UC San Francisco professor Lisa Fortuna, MD, MPH, MDiv, has been selected to receive the 2022 Frances J. Bonner, MD Award by the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry in recognition of her work in the fields of child psychiatry and social medicine. She will receive the award and present a special virtual grand rounds lecture, "Co-Designing Mental Health Interventions and Equity with Marginalized Community Stakeholder Youth," on Thursday, October 27, 2022.
Fortuna joined the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences faculty in November 2019 as the Vice Chair for Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, as well as of the Chief of Psychiatry at Zuckerberg San Francisco General. Earlier this year, she was also appointed as the department's Executive Vice Chair. Prior to coming to UCSF, she served most recently as the director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center.
She is a bicultural, bilingual psychiatrist with triple board certifications in general psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry, and addiction medicine, and has worked extensively in the fields of Latinx mental health, PTSD, access to mental health care, and quality of treatment for underserved and vulnerable populations. 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. Some of her recent work includes an NIMH-funded R01 project aimed at optimizing family navigation for child behavioral health in primary care and a Patient Centered Outcome Research Institute (PCORI)-funded, multi-site, large, pragmatic trial on the treatment of childhood anxiety comparing face-to-face vs. digitally delivered cognitive behavioral therapy in both English and Spanish.
The Bonner Award was established in 2010 by the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry and its Center for Diversity to promote diversity and inclusion in the mental health community. It is named in honor of Frances J. Bonner, MD, the first African American women to train at Massachusetts General and a longtime member of faculty at both Harvard Medical School and Boston University. A true pioneer who crossed racial and gender boundaries in medicine, Bonner supervised psychotherapy training at Massachusetts General for 50 years, served as the first appointed psychiatrist for Boston public schools, and co-founded the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England. The award named after her is awarded annually to a professional who has made a significant contribution to the field of mental health and the care of underserved minorities in the United States in a research, clinical, or administrative capacity.
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.
