When
June 6, 2022
9:30 am - 4:00 pm ET
Where
Organizer
Keynote Address
Digital Technologies
Aging as We Come out of COVID
Substance Use Disorder
Mood Disorders and Children
Faculty Speakers and Moderators

Lee S. Cohen, MD
Associate Chief of Psychiatry for Philanthropy and Department Communications
Dr. Lee S. Cohen is a national and international leader in women’s mental health and was among the founders of the field of perinatal and reproductive psychiatry. His work spans the domains of research, teaching, and clinical care in the treatment of mood and anxiety disorders, especially those associated with female reproductive function. These include psychiatric disorders during pregnancy and the post-partum period, depression in midlife women and issues related to infertility and mental health.
Dr. Cohen is founder and director of the Ammon-Pinizzotto Center for Women’s Mental Health and director of the Perinatal and Reproductive Psychiatry Clinical Research Program at Mass General. He is the Edmund N. and Carroll M. Carpenter Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 articles, abstracts, and book chapters and has received numerous distinguished awards for his research, mentorship of trainees and teaching. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, his medical degree from Albany Medical College and completed his residency and a fellowship in psychopharmacology at Mass General.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD
Chief Science Officer, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Mass General and Harvard Medical School. Her lab is developing a systems-level model of brain and body mechanisms to unify human affect, emotion, motivation, cognition and action. She is in the top one percent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience.
Dr. Barrett is the recipient of a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for transformative research, the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (APA) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in neuroscience. A former APA president, she has testified before the US Congress and engages in informal science education for the public via popular books, articles and public lectures. In addition to her books, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain and How Emotions are Made, Dr. Barrett has published over 245 peer-reviewed, scientific papers. She has also given a popular TED talk with over six million views. She received her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Waterloo.

A. Eden Evins, MD, MPH
Director of the Center for Addiction Medicine
Dr. Eden Evins has conducted a series of studies that have changed clinical practice guidelines and the regulatory environment for smoking cessation treatments for those with and without serious mental illness. She studies effects of nicotine and the impact of vaped and oral cannabis on brain activation, psychiatric symptoms, cognitive function, and addictive behaviors. She is leading the first ever pharmacologic treatment study for addiction to vaped nicotine in adolescents and young adults. She is investigating the impact of pharmaceutical grade CBD on markers of neuroinflammation and pain in adults with chronic pain and on both clinical symptoms and brain function in social anxiety disorder.
Dr. Evins is founder and director of the Center for Addiction Medicine and the Cox Family Professor of Psychiatry in the Field of Addiction Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She has as received three career awards from the National Institute of Health. She has mentored over 35 junior investigators and authored over 200 publications that have been cited over 12,000 times, including over 60 publications with a mentee as first author. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and her medical degree at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

Daphne J. Holt, MD, PhD
Director of the Resilience and Prevention Program
Dr. Daphne Holt is using virtual reality technology to develop approaches for quantitatively measuring emotional and social functions, including automatic social behaviors such as personal space preferences, and improving these abilities. Dr. Holt is director of the Emotion and Social Neuroscience Lab and director of the Resilience and Prevention Program, a clinical and research program focused on developing interventions to increase resilience of youth and adults with risk factors for developing psychiatric illnesses. She is also co-director of the Psychosis Clinical and Research Program, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a MGH Research Scholar (2018-2023).
Dr. Holt has been a faculty member of the Mass General Psychiatry Department since 2004 and also faculty at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She received her MD and PhD from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She then went on to complete her clinical training at the MGH/McLean Psychiatry Residency Program and a fellowship in clinical research and neuroimaging at the Martinos Center.

John F. Kelly, PhD
Director of the Recovery Research Institute
Dr. John F. Kelly is founder and director of the Recovery Research Institute and the associate director of the Center for Addiction Medicine. Dr. Kelly is also the Elizabeth R. Spallin Professor of Psychiatry in Addiction Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is founder and the inaugural president of the American Board of Addiction Psychology, a former president of the American Psychological Association’s Society of Addiction Psychology, a distinguished fellow of the APA, and a diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology.
Dr. Kelly’s research focus has been to improve the quality and effectiveness of addiction care across the lifespan and understand the pathways to enhance stable remission and recovery. He has served as a consultant to U.S. federal agencies and non-federal institutions, foreign governments, the UN and the World Health Organization. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles, reviews, chapters, and books and was an author on the U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health. He has won state, national, and international awards for his research on addiction and its treatment. He completed his doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of California, San Diego and his clinical residency and post-doctoral fellowship in addiction studies at Brown University Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies.

