The UC San Francisco Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences announced today that five of its highly accomplished faculty members have been appointed to endowed chairs and professorships. These appointments have been bestowed in recognition of each of the recipients’ outstanding accomplishments and to support future scholarly growth and further excellence across the department’s clinical, research, educational, and public service missions.
Carol Cochran Schaffner Endowed Chair in Mental Health – Lisa Fortuna, MD, MPH, MDiv
Professor of Clinical Psychiatry Lisa Fortuna, MD, MPH, MDiv, has been named the Carol Cochran Schaffner Endowed Chair in Mental Health. As a bicultural, bilingual psychiatrist with triple board certifications in general psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry, and addiction medicine, Fortuna has worked extensively in the fields of Latinx mental health, PTSD, mood disorders, access to mental health care, and quality of treatment for underserved and vulnerable populations.
She joined the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in November 2019 as the Vice Chair for Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, as well as the chief of psychiatry at Zuckerberg San Francisco General. In 2022, she was also appointed as the department's Executive Vice Chair.
In addition to her regular responsibilities of overseeing the department's clinical services, education, and research efforts at Zuckerberg San Francisco General and its affiliated community-based programs, Fortuna has been an investigator on several National Institutes of Health and foundation-funded studies of Latinx and immigrant mental health, integrated care, and access to care.
The Carol Cochran Schaffner Endowed Chair in Mental Health supports the research, teaching, and service activities related to work in the field of mental health.
Lynne and Marc Benioff Endowed Chair in Psychiatry – Christina Mangurian, MD, MAS
Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Epidemiology & Biology Christina Mangurian, MD, MAS, has been named the Lynne and Marc Benioff Endowed Chair in Psychiatry. She first joined the department’s faculty at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center in 2009. She served as the department’s inaugural Vice Chair for Diversity and Health Equity for seven years and was selected to be Vice Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs for the UCSF School of Medicine in 2022.
As a bicultural, bilingual community psychiatrist dedicated to promoting mental health equity across all of the department’s important missions, Mangurian has been recognized for her work to improve medical health care for people with serious mental illnesses. She has received multiple awards and grants from the National Institutes of Health, as well as several foundations and industry partners. She is the co-founder and director of the UCSF Public Psychiatry Fellowship, a core faculty member at the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, and an affiliate faculty member of the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.
Mangurian is a champion of gender equity in academic medicine and has conducted multiple studies regarding policy inequities. She received the UCSF Chancellor Award for the Advancement of Women in 2017 and the J. Elliott Royer Award for Excellence in Academic Psychiatry in 2022. She is also a former chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Minority Mental Health and Health Disparities.
The Lynne and Marc Benioff Endowed Chair in Psychiatry supports research, teaching, and service activities related to psychiatry.
Gloria Hubner Endowed Chair in Psycho-Oncology – Ramotse Saunders, MD
Health Sciences Clinical Professor Ramotse Saunders, MD, has been named the new Gloria Hubner Endowed Chair in Psycho-Oncology. He is board certified in adult psychiatry and consultation-liaison psychiatry, and also serves as the medical director for acute services at UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital.
Saunders has more than 15 years of experience treating patients with mood disorders, including depression and anxiety, using evidence-based and neuroscientifically informed therapies. He has a background in brain electrophysiology research, and his long-standing interest in brain electrical activity led him to pursue therapeutic interventions in the field of clinical brain stimulation, including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
He is a member of the UCSF TMS and Neuromodulation Program, associate director of the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) service, and has been integral in developing an inpatient ketamine/esketamine program. Saunders is also a member of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (a psychiatric think tank)’s Psychosomatic Medicine committee. With his intersecting interests in consultation-liaison psychiatry and interventional psychiatry, he is specifically interested in the applicability of interventional modalities to consultation-liaison patient populations.
The Gloria Hubner Endowed Chair in Psycho-Oncology was created in 2003 to support the teaching, research, and service activities of a faculty member involved with the UCSF Psych-Oncology Program at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center based at UCSF’s Mount Zion campus.
Kilroy Realty Endowed Professorship in Psychiatry – Marina Tolou-Shams, PhD
Professor Marina Tolou-Shams, PhD, has been named the inaugural Kilroy Realty Endowed Professor in Psychiatry. She is a pediatric and forensic psychologist with a deep commitment to advancing behavioral health equity for underserved children, adolescents, and their families.
Tolou-Shams joined the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in 2015 and is the director of the UCSF Juvenile Justice Behavioral Health program, as well as Community Health Advanced by Next Generation Efforts in San Francisco (CHANGE SF), a mental health workforce development program. She also serves as the department’s Vice Chair for Community Engagement, Outreach, and Advocacy, and as a Deputy Vice Chair for Research.
She is also an active clinical researcher who focuses on developing evidence-based mental health, substance use, sexual, and reproductive health interventions for youth and families involved in the juvenile legal and child welfare systems. Tolou-Shams' long-standing NIH-funded research includes emphasis on gender and trauma-responsive substance use interventions for girls and identifying ways to leverage technology to improve access to behavioral health care for systems-impacted youth populations.
The Kilroy Realty Endowed Professorship in Psychiatry was recently established to support research, teaching, and service activities in the area of child, adolescent, and young adult mental health in ways consistent with the vision and mission of the UCSF Young Adult and Family Center.
Leon J. Epstein Chair, MD, Chair in Geriatric Psychiatry – Kristine Yaffe, MD
Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Epidemiology & Biostatistics Kristine Yaffe, MD, has been named the Leon J. Epstein Chair in Geriatric Psychiatry. Yaffe is the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences' Vice Chair for the Weill Institute for Neurosciences, as well as chief of neuropsychiatry and director of the Memory Evaluation Clinic at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and director of the UCSF Center for Population Brain Health. She also holds the Roy and Marie Scola Endowed Chair in Psychiatry.
As an internationally recognized expert in the epidemiology of dementia and cognitive aging Yaffe has served as the principal investigator on multiple grants from NIH, the U.S. Department of Defense, and several foundations, and delivered testimony as a subject expert to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. With over 700 peer-reviewed articles dedicated to improving population brain health, her work has formed the cornerstone for dementia prevention trials worldwide. In recognition of her groundbreaking accomplishments, Yaffe has received several prestigious honors including the Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Research in 2017, election to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, and the NIH Robert S. Gordon, Jr. Award in Epidemiology in 2021.
The Leon J. Epstein, MD, Chair in Geriatric Psychiatry supports the work of a faculty member who is recognized as an authority on geriatric psychiatry, particularly the role that social conditions, social status, physical health, and environmental factors play in the mental health of the elderly. It was established in honor of Leon J. Epstein, MD, who played a major role in the developing the field of geriatric psychiatry and served twice as the acting department chair, first in 1974-75 and again in 1985-86.
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 the UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building; UCSF 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.
