The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences held its 2023 Graduation Commencement Ceremony on Friday, June 16, 2023, to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of our residents, fellows, interns, and other trainees who are completing their programs and preparing for the next step in their professional lives.
Watch the ceremony
Commencement program
Below is a copy of our official commencement program. You can flip through the program and zoom in or out using controls on the page, open the program in a fullscreen window, or download a copy to view on your device.
About this year's commencement speaker: Ramotse Saunders, MD
Ramotse Saunders, MD, is the Gloria Hubner Endowed Chair in Psycho-Oncology and a health sciences clinical professor in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. 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.
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.
Looking for a previous ceremony? Archived videos of our most recent graduation commencements are available: 2022 • 2021 • 2020.