In 2021, UT Southwestern Medical School established a school-wide diversity program to help faculty and staff transform our recruitments, our teachers and learners, our leadership positions, and our patient care to greater diversity. This UTSW program is led by Quinn Capers, M.D., Associate Dean for Faculty Diversity, complemented by a Diversity Lead in each of the Departments. To take advantage of this opportunity, we called for and received nominations and appointed a committee to review and recommend a candidate for the Psychiatry Diversity Lead. It did not take the committee long to recommend Olufunke Awosogba, Ph.D., for this position. We are now lucky to have Dr. Awosogba settled into the Psychiatry position, already at work. Please meet Dr. Awosogba soon.

The Department of Psychiatry’s Anti-Racism Planning Committee creates initiatives that foster a community of collective responsibility and action, as well as respect and empowerment of all members of the department.

Its vision is a department of psychiatry that is anti-racist in all of its policies and practices. It comprises psychologists, psychiatrists, graduate students, psychiatry residents, and classified staff with diverse professional roles and racial/cultural identities.

The Department of Psychiatry Anti-Racism Subcommittees are open to all staff, faculty, and trainees who would like to join and help the department more forward with this mission.

If you are interested in becoming involved, reach out directly to one of the sub-committee chairs.

Focus: To examine the current process and level of recruitment, retention and advancement of underrepresented minority faculty, staff, and trainees in the Department of Psychiatry and identify improvements that can be made by attending to areas such as mentorship, training, and partnership with department hiring managers, supervisors, leadership, University Human Resources, Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Greek organizations, and the community at large.

Focus: To examine inequities and disparities in the clinical services within the UTSW and Parkland system and utilize research data as a tool to measure, guide, and improve clinical practice, with meaningful dialogue about the degree to which race impacts how we provide clinical services to patients and train students, integrating smaller focus groups, administrative staff, students, and faculty and developing departmental protocols for managing race-related issues that occur within the context of clinical care.

Focus: To increase knowledge of students, residents, faculty, and staff on issues of race and culture, particularly understanding/knowledge of underrepresented minorities in medicine, including a focus on staff/clinicians/students to learn best practices for working with minority populations in health care.

Focus: To establish ongoing channels of support and connection for faculty, staff, and trainees regarding anti-racism and social justice within the Department of Psychiatry, exploring multiple options, such as advocacy for underrepresented minority faculty, staff, and trainees; listening sessions; and support sessions.

The O’Donnell Brain Institute is accepting applications for the Clinical Neuroscience Scholars Award, which provides $1M in funding over 5 years to be used for teaching, patient-centered research, development of a specialized clinical program, or related activities. Applications can be submitted anytime between now and February 28, 2022. The candidate statement (recommended length 1-2 pages) should convey the candidate’s past/current interests and how these inform future goals/activities and be clear about the proposed training/research that the funding would support.

We have had another successful recruitment for our Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship under the direction of Sidarth Wakhlu, M.D.!

We are in an era of overwhelming need for addiction treatment nationally, yet many addiction fellowships still struggle in recruitment, which makes our accomplishments of both growing and filling our fellowship phenomenal!

We look forward to profiling the new fellows in a future issue of this newsletter.

We are grateful to all the Faculty, Fellows, and Staff who took time from their busy schedules to interview the applicants and be available by responding to calls/emails after the interviews. Ty Sanders did an amazing job in scheduling all the interviews, especially since Addiction Fellowships went through ERAS for the first time this year.

Congratulations to Dr. Wakhlu, Ty, and all our addiction faculty and staff!

Empire Central and Brook River will share 1 shuttle.

Scheduled Service during Peak Times (stops will be for the DART/TRE)

Note: Last shuttle leaves Empire Central at 6:00 p.m.

Shuttle goes to 4 stops on Main Campus

Access to Pegasus Park and Trinity Towers will require a transfer to Main Campus.

On-Demand Shuttle (app required: download)

When you request a shuttle, expect to wait about 15-20 minutes.

Patients and Research Participants will have a separate On-Demand Shuttle, scheduled by Guest Services.

Patients are increasingly paying attention to online information, especially hospital rankings, to help them decide where to seek care. One of the most popular rankings is the U.S. News & World Report’s annual Best Hospital list, which ranks UT Southwestern highly in several specialties currently.

Every year Doximity also surveys its members to create a ranking of residencies by reputation. Our psychiatry residency program is ranked #16 in the nation, and #1 in the South, for 2021-2022.

The best way you can help us maintain this well-deserved recognition and grow our reputation is to ensure your Doximity profile is claimed and up-to-date and vote in the U.S. News survey. These results, combined with other measures like risk-adjusted survival, determine the Best Hospital rankings.

It’s important to note three changes to the Doximity survey process for 2022:

Exactly how these changes will impact UT Southwestern’s reputation is difficult to determine, but it’s clear that participating in the survey is the most vital step to ensuring people in North Texas and beyond hear about the great care you provide. We encourage you to join us in this effort to get UT Southwestern the recognition we know your work deserves.

Thank you for your commitment to clinical excellence and the compassionate care you provide our patients every day.

