New faculty members (L to R): Mikel Matto, MD; Dhakshin Ramanthan, MD, PhD; Herbert Schreier, MD; Christopher Stauffer, MD; and Helen Weng, PhD.
Five new faculty members have recently begun their academic appointments with the UCSF Department of Psychiatry. Please join us in welcoming these new colleagues to our faculty ranks.
Mikel Matto, MD, will serve as a Health Sciences Assistant Clinical Professor and continue his work as the medical director of the San Francisco VA Medical Center's Same Day Mental Health Clinic. He completed his medical training at UC Davis, and his psychiatry residency and a forensic psychology fellowship at UCSF. During his residency, he served as a chief resident and received both the Edwin F. Alston Award for Leadership in Psychiatry and the UCSF Psychiatry Grand Rounds Trainee Research Award. His clinical experience includes work at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, Contra Costa Regional Medical Center, and Kaweah Delta Mental Health Hospital.
Dhakshin Ramanthan, MD, PhD, has joined the faculty as an Assistant Adjunct Professor and researcher based the the San Francisco VA Medical Center. He received his MD and a PhD in neurosciences from UC San Diego, and most recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the UCSF Laboratory of Plasticity and Neural Engineering under the mentorship of Karunesh Ganguly, MD, PhD. In addition to receiving a UCSF Psychiatry Grand Rounds Trainee Research Award in 2014, Ramanathan was also in 2016 named a recipient of both a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant and a Department of Veteran Affairs Clinical Science Research and Development Career Development Award.
Herbert Schreier, MD, joins the department as a Health Sciences Clinical Professor based at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland, where he has served as director of psychiatry since 1977. He received his medical degree and completed a psychiatric residency and child psychiatry fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Schreier is an internationally renowned expert on transgender and gender-variant children, as well as on mothers with Munchausen syndrome by proxy. He has previously held faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, Children's Hospital Medical Center (Boston), and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Christopher Stauffer, MD, is an Assistant Adjunct Professor who specializes clinically in the treatment of substance use disorders and PTSD. seeing patients at both the San Francisco VA Medical Center and Zuckerberg San Francisco General's Opioid Treatment Outpatient Program. He is also the Director of the Addiction Research for the UCSF BAND Lab, and recently received a Clinical Science Research and Development Career Development Award from the Department of Veteran Affairs for his work on the use of social drugs such as oxytocin and MDMA as an adjunct to psychotherapy for substance use disorders and PTSD. He completed his medical training at Oregon Health & Science University, followed by a psychiatric residency and research fellowship at UCSF, and was named a recipient of the UCSF Psychiatry Grand Rounds Trainee Research Award in 2015.
Helen Weng, PhD, is an Assistant Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and a core member of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine and UCSF Neuroscape Lab. She earned her PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by a research fellowship in the UCSF Osher Training in Research in Integrative Medicine Program. As a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, Weng is interested in the neurobiological mechanisms through which meditation training may improve social behavior and mental health.
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 and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, with a mission focused on research (basic, translational, clinical), teaching, patient care and public service.
UCSF Psychiatry conducts its clinical, educational and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including UCSF campuses at Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay and Laurel Heights, UCSF Medical Center, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the San Francisco VA Health Care System and UCSF Fresno.
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—Neurology, Psychiatry, 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
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 top-ranked hospitals – UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland – and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area.
