Four new faculty members to join UCSF Psychiatry in October

Three new faculty members will officially begin their academic appointments with the Department of Psychiatry on Saturday, October 1, with a fourth joining them on Monday, October 3. Please join us in welcoming these new colleagues to our faculty ranks.

Simon Desjardines, MD, MBA

Simon Desjardines, MD, MBA

Simon Desjardins, MD, MBA, will join the psychiatric medical staff at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital & Trauma Center as an HS Assistant Clinical Professor and a full-time member of the ZSFG Psychiatric Emergency Services clinical team, effective October 3. He attended medical school at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and also holds an MBA with a focus on healthcare administration from Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business. Desjardins completed his psychiatric residency (including a year as chief resident) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, where he also served as a faculty member afterwards. Most recently, he was a staff psychiatrist and the Medical Director of the Rapid Access Clinic at the James J. Peters Bronx Veterans Affairs Hospital in New York.

Shanti Gooden, MD, is joining the department as an HS Assistant Clinical Professor and an attending child and adolescent psychiatrist at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland. She completed medical school at the Drexel University College of Medicine and a triple board residency program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. From 2012-2016, she served on the faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, and is she currently the Director of Child and Adolescent Consult-Liaison Psychiatry and UCSF Benioff Oakland. In addition to her focus on child and adolescent psychiatry, she also holds interests in complex trauma, social justice medicine, psychosomatic medicine, and medical education.

Petra Steinbuchel, MD, is the Medical Director for Mental Health and Child Development at UCSF Benioff Oakland, a role she will continue to hold in addition to her appointment as an HS Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at UCSF. A graduate of the Medical College of Georgia, California Pacific Medical Center's psychiatry residency program, and Massachusetts General Hospital's child and adolescent psychiatry program, Steinbuchel has held clinical, research, and education duties in a variety of roles at UCSF Benioff Oakland since 2007, and is board certified in both psychiatry and neurology.

Dawn Sung, MD, who joins UCSF Psychiatry as an HS Assistant Clinical Professor and attending child and adolescent psychiatrist at UCSF Benioff Oakland, was born in San Francisco and grew up in the East Bay area. She began volunteering with homeless and mentally ill communities during her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley. After graduating, she volunteered for a year as a Community Appointed Special Advocate (CASA worker) for Alameda County with foster youth in inner-city Oakland before entering medical school at UC Davis. Sung pursued her psychiatry residency and child psychiatry fellowship at New York University, where she helped to found the Association for Culture and Psychiatry. Earlier this year, she completed the UCSF Public Psychiatry Fellowship at ZSFG.  Her interests are in working with underserved minority youth, adults, and families, community program development, and providing culturally sensitive care.
 


About UCSF Psychiatry

The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute are among the nation's foremost resources in the fields of child, adolescent, adult, and geriatric mental health. Together they constitute one of the largest departments in the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, with a mission focused on research (basic, translational, clinical), teaching, patient care, and public service.

UCSF Psychiatry conducts its clinical, educational, and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including UCSF campuses at Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay, and Laurel Heights, the UCSF Medical Center at Mt. Zion, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the San Francisco VA Health Care System, and UCSF Fresno.

About the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences

The UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, established by the extraordinary generosity of Joan and Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, brings together world-class researchers with top-ranked physicians to solve some of the most complex challenges in the human brain.

The UCSF Weill Institute leverages UCSF’s unrivaled bench-to-bedside excellence in the neurosciences. It unites three UCSF departments—Neurology, Psychiatry, and Neurological Surgery—that are highly esteemed for both patient care and research, as well as the Neuroscience Graduate Program, a cross-disciplinary alliance of nearly 100 UCSF faculty members from 15 basic-science departments, as well as the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, a multidisciplinary research center focused on finding effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.

About UCSF

UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises two top-ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area.