The Psychiatry Student Interest Group Network is a working group to foster the involvement, organization, and implementation of student psychiatry interest groups at individual medical schools throughout North America. The group functions as a central hub for the exchange of ideas, information, and resources for student coalitions in psychiatry. It also promotes the discourse for psychiatric education in the medical school community and for advocacy and justice in mental health as an integral part of health overall.

We believe that mental health is a fundamental part of general well being, and an understanding of its principles should underlie all aspects of medical care, education, and policy. By working to connect students, interest groups, psychiatry faculty, and area psychiatrists to the mental health care needs in the community, we hope to promote a heightened involvement and immediacy in psychiatry at each of these levels.

PsychSIGN holds an annual conference in conjunction with the APA Annual Meeting. The first meeting was held in May 2006 in Toronto, ON and drew over 100 students representing 60 medical schools. In 2009, we hosted our fourth annual conference in San Francisco.

In addition, PsychSIGN holds a number of regional conferences throughout the year, often in conjunction with professional meetings such as the Institute on Psychiatric Services, the American Medical Association National Meeting and the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

The PsychSIGN Executive Board consists of regional chairs from each of our 7 regions as well as one national chair.

Region 1 includes Ontario, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Newfoundland Region 5 includes Puerto Rico Region 7 includes Western Canada, AK and HI

National Chair:

Lara J. Cox
University of Pittsburgh

Lara has known that she wanted to be a psychiatrist since the day in high school when someone handed her a book by Kay Redfield Jamison (or perhaps even before that). In that vein, she majored in psychology and neuroscience at Kenyon College, where she discovered her love for research. She has now finished her third year of medical school at Pitt and will be taking a leave of absence for the next year to conduct research and pursue a masters degree in clinical research, sponsored by the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute Predoctoral Fellowship. Her current project examines neurocognitive changes in adolescents with non-suicidal self-injury, and will likely extend to include the study of the underlying functional neurocircuitry. Lara has also been involved with the psychiatry interest group at Pitt, the LGBT interest group, and hopes to work on the Pitt annual theatrical production this spring. Throughout high school and college, she spent most of her free time in the theatre and has decided that her alternate career choice is stage director. In her copious free time, she enjoys attending plays and concerts, drinking vast quantities of coffee, cooking (and eating!), travel, and spending time with her friends and family. Her career path is yet to be determined, but current possibilities include child & adolescent, emergency, and addiction psychiatry.

Region 1: CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT, Ontario and Quebec

Heather Speller
Yale Medical School

Heather is currently a 4th year student at the Yale School of Medicine. Originally from Belmont MA, she attended Boston College where she graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in psychology. Heather entered medical school with an interest in psychiatry, and her enthusiasm for the field has only since grown. In 2008 she was awarded a Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship and has spent the past year conducting research on depression in interns and residents. Heather intends to pursue a career in psychiatry, with a focus on mental health and wellness of physicians and physician trainees. At Yale, in addition to leading the psychiatry interest group, she is involved in clerkship curriculum development, is a member of the Committee for the Well-Being of Students, and served on the Medical School Admissions Committee. In her free time she is an avid skier and snowboarder, enjoys drawing and painting, wine tasting, and reading. She has a passion for travel, with recent excursions to the ski slopes of Utah, Sonoma's wine country, the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro, as well as Dubai, Croatia, and Bejing.

Region 2: NY

Paul Nestadt
New York Medical College

Paul is a 3rd year medical student and Sidney Frank Fellow at New York Medical College, although he never intended to be. He holds B.S. degrees in Neuroscience and Biology from Brandeis University, where he studied lobster stomatogastric ganglia and later investigated the mechanisms of conditioned taste aversion in mammals. He subsequently returned home to help found and teach at a Baltimore high school, the Baltimore Freedom Academy. Foolishly believing that he could break into the NYC art scene, Paul moved to Manhattan and promptly forgot how to paint. Luckily, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine took pity on him and employed him as a psychiatric clinical research coordinator, investigating PTSD, depression, resilience, and chronic fatigue syndrome, largely using magnetic resonance spectroscopy. When his friends started asking him for pills, Paul realized that he would need to obtain a medical degree, and he took the MCAT. His interests in psychiatry have traditionally been research and teaching based, but lately clinical and community psych has become overwhelmingly interesting, particularly regarding schizophrenia and major depression. Paul has found that medical school leaves plenty of free time for biking around NYC, building things out of metal and wood, and reading far too many comic books.

Region 3: DC, DE, MD, NJ, PA

Pradeep Kumar Selvan
Temple University School of Medicine

I'm a second year at Temple. I studied philosophy, science, and economics at Penn State. I'm interested in psychopharmacology and addictions.

Region 4: IL, IN, IA, KS, MI, MN, MO, NE, ND, OH, SD, WI

Nick Eilbeck
University of Toledo City

Nick is a fourth year medical student at the University of Toledo. He completed his undergraduate education at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he dual-majored in psychology and philosophy. As a medical student he has served as president of his school's psychiatry interest group and has participated in national forums on mental healthcare policy and advocacy. He recently completed an Annenburg Foundation summer fellowship in addiction psychiatry and is involved in local outreach programs serving urban substance-using populations. His interests include physician mental health, medical student education, and issues of mental health stigma. Beyond medicine, he enjoys writing and spending time with family.

