Chair's Update September 2011

Thursday, September 01, 2011

Grants & Fellowships

Mangurian	Christina Mangurian, MD and James W. Dilley, MD are directing the first SFGH Public Psychiatry Fellowship which launched in July 2011, with the support of the San Francisco Community Behavioral Health Services (CBHS). This is the only active Public Psychiatry Fellowship in the State of California, as well as in the western United States. This one-year traineeship will develop the next generation of leaders in community psychiatry, and is built around clinical care activities in an existing CBHS community psychiatry service program and a seminar series dedicated to building a knowledge base specific to public psychiatry. Core faculty for the traineeship include Robert Cabaj, MD, Hung-Ming Chu, MD, Mark Leary, MD, Raj Parekh, MD, Martha Shumway, PhD, Irene Sung, MD, and Steven Wozniak, MD. Fellows for the 2011-2012 year are Dr. Fumi Mitsuishi (most recently Chief Resident at UCSF/SFGH Psychiatry Residency Training Program) and Dr. James Ryan Shackelford (most recently Chief Resident at UC-San Diego Combined Family Medicine and Psychiatry Residency Training Program).
Dilley
Sohal	Vikaas Sohal, MD, PhD has received a Pilot Award from the Simons Foundation for Autism Research to support studies about how calcium channel overactivity in the prefrontal cortex might disrupt normal social function. This is relevant both to autism and schizophrenia.

New Recruitments and Roles

Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Yang

Tony Yang, MD, PhD was successfully searched for one of our two Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Translational Researcher positions and will start on January 1, 2012. As a board-certified academic child and adolescent psychiatrist, his broad clinical and research goal has been to help youths suffering from psychiatric disorders through a combination of clinical care and research studies. His research interests have been mainly focused in two areas: examining the potential usefulness of medications through inpatient and outpatient clinical trials in children and adolescents, and developing cutting edge functional neuroimaging tools to understand the underlying neurobiology of the human brain and to apply this knowledge towards improving the care and treatment of patients. Here at UCSF, he plans on using fMRI to understand the underlying neural correlates of adolescent depression and to predict clinical treatment outcomes of antidepressants and/or therapy over time. He would like to collaborate with researchers interested in doing outcomes research using different types of therapies in depressed adolescents. He also plans to start up or work in an existing child and adolescent mood disorders specialty clinic.

SFGH

Peterson

Chad Peterson, MD, PhD graduated from the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign with a BS in chemistry, and then got his PhD in bio-organic chemistry from UC Berkeley. He went on to get his MD from Vanderbilt University Medical School, and then did psychiatry training at UCSF. He is now at SFGH in the Psychiatric Emergency Services (PES), where his primary responsibilities are clinical, but where he is also very excited about teaching psychiatry interns, medical students, nursing students, and psychology interns. His areas of focus are community psychiatry, trauma/PTSD, end-of-life psychiatry, psychotherapy, and veterans' issues, particularly veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also hopes to be instrumental in developing a telementalhealth program based in PES to coordinate care between PES and community clinics.