Cherise Chin Fatt, Ph.D., has received a Translational Pilot Grant (TPG) for the research project "Elucidating Immune Mechanisms of Active Suicidal Ideation in Adults with Major Depressive Disorder."

Dr. Chin Fatt’s proposal was selected from among applications from many prestigious researchers at institutions across the state.

The TPG award is designed to achieve the following:

Alex Rollo, M.D., a fourth-year resident in the Neurology-Psychiatry Combined Training Program, has been accepted into the Honor Scholars Program of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry (AAGP). Scholar benefits include a 1-year membership to the AAGP, registration to the 2022 and 2023 AAGP Annual Meetings, special Scholars Program activities, and assignment of a mentor in geriatric psychiatry. Residents complete a scholarly project related to geriatric psychiatry under mentorship.

Although lethal means restriction is considered standard practice in treating suicidal patients, there is little experimental literature related to its efficacy. The funded project will be a randomized controlled trial of a novel cellphone-based intervention aimed to remind parents of adolescents in a suicide prevention program about lethal means restriction practices. The project will investigate the efficacy of this intervention at preventing suicidal behavior, as well as family communication following adolescents’ suicidal events.

UT Southwestern’s Special Grant Incentive (SGI) program provides funding to faculty members who obtain federal awards (e.g., NIH, NSF, DoD, NASA, DARPA). Faculty do not need to submit awards for consideration. Each quarter, the Provost Office automatically reviews faculty awards to determine which are eligible for SGI.

We congratulate the following psychiatry faculty members, who each received a $10,000 SGI Award.

October 2021 retreat attendees had the opportunity to participate in the antiracism workshop Racism: A Black Mental Health Crisis, which was an abridged version of the mandatory workshop that runs in the Psychiatry Clerkship. Faculty, fellows, residents, and students help facilitate the workshop, and we invite more faculty to sign on as facilitators.

The workshop runs about every 6 weeks, on cycle with the clerkship rotation, Tuesdays, 2-4:30pm in the D Auditoriums on South Campus (the February session will run virtually given the pandemic's surge). Interested faculty would receive the scheduled dates in order to select sessions that work with their schedules.

Facilitator Responsibilities:

• Before the workshop, read and prepare content using the Facilitator Manual (all content, prep work, and support resources are provided)

• Before the workshop, complete pre-workshop material about a week before assigned session (outlined in the facilitator manual)

• During the workshop, guide participants in small groups (about 7-10 participants) during the two breakout sessions of the workshop. There will usually be two facilitators per small group (all content and guiding questions are provided)

• *Optional: you can choose to lead the entire workshop

If you are interested in signing on as a facilitator, please email Drs. Rachel Russo, Sarah Baker, and Dani Morelli. A facilitator orientation/refresher will be arranged, and faculty are welcome to attend any of the remaining workshops as a participant to see how it runs before they would facilitate.

Join Department of Psychiatry mindfulness experts, Monty Evans, Ph.D., and Martin Deschner, Ph.D., via Zoom as they help participants develop a successful mindfulness practice by offering an understanding of the role of how attention, awareness, and memory interact to achieve stable attention (mindfulness) in the daily practice of meditation training. It addresses problems of focal attention, effortful control, concentration difficulties, and distraction. If offers helpful explanations based on classical mindfulness training and cognitive neuroscience.

February 23 Psychiatry Grand Rounds: "From Bench to Clinical Trials to Program Development: Journey and Collaborations in Neonatal Ischemic Encephalopathy" by Lina Chalak, M.D., M.S.C.S.

March 8 Ethics Grand Rounds: "Ethics Large and Small: Moral Considerations in Response to Childhood Obesity" by D. Micah Hester, Ph.D., Chair of the Department of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the College of Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Clinical Ethicist at Arkansas Children's Hospital.

While there is no registration fee, participants must register to attend the webinar. The Zoom event ID and link to join the webinar will be emailed upon registration.

Additional information may be found on the University's events calendar.

The Promotion and Tenure Committee is hosting a workshop to ensure that faculty members understand the academic advancement timeline and criteria for the Research Track on Thursday, February 17, at noon. Register to attend.

Faculty members, researchers, medical students, and certain other individuals must complete and submit a Conflict of Interest (COI) Statement of Financial Interests by March 1.

The SUCCESS program helps clinician faculty thrive at UT Southwestern by providing training in the domains of excellence required for academic promotion: clinical excellence, educational effectiveness, scholarly productivity, and institutional citizenship.  

Part 1: Tuesday, March 1, at 8 a.m. Register to attend.  

Part 2: Tuesday, March 8, at 12:30 p.m. Register to attend.  

The investments will further translational and basic research, training, and leading-edge care, advancing the work of the UTSW Departments of Psychiatry, Neurology, Neurological Surgery, Neuroscience, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and others. These resources will enable the O’Donnell Brain Institute to:

 

 

UT Southwestern and the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute are deeply appreciative of the confidence and partnership represented by every contributor to solve the challenges of brain function and alleviate the suffering of so many patients and their families impacted by brain disease and injuries. We hope that one day no patient diagnosed with brain disease will ever hear the words “there is no cure.”