Richard Liu, PhD
Director of Suicide Research
Dr. Richard Liu is director of suicide research in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and director of Big Data Studies in the Depression Clinical and Research Program. Dr. Liu’s research program focuses on characterizing dynamic processes of risk underlying onset and recurrence of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors and depression in youth and young adults, and he has over 100 publications on these and related topics.
Dr. Liu is currently the principal investigator of three NIMH-funded studies involving computational modeling of ecological momentary assessment data and ambulatory measures of psychosocial stress, sleep, and physiological arousal, as well as neurocognitive markers of short-term risk for suicidal behavior in adolescents. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from Temple University after completing his internship at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center and he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University. He is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

Olivia I. Okereke, MD, MS
Director of Geriatric Psychiatry
Dr. Olivia I Okereke is director of geriatric psychiatry at Mass General, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, associate professor in epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Terry and Jean de Gunzburg MGH Research Scholar 2021-2026. She is the inaugural director of the MGH Psychiatry Center for Racial Equity and Justice.
Dr. Okereke is a geriatric psychiatrist and physician scientist with advanced training in psychiatric epidemiology and analytic methods. Her clinical research interests are conditions that profoundly affect patients and their families, including depression, anxiety and Alzheimer’s disease. A central theme of her work is the use of diverse research methods and data resources to address novel scientific questions and to drive innovation. She led a first-of-its-kind, large-scale, randomized clinical trial testing the effects of nutrient supplements for prevention of depression in nearly 20,000 adults. She is on the Board of Directors of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry (AAGP) and chair of the Research Committee of AAGP and she is a past member (reached term limits) of the Board of Directors of the MA/NH Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association

Vinod Rao, MD, PhD
Medical Director of the West End Clinic
Dr. Vinod Rao is medical director of the West End Clinic, an outpatient facility for those with substance use disorders and co-occurring mental health disorders. In addition to providing clinical care, supervising trainees, and developing and maintaining clinical programs at the West End Clinic, Dr. Rao engages in informatics-based clinical research to evaluate the effectiveness of clinical interventions to better prevent and treat substance use disorders.
Dr. Rao received his undergraduate degrees from MIT, his medical degree and his doctorate in neurobiology from Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. He completed his residency in psychiatry at MGH/McLean Hospital and completed the Partners Addiction Psychiatry fellowship

Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD
Associate Chief of Psychiatry for Research
Dr. Jordan Smoller is a psychiatrist, epidemiologist and geneticist whose research focus is understanding the genetic and environmental determinants of psychiatric disorders across the lifespan and using big data to advance precision mental health and improve methods to reduce risk and enhance resilience.
Dr. Smoller is director of the Center for Precision Psychiatry at Mass General where he directs the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit in the Center for Genomic Medicine and the Omics Unit of the Division of Clinical Research He is the MGH Trustees Endowed Chair in Psychiatric Neuroscience and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is co-director of the Mass General Brigham Biobank. He is author of over 400 scientific publications and the book, The Other Side of Normal. He earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard College and his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. After completing residency training in psychiatry at McLean Hospital, he received masters and doctoral degrees in epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he is professor of epidemiology.

Mai Uchida, MD
Director of the Child Depression Program
Dr. Mai Uchida’s research program is focused on the characteristics, longitudinal course and treatment of unipolar depression and bipolar mood disorders in children. In collaboration with Dr. John Gabrieli at MIT and Dr. Joseph Biederman at Mass General, she has published on the functional and structural MRI based biomarkers of the risk for development of major depression. She is a current awardee of the National Institute of Health K23 award and has received the First Prize, Department of Psychiatry Award as well as the Dupont Warren Fellowship Livingston Award, Pilot and Feasibility Award from MassGeneral for Children, and Milton Award from HMS.
Dr. Uchida’s expertise is also in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children and adulthood. She has been named a Louis V Gerstner Scholar for her work in neural networks that affect emotional regulation in adults with ADHD. She is a committed advocate for mental health and shares her experiences as a parent in discussing issues such as racism, gender inequality and emotional regulation. In the past year, she was integrally involved in the COVID-19 communication in Japan to help the community take effective prevention and understand the science of vaccination.

