle completed his M.D. and Ph.D. training in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Yale University School of Medicine. His Ph.D. research in Genetics investigated the biological process of making ribosomes, the cellular machines responsible for protein production, and how defects in this process cause human disease. As a resident and fellow, Dr. Sondalle has diverse interests, including psychoanalysis, the treatment of trauma, and the interplay between inflammation and psychiatric illness.