Publications

Hickman	Prochaska	Hickman, N. J., Prochaska, J. J., & Dunn, L. B. (2011) Screening for research consent capacity in the inpatient psychiatry setting. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 6(3):65-72.
Dunn	Kaup, A. R., Dunn, L. B., Saks, E. R., Jeste, D. V., & Palmer, B. W. (2011) Decisional capacity and consent for schizophrenia research. IRB: Ethics and Human Research, 33(4):1-9.
Humfleet	Muñoz	Reus	Prochaska
Hall	Hall, S., Humfleet, G., Muñoz, R., Reus, V., Prochaska, J., & Robbins, J. (2011) Using extended cognitive behavioral treatment and medication to treat dependent smokers. American Journal of Public Health. Published online ahead of print June 7, 2011: e1-e8. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2010.300084. PMID: 21653904
Delucchi	Hendricks, P. S., Delucchi, K. L., & Hall, S. M. (2010) Mechanisms of change in extended cognitive behavioral treatment for tobacco dependence. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 109, 114-119. This article was featured on the Society on Nicotine and Tobacco Research's web page.
Hamilton	Hamilton, S. P. (2011) A new lead from genetic studies in depressed siblings: Assessing studies of chromosome 3. American Journal of Psychiatry, 168(8):783-789.
Jones	Herbst, E. D., Harris, D. S., Everhart, E. T., Mendelson, J., Jacob, P., & Jones, R. T. (2011) Cocaethylene formation following ethanol and cocaine administration by different routes. Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, 19(2):95-104. PMID: 21463066
Satre	Mackin	Satre, D. D., Sterling, S. A.,Mackin, R. S., & Weisner, C. (2011) Patterns of alcohol and drug use among depressed older adults seeking outpatient psychiatric services. American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 19(8):695-703.
Weisner	Eisendrath	Satre, D. D., Chi, F. W., Eisendrath, S., & Weisner, C. (2011) Subdiagnostic alcohol use by depressed men and women seeking outpatient psychiatric services: Consumption patterns and motivation to reduce drinking. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 35(4):695-702.
Voglmaier	Zhaolin, H., Leal-Ortiz, S., Foss, S. M., Waites, C. L., Garner, C. C., Voglmaier, S. M., & Edwards. R. H. (20111) v-SNARE composition distinguishes synaptic vesicle pools. Neuron, 71(3):474-487. A fundamental new discovery about how nerve cells in the brain store and release tiny sacs filled with chemicals may radically alter the way scientists think about neurotransmission.
von Zastrow	Kotowski, S. J., Hopf, F. W., Seif, T., Bonci, A., & von Zastrow, M. (2011) Endocytosis promotes rapid dopaminergic signaling. Neuron, 71(2):278-90. This paper shows that the machinery that mediates removal of dopamine receptors from the surface of neurons after dopamine exposure enhances the acute signaling response. It also shows that this link between endocytic and signaling machineries is essential for rapid dopamine-induced control in neuronal excitability in the basal ganglia—it is this type of signaling that communicates the salience of normally rewarding environmental cues, and mediates the pathologically reinforcing effects of addictive drugs. The study involves neural imaging, biochemical and electrophysiological approaches applied to cultured cells and brain slice preparations. Lau, E. K., Trester-Zedlitz, M., Trinidad, J. C., Kotowski, S. J., Krutchinsky, A. N., Burlingame, A. L., & von Zastrow, M. (2011) Quantitative encoding of the effect of a partial agonist on individual opioid receptors by multisite phosphorylation and threshold detection. Science Signaling, in press. This paper defines a biochemical basis for how the addictive opiate drug morphine produces a different regulatory consequence than endogenously produced opioid peptides following binding to mu-opioid receptors. The ability of morphine to produce differential effects is of great potential importance to how addictive drugs work at the most fundamental level, but defining whether or not there is a difference in regulation at the level of individual opioid receptors has been the source of considerable confusion and controversy. This study largely (we think) settles the matter, by defining a clear biochemical basis for agonist-selective drug action occurring at the level of individual opioid receptors. The study uses cultured neurons, together with various biochemical and mass spectrometry-based analytical methods.
Yaffe	Yaffe, K., Laffan, A. M., Harrison, S. L., Redline, S., Spira, A. P., Ensrud, K. E., Ancoli-Israel, S., & Stone, K. L. (2011) Sleep-disordered breathing, hypoxia, and risk of mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older women. Journal of the American Medical Association, 306(6):613-619.

Awards and Honors

The Academy of Medical Educators will honor six Psychiatry faculty with the Excellence in Teaching Award in Medical Education on September 19. Awardees are nominated by Academy members, medical school course directors, and residency program directors who recognize faculty who consistently exhibit talent and dedication to medical education and demonstrate exemplary teaching of medical students and residents on a daily basis.
	Emily Baldwin, MD Christopher Benitez, MD Kristi Chambers, RN, MS, CNS Christopher Daley, MD Arnaldo Moreno, MD Chad Peterson, MD, MPH
Doupe	Allison Doupe, MD, PhD has been named the new director of the Center for Integrative Neuroscience (formerly the Keck Center).
Neylan	Thomas Neylan, MD has been invited to serve as a member of the NIH Pathophysiological Basis of Mental Disorders Study Section, Center for Scientific Review. Members are selected on the basis of their demonstrated competence and achievement in their scientific discipline as evidenced by the quality of research accomplishments, publications in scientific journals, and other significant scientific activities, achievements, and honors.