Robert Waldinger, MD
Director of the Center for Psychodynamic Therapy
Dr. Robert Waldinger is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and Zen priest. He is director of the Center for Psychodynamic Therapy and the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies of adult life. His 2015 TED talk about the study is one of the most viewed TED talks of all time.
Dr. Waldinger is the author of numerous scientific papers as well as two books. He is the founder and co-director of the MGH/McLean Program in Psychodynamics, a program that offers psychiatry residents in-depth teaching in the theory and practice of psychodynamic psychiatry. He has won awards for teaching and research from the American Psychiatric Association, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, and several Harvard teaching hospitals. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School.

Anthony P. Weiner, MD
Director of Outpatient Geriatric Psychiatry
Dr. Anthony P. Weiner’s clinical practice involves caring for patients whose conditions intersect psychiatry, neurology and internal medicine and who are often impacted by the presence of complicated polypharmacy and a social network that changes as the patient ages. He is the inaugural incumbent of the Millicent and Eugene Bell Endowed Directorship in Older Adult Outpatient Psychiatry.
Dr. Weiner created the MGH Geriatric Psychiatry Clinical and Research Program in 2017.The mission of the program is to optimize the mental health and well-being of individuals aged 65 and older affected by cognitive, mood or memory disorders through comprehensive, cross-disciplinary care and to provide education and support to their families. In January 2022, he launched Care for America’s Aging, a project to create a new model of homecare through enhanced training of home health aides in order to improve the quality of life of homebound older adults with cognitive impairments. Dr. Weiner received his MD from Boston University and completed his residency at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.

Timothy E. Wilens, MD
Chief, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Dr. Timothy Wilens is chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, director of the Child Resiliency Program and co-director of the Center for Addiction Medicine. He is the MGH Trustees Chair in Addiction Medicine and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
His research interests include the relationship among attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, and substance use disorders, embedded health care models, and the pharmacotherapy of ADHD across the lifespan. He has published more than 325 peer-reviewed articles, concerning these and related topics. He has coedited more than 90 book chapters, five books, and 300 abstracts and presentations for national and international scientific meetings. Dr. Wilens is a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and is on the editorial boards or is a scientific reviewer for more than 35 journals. He earned his MD at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor and completed his residency in child, adolescent and adult psychiatry at Mass General.

Sabine Wilhelm, PhD
Chief of Psychology
Dr. Sabine Wilhelm is director of the Center for OCD and Related Disorders and the Center for Digital Mental Health. Her early work focused on the development and testing of new treatments for adults, adolescents and children suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, tic disorders and body dysmorphic disorder. Her recent research focuses on the use of cutting-edge technology to improve and personalize mental health care for a range of mental health concerns.
A Harvard Medical School Professor, Dr. Wilhelm has over 300 publications, including seven books, and has given more than 255 lectures on these subjects. She is the recipient of the Peter K. Ranney Innovation Award from the World Medical Innovation Forum for her presentation “Bridging the Mental Health Treatment Gap” and the Claflin Distinguished Scholar in Medicine Award. She is currently working on smartphone-based treatments for OCD, body dysmorphic disorder and depression. Her ultimate goal is to use technology-based interventions to enhance access to high quality mental health interventions globally.

Janet Wozniak, MD
Director of the Pediatric Bipolar Disorder Clinical and Research Program
Dr. Janet Wozniak is widely regarded as a national expert on the topic of pediatric bipolar disorder and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. She is associate chief of psychiatry for quality and safety and director of the Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Outpatient Service. She is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Wozniak’s research focuses on the characteristics, course and treatment of pediatric bipolar disorder. Her 1995 paper on childhood mania is one of the ten most cited papers published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Her current research focuses on treating pediatric bipolar disorder with complementary and alternative treatments and investigating cerebral organoids as a novel biomarker for pediatric bipolar disorder. She has authored dozens of scientific articles and cares for hundreds of children and teens in her clinical practice at Mass General. She is co-author of a book for parents, “Positive Parenting for Bipolar Kids.” She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and her medical degree from Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where she earned a SmithKline Beckman Medical Perspectives Award for Outstanding Medical Students. She completed her adult and child psychiatry training at Mass General.
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