Rina Crawford
Northwestern University - Feinberg School of Medicine

Rina is a 3rd-year student at Northwestern. She is fascinated by the meeting place of mind/body/spirit and looks forward to psychiatry as a career through which to explore it. Rina came to NU from S. Dakota in 1998, majoring in philosophy as an undergrad. She entered med school planning to become a psychiatrist and developed an unexpected taste for research after a summer position under Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos at the UMN Brain Sciences Center. She believes a diversity of perspectives within and outside western medicine can inform our understanding of mental health and enrich our research in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience. Like most med students, Rina wishes she had a bit more free time -- if she did, she'd eagerly devote some of it to skiing/snowboarding, backpacking, and traveling to music festivals. 

Region 5: AB, AK, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, OK, SC, TN, TX, VA, WV, PR and Uniformed Services

Lea Morton-Fishman
Marshall University

Lea Morton-Fishman is a 4th year medical student at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University in Huntington, WV. Born to a blue-collar family from the heart of Appalachia, she was exposed early to the unique hardships faced by the working class of rural America. Following graduation from high school, she briefly pursued an art degree until a strong desire to explore the world led her to abandon college in favor of the workforce. After spending a few years living and working on both coasts, she eventually obtained employment in the airline industry, allowing her to do what she loves most: travel. Unfortunately, massive layoffs in the airline industry during the fall of 2001 would eventually leave her, like thousands of others, faced with an uncertain future in the job market. Fortunately at the time, she was able to fall back on her second job in the postal service, and the loss of her primary job turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Seizing the perfect opportunity to resume her education, she went on to graduate summa cum laude from West Virginia State University three years later with a Bachelors of Science degree in Classical Mathematics, with minors in Chemistry, Biology and French. Although she had given great consideration to pursuing a PhD in Biostatistics, it was life experience and a fascination with the human condition that instead led her to enter the field of medicine and focus on a career in psychiatry. Lea is currently in the process of applying to residency and hopes to match in a dual program combining psychiatry with either internal medicine or neurology. Her specific areas of interest are PTSD (and its comorbidities), schizophrenia and the potential uses of neuroimaging in psychiatric diagnosis.    

Region 6: CA

David Safani
University of California, Irvine

David is currently in his fifth and final year of the MD/MBA dual-degree program at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine and Paul Merage School of Business. Born and raised in Southern California, David’s fear of cloudy days and cold winters led him to a sunny undergraduate experience at the University of California, Los Angeles graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business/economics. After graduation, he continued to work at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles performing research, coordinating studies, and enjoying weekends at the beach. Seeing psychiatric disorders often go unrecognized and untreated during his medical school rotations, he felt a need to expose future health providers to this important issue. As Co-President of the UCI Psychiatry Interest Group, he coordinates local UCI meetings, bringing together students and distinguished faculty in hopes of inspiring future psychiatrists. In hopes to advocate for mental health on a larger scale, David elected to earn a master’s degree in business administration. Ultimately he hopes to use this experience to manage community-wide mental health care. In his bountiful spare time he enjoys spending time with his friends and family, basketball, racquetball, wine tasting, hiking, backgammon, poker, and of course, the beach. 

Adam Quest
University of California, Davis

Adam is a third-year medical student at the University of California at San Diego. The son of a father who struggled as a writer and professor of African literature, he grew up focused on using his mathematical and scientific strengths to earn a living. While studying as an undergraduate at Yale he found psychology and philosophy classes interesting but chose to major in mechanical engineering. The choice was due in part to his interest in inventing and building with his hands, but also in part to the promise of job security that often accompanies skilled technical positions. After taking a job with Accenture and working as Information Technology consultant to Fortune 500 companies, he soon realized that his passion for working to better society was yet unfulfilled. Medical school offered a path to that end, but it was not until discovering psychiatry that he felt most able to use his experiences as an immigrant, entrepreneur, and traveler to relate to patients and attempt to understand both what ails them and how best to approach their healing. 

Region 7: AK, AZ, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, NM, OR, UT, WA, WY and Western Canada

Czlaire Anderson
University of Utah

Czlaire is a third year medical student at the University of Utah School of Medicine. She grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and played soccer for the infamous championship futbol club, The United Dragons. As an undergraduate, Czlaire participated in the Bachelor of Undergraduate Studies program where she created her own major, entitled Science and Society. While on exchange at Humboldt State University in northern California, she took the life altering course: The Sociology of Altruism and Compassion. Czlaire became interested in psychiatry after volunteering at The Children�s Center, a therapeutic preschool for very young emotionally and behaviorally disturbed children. She learned Spanish while volunteering in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and hopes to use this skill while working with underserved patients in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Facilitator

Vandai X. Le
University of California - Los Angeles

Vandai completed her MD at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA last year, and is now a first year psychiatric resident at Harvard Longwood.  Although born in Saigon, Vietnam, she grew up in Orange County (the “OC”), California, where she received her B.S. in Neurobiology from the University of California, Irvine.  Surprisingly, her interests in psychiatry were not established until beginning the psychiatry clerkship in her 3rd year.  Soon after, her decision to pursue the field was solidified by the strong mentors she had at UCLA and the various psychiatry opportunities she experienced outside of school.  She has participated in Addiction Medicine training through The Summer Institute for Medical Students at the Betty Ford Center, and has just recently been awarded the 2008-2009 AACAP Jeanne Spurlock Minority Clinical Fellowship for Medical Students.    Besides child psychiatry, Vandai also has special interests in psychodynamic psychotherapy, forensic psychiatry, and mental healthcare in the Asian American community.  Outside of medicine, she enjoys wine, jazz, experimental cooking, and simply spending quality time with her family, including playing Wii with her 9 nephews and nieces.