Walter (Stan) Mathis, MD, has been appointed director of the Yale Fellowship in Public Psychiatry, effective July 1.
Mathis is associate professor of psychiatry, medical director of the Connecticut Mental Health Center’s Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) team, and co-associate director of the Public Psychiatry Fellowship. He joined the department in 2016 as a fellow in the Public Psychiatry Fellowship, an experience that continues to shape his clinical, educational, and scholarly work.
Since 2020, Mathis has served in fellowship leadership roles with a focus on research mentorship and scholarly development, guiding fellows through the conception, execution, and completion of year-long research projects. In this capacity, he has emphasized integrating public psychiatry practice with rigorous, data-informed inquiry, helping fellows translate clinical and policy questions into publishable scholarship.
Clinically, Mathis provides community-based care to individuals with severe mental illness through the ACT model, working with patients in their homes and neighborhoods. He has led substantial redesign of ACT team workflows and developed digital tools to support clinical efficiency, outreach, and fidelity to evidence-based care. His clinical leadership has been consistently recognized with top evaluations from the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.
Trained originally as an architect and urbanist, Mathis brings a systems-oriented perspective to psychiatry that integrates social, spatial, and structural determinants of health. His research focuses on health services and equity, using advanced analytics – including geospatial methods, machine learning, and large language models – to study access, pathways to care, and outcomes across public-sector systems.
He has also been closely involved in the development of Yale Psychiatry’s structural competency curriculum and serves as director of informatics for a multisite learning health collaborative for first-episode psychosis.