Owen Wolkowitz, MD

Dr. Owen Wolkowitz is a clinical and translational research psychiatrist and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. His clinical work, teaching and research all focus on affective and anxiety disorders. He has been involved in psychiatric research for over 35 years, with an emphasis on stress-related mental illnesses such as Major Depression and PTSD, and he is presently Co-Director of the UCSF Depression Center. He obtained his MD degree from the University of Maryland and received his psychiatric residency training at Stanford University, after which he completed a fellowship in psychopharmacology research at the National Institute of Mental Health. His research focus is the identification of moderators and mediators of stress effects on psychiatric and comorbid physical health, with a goal of identifying novel targets for therapeutic intervention. He views many psychiatric illnesses not strictly as “mental illnesses” but as body-wide perturbations that affect the brain. He studies steroid and neurosteroid hormones, inflammation, oxidative stress, cell aging (such as telomeres, telomerase and epigenetic aging), metabolomics, mitochondrial physiology, neurotrophic factors, and neuroimaging as well as the roles of genetics and early life adversity. His team is now venturing into new directions in the gut microbiome and induced pluripotent stem cells in depression, the latter to predict individual patient responses to specific antidpressants. He was awarded the 2015 Academic J. Elliott Royer Award by the UCSF School of Medicine in “recognition of his significant cotributions to the advancement of Psychiatry.” He has published over 250 peer-reviewed papers and chapters, and he co-edited the American Psychiatric Press textbook on clinical psychoneuroendocrinology. His research, continuously funded by the NIMH, the US Department of Defense and private foundations since 1988, currently focuses on the possibility of accelerated biological aging in psychiatric conditions as well as “precision psychiatry.”