UC San Francisco faculty member Amy Byers, PhD, MPH, has been named a Clinical Science Research and Development (CSRD) Research Career Scientist by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs' Office of Research and Development. Research Career Scientist awards are for established, non-clinician, independent investigators who have demonstrated extraordinary contributions to VA research beyond their own funded studies and programs. The awards initially provide up to five years of funding.
Byers is a clinical epidemiologist and professor in the UCSF Departments of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and Medicine based at the San Francisco VA Health Care System. Her strong background in aging research and expertise in mathematical epidemiology, geropsychiatry, and utilization of large-scale complex data sources has allowed her apply advanced methodology to address complex clinical questions at the intersection of physical and mental health in aging adults.
Her work has been funded by several agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, Department of Veteran Affairs and the UCSF Older Americans Independence Center. She is currently the principal investigator of the first VA R01-level grant longitudinally investigating suicide and suicidal behavior at a national level in older U.S. veterans, as well as an NIH-funded research program focusing on suicide and suicide-related outcomes among older veterans and individuals reentering the community from incarceration. By leveraging national databases, Byers has built large longitudinal cohorts to study how complex and salient risk factors—such as comorbidities, polypharmacy, and history of incarceration—contribute to late-life suicide and related disorders.
About UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences 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 and Behavioral Sciences conducts its clinical, educational, and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital; UCSF Medical Centers at Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay, and Mount Zion; UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland; Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center; the San Francisco VA Health Care System; UCSF Fresno; and numerous community-based sites around the San Francisco Bay Area.
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—Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Neurology, 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
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area.
