Hirschtritt selected for AAPL Rappeport Fellowship

By Nicholas Roznovsky
 

Matthew Hirschtritt, MD, MPH

Matthew Hirschtritt, MD, MPH, (second from right) and the other 2017 AAPL Rappeport Fellows  [Photo courtesy Renée Binder]

Fourth-year psychiatry resident Matthew Hirschtritt, MD, MPH, has been named a 2017 Rappeport Fellow by the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL). Each year, six recipients from across the United States and Canada are chosen through a competitive process for the prestigous fellowship, which is named in honor of AAPL founding president Jonas R. Rappeport, MD.

As part of the fellowship, Hirschtritt attended the AAPL Annual Meeting in Denver, where he attended educational sessions, and met with AAPL preceptors, who assisted him in exploring interests in psychiatry and the law. He also participated in the AAPL Forensic Psychiatry Review Course, an intensive, comprehensive overview of psychiatry and law.

Hirschtritt received his undergraduate degree in psychology from Cornell University, then completed a two-year post-baccalaureate fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health, a one-year pre-medical program at Johns Hopkins University, and served as a research associate at the Yale Child Study Center. He went on to complete his MD and MPH degrees from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University. During medical school, a Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship brought him initially to UCSF, where he stayed for residency training. His research interests include access to care, implementation science, quality of mental-health care in correctional settings, prevention of criminal behavior and recidivism, and psychiatric epidemiology. He co-led a workshop addressing forensic issues in emergency psychiatric settings for the 2015 AAPL Annual Meeting and wrote a perspective piece regarding the criminalization of mental illness which appeared in JAMA. In the summer of 2018, following the completion of his residency training, he will begin the forensic psychiatry fellowship at UCSF.

Former fellow Armontrout also honored

Former UCSF forensic psychiatry fellow James A. Armontrout, MD, was also recognized during the AAPL Annual Meeting with the organization's Outstanding Young Investigator Award for research done during his time at UCSF. Armontrout, who completed his forensic fellowship this past summer, is currently a psychiatrist with the VA Palo Alto Health Care System's Trauma Recovery Program.

The American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL, pronounced "apple") is an organization of psychiatrists dedicated to excellence in practice, teaching, and research in forensic psychiatry. Founded in 1969, AAPL currently has over 2,000 members in North America and around the world.


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, UCSF Medical Center, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals, 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 top-ranked hospitals – UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland – and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area.