Horowitz, McNiel, State selected to deliver scientific program lectures at APA meeting

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Three UCSF Psychiatry faculty members – Mardi J. Horowitz, MD; Dale E. McNiel, PhD, and Matthew W. State, MD, PhD – have been chosen by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to give lectures at its 2016 Annual Meeting in Atlanta this May.

These invited lectures feature a small number of distinguished speakers discussing scientific and cultural topics, many of which extend beyond the usual limits of clinical psychiatry. UCSF is the only institution with multiple faculty members featured as scientific program lecturers this year.

Horowitz and State were selected by the APA’s Scientific Program Committee to speak as part of the APA Distinguished Psychiatrist Lecture Series. State will deliver “From Genes to Neurobiology in Autism Spectrum Disorders” on Sunday, May 15, and Horowitz will present “How the Mind Works: Using Trauma and Grief as Models” on Tuesday, May 17.

McNiel was invited as part of the APA Frontiers of Science Lecture Series. He will deliver his address, “Advances in Assessment and Management of Risk of Violence” on Sunday, May 15. Finalized times and locations for each lecture will be announced closer to the beginning of the conference.

In addition to three current faculty members selected, APA President Renée L. Binder will deliver an address during the meeting’s opening ceremony. The Department of Psychiatry will also host a reception for faculty, trainees, and alumni attending the conference on the evening of Tuesday, May 17.

About Mardi Horowitz, MD

Mardi Horowitz, MD is a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF. He has been president of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the International Society for Psychotherapy Research. He has directed the NIMH Center for the Study of Neuroses and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Program on Conscious and Unconscious Mental Processes. He is a founding member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and the Society to Explore Psychotherapy Integration.

Dr. Horowitz has published many books, including States of Mind: Configurational Analysis of Individual Personality, Personality Styles and Brief Psychotherapy and Nuances of Technique in Dynamic Psychotherapy. His two most recent books are Identity and the New Psychoanalytic Explorations of Self-Organization (published 2014, Routledge Press) and Adult Personality Growth in Psychotherapy (in press, Cambridge Press). He has also recently published two books written for a nonprofessional audience: A Course in Happiness and Grieving as Well as Possible.

Dr. Horowitz is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Pioneer Award of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies for his achievements in developing the diagnoses of PTSD and disorders of complicated grief. He also received the foundation's fund prize for psychiatric research “for his distinguished contribution to an understanding of the psychological processes following serious life events and of the adaptive changes facilitated by psychotherapy.” His seminal book, Stress Response Syndromes: PTSD, Grief, Adjustment, and Dissociative Disorders, is now in its fifth edition and has been published in multiple languages.

About Dale McNiel, PhD

Dale E. McNeil, PhD is Professor of Clinical Psychology in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and chief psychologist at Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital. He is also director of the Clinical Psychology Training Program in the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF, which includes an APA-accredited internship and a postdoctoral fellowship.

Dr. McNiel is board certified in both clinical neuropsychology and forensic psychology and by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions of Clinical Psychology and Psychology and Law) and is a former President of the Section on Clinical Emergencies and Crises in the APA’s Division of Clinical Psychology. He has published extensively on topics related to behavioral emergencies such as violence, self-harm, and trauma.

About Matthew State, MD, PhD

Matthew State, MD, PhD is a child psychiatrist and human geneticist studying pediatric neuropsychiatric syndromes. His lab focuses on gene discovery as a launching point for efforts to illuminate the biology of these conditions and to develop novel and more effective therapies.

Dr. State received his undergraduate and medical degrees at Stanford University, completed his residency in psychiatry and fellowship in child psychiatry at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, and earned a PhD in genetics from Yale University. He was on the faculty at Yale from 2001 to 2013 where he was the Donald J. Cohen Professor of Child Psychiatry, Psychiatry and Genetics and the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Yale Program on Neurogenetics. He is currently the Oberndorf Family Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at UCSF and Director of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute.

His lab has played a leading role in demonstrating the contribution of rare and de novo variation to autism spectrum disorders (ASD), Tourette syndrome, and brain malformation syndromes. Recent work has contributed to the identification of dozens of ASD risk genes and has utilized systems biological approaches to characterize the spatial and temporal convergence of these genes in developing human brain. Dr. State plays a leadership role in a number of national and international collaborative genomics studies of autism and Tourette disorder, including the Simons Simplex Collection Genomics Consortium, the Autism Sequencing Consortium, and the Tourette International Collaboration (TIC) on Genetics.


About UCSF Psychiatry

The UCSF Department of Psychiatry 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, with a mission focused on research (basic, translational, clinical), teaching, patient care, and public service. UCSF Psychiatry has an organizational structure that crosses all major UCSF sites - Parnassus, Mission Bay, Laurel Heights, Mt. Zion, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the San Francisco VA Health Care System, and UCSF Fresno.

About UCSF

UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises two top-ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area.