UT Southwestern's Program Development Award recognizes clinical faculty and staff who have worked together as a team to develop and sustain an innovative program that significantly advances our ability to improve patient care.

We are very proud that our COVID ICU Communications Team received a 2021 Program Development Award, celebrating the innovation and collaboration that are foundational to the success of UT Southwestern Medical Center in treating COVID.

The COVID ICU Communications team is led by Kala Bailey, M.D., and includes Jennifer Yoon, M.D., Mohona Sadhu, M.D., and Alex Cole, M.D.

Psychiatry residents helped the team at the height of the COVID surge last winter, and additional team members contributed from the palliative care department.

We also congratulate Lina Chalak, M.D., who received a 2021 UT Southwestern Mentoring Award. Dr. Chalak has dual appointments in Pediatrics and Psychiatry.

Additional safeguards are being put into place December 16 to protect the privacy of patients cared for by substance use disorder providers in the Addiction and Substance Use Disorder Clinic. Per federal regulations, providers cannot disclose any information that would identify a person as having or having had a substance abuse disorder without the person's written consent. SUD records in Epic, including treatment notes, will generally be restricted for providers outside of the SUD Clinic. As a result, if multiple UTSW clinicians care for the same patient, they will be unable to access records generated within the SUD clinic without the patient’s written consent, even if they referred the patient to the addiction team.

The Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology received 335 applications this year, which is the highest number on our yearly records and represents a more than 25% increase from last year. Fifty percent of applicants are located outside Texas, attesting to the national reputation of the program.

The program also has a new collaboration with the office of development to establish a scholarship fund to honor the late Drs. Maurice and Claire Korman. Dr. Maurice Korman was the founder of the program and division chief for nearly five decades. Dr. Claire Korman served on the UTSW faculty for 25 years and was known for her warmth and concern for students in the rehabilitation psychology program.

The Psychology Internship Program is partnering with the Psychiatry Residency Rural Mental Health Track to submit a Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) application to establish a training track in underserved, rural community settings and substance abuse treatment.

The Texas Alzheimer’s Research and Care Consortium (TARCC) is a collaboration among nine of the state’s leading medical research institutions to improve early diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease and related brain disorders. TARCC is interested in novel, innovative, and cutting-edge approaches to the study of Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders, including clinical and basic science proposals. The deadline for the FY2021 Request for Applications is Monday, January 10, 2022, by 5 p.m.

The Southwestern Assessment of Processing Speed (SWAPS) is a new, brief (1 minute!) pencil-paper measure of processing speed that can be used in a wide variety of clinical and research settings. It is free to download and use, and comes with available norms for ages 50+. C. Munro Cullum, Ph.D., and his lab are pleased to have SWAPS published and look forward to learning more about its utility in various populations and applications.

Guidelines for Psychological Practice for People with Low-Income and Economic Marginalization: Executive Summary, coauthored by Kipp Pietrantonio, Ph.D., and colleagues, is available online and will be in the next print edition of the American Psychologist. It summarizes much longer guidelines that the American Psychological Association adopted in 2019 and reflects work from a very large multi-year project.

Department members have been very busy this month presenting their work at conferences! Below is a sampling of poster presentations from faculty and trainees at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) Annual Meeting December 5-8 and the National Academy of Neuropsychology (NAN) Annual Conference December 9-10.

The speaker will be Aaron S. Kesselheim, M.D., J.D., M.P.H., Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law (PORTAL), Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

No registration fee -- Simply register to attend

The Zoom event ID and link to join the webinar will be emailed upon registration.

UTSW typically discourages any kind of public-facing interaction with aspiring journalists/podcasters (e.g., high school or college students), but you’d be free to accommodate this request without use of your UTSW credentials.

Email any questions about invitations to participate in media-related items that would be posted online, aired on the radio, or included in a publication to James Beltran, UTSW Manager of Communications.

The OBI is excited to announce the winners of the 2022 OBI Research Interest Groups! Funded groups include two or more UTSW departments, in both laboratory and clinical arenas. Email the listed administrator for more information regarding group membership, meetings, and events.

As the research portfolio at UTSW continues to grow, the OBI developed this program to propel teamwork across the breadth of laboratory and clinical brain science. The OBI encourages a spirit of collaboration, including an open culture in which people are free to attend more than one group.

Each funding period is for 1 year, with $2,000 available to support regular meetings. Applications for 2023 OBI Research Interest Groups will open in Fall 2022.

Sleep and Circadian Rhythms Training Program Translational Seminar Series "Anesthesia: More Stressful than Restful"

Speaker: Mantre Dehnad, Ph.D.

Friday, December 17, 4pm, via Zoom

(Meeting ID 989 7092 1344)