Residents

PGY-1

Christopher Hammond, M.D., University of Florida

PGY-3

Jon Carlson, M.D., University of Colorado School of Medicine
Kyle Williams, M.D., University of Minnesota Medical School

PGY-4

Rebecca Hommer, M.D., University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Tamara Vanderwal, M.D., Yale University School of Medicine

PGY-5

Thomas Fernandez, M.D., Yale University School of Medicine
Alexander Westphal, M.D., Brown University School of Medicine

PGY-6

Michael Bloch, M.D., Yale University School of Medicine
Hanna Stevens, M.D., Ph.D., University of Illinois College of Medicine

Research Trainees

Roger Jou, M.D., M.P.H., University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Ellen Hoffman, M.D., Stony Brook University School of Medicine

Michael H. Bloch, M.D. (entered 2004): Michael graduated from Yale Medical School after receiving a B. A. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in biology. During his years at Yale, Michael conducted a thesis project assessing Predictors of Future Tic and OCD severity on MRI in children with Tourette syndrome (TS) under the mentorship of Dr. James Leckman and Dr. Bradley Peterson. The thesis project fostered a lifelong passion in child psychiatry and clinical research. Dr. Bloch is continuing his research in the area of Tourette syndrome and Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder mentored by Dr. James Leckman. Michael is currently conducting a study of childhood clinical, neuropsychological and neuroimaging predictors of long–term outcome in Tourette syndrome and OCD. Michael found that reduced caudate volume and poor performance on the Purdue Pegboard task in children with TS were predictive of increased adulthood tic severity. Increased IQ and reduced caudate volume in children with TS were predictive of increased adulthood obsessive–compulsive symptom severity. While on the training grant, he has published three manuscripts about the TS cohort. He is currently working on the results of adult–outcome in the cohort with pediatric–onset OCD and received an AACAP Pilot Research Grant to support this work. Michael is also pursuing an advanced M.S. degree at the School of Public Health at Yale and working with Dr. Christopher Pittenger as the assistant director of the adult OCD clinic at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. Through a combination of his experience at these two institutions he recently completed a series of systematic reviews one of which was on antipsychotic augmentation therapy for treatment–refractory OCD that was published in Molecular Psychiatry. A second systematic review of Behavioral and Pharmacological Treatments for trichotillomania was published in Biological Psychiatry. Last year he received an APA/Janssen Resident Research Award to conduct further systematic reviews in psychiatry. This coming year he will be funded in part by a Lilly Psychiatric Research Fellowship from the American Psychiatric Association.

Jon Carlson, M.D. (entered 2007): Dr. Carlson is a 2007 graduate of the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Prior to entering medical school Jon worked as a research assistant in the University of Colorado Neuroimaging Laboratory headed by Martin Reite, MD. Publications from this period continue to appear in the scientific literature. He also received an NIH short–term grant with Angeles Ribera, Ph.D., to develop tools and protocols for the examination of neural circuit function in zebrafish embryos. In his last years of medical school Jon also worked with Drs. Randy Ross and Sharon Hunter at Colorado to study early brain development and sensory gating. He received two Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) scholarships for work conducted at Colorado. During his time at Yale Dr. Carlson plans to pursue his interest in childhood psychosis and the schizophrenia prodrome. More recently, he matriculated into Yale’s Investigative Medicine Program (IMP). The IMP is a PhD program for physician–scientists and specifically designed for residents and fellows in training at Yale–New Haven Medical Center. Jon is now one of four Solnit trainees in this innovative program. He is presently in the midst of deciding on a research mentor here at Yale.

Thomas V. Fernandez, M.D. (entered 2005): Prior to medical school, Tom worked in the Child Psychiatry Branch of the NIMH and developed a specific interest in the genetic influences of childhood psychiatric disorders. During medical school and residency training at Yale, Tom has conducted his research in the area of genetics of child psychiatric disorders, mentored by Dr. Matthew State. He is currently conducting genetic association studies examining several promising candidate genes for autism and Tourette syndrome. In addition, he is examining gene copy number variation and using parametric linkage analysis to study a unique sample of children with chronic motor stereotypies (CMS), with the aim of identifying specific genes contributing to neural circuit dysfunction. He has co–authored an original chapter providing an overview of approaches to gene discovery in child psychiatric genetics for Lewis’s Textbook of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 4th Edition, and has reported his research findings in the American Journal of Human Genetics and American Journal of Medical Genetics during his training. He was selected for the AACAP Educational Outreach Program as well as the Donald J. Cohen Fellowship Program for International Scholars in Child & Adolescent Mental Health in 2007 and the NIH Pediatric Loan Repayment Program for 2007–2009. His research on CMS will be supported in part by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Eli Lilly Pilot Research Award in 2008–2009.

Christopher Hammond, M.D.(entered 2009): Chris graduated from the University of Florida College of Medicine in 2009. After completing his BA from Washington University in 2002 Chris worked in a research laboratory at the NIH conducting neuropsychological testing on patients with Alzheimer's disease. From 2006 - 2007 he was involved in international medicine as president and spokesperson of Health Outreach Assembly which organized several international medical outreach trips. Other volunteer work was been with Project HEAL, a multidisciplinary initiative of the University of Florida students with the University of San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Chris's poster on Addiction Treatment Outcomes for a cohort of African-American Physicians with diagnoses of Substance Abuse or Dependence was presented at the 2009 American Psychiatry Association Annual meeting as well as the American Society of Addiction Medicine annual meeting. As a PGY 1 resident Chris is completing his internship year with rotations at Yale New Haven Hospital (Pediatrics) and the VA Hospital.

Ellen Hoffman, M.D.(entered 2008): Dr. Hoffman graduated with an M.D. with Recognition in Research degree from Stony Brook University School of Medicine. She was awarded an Alpha Omega Alpha Student Research Fellowship for her project in the laboratory of Dr. Gail Mandel of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Department of Neurobiology at Stony Brook. This project involved studying a transcriptional repressor protein that plays a key role in neuronal differentiation. During her child psychiatry fellowship and psychiatry residency at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, she continued to be involved in basic science research projects studying nervous system development. She has received numerous awards including the American Psychiatric Institute/Janssen Psychiatric Research Scholar Award towards research in the laboratory of Dr. Deanna Benson of the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Eli Lilly Pilot Research Award, which supported an independent research project in the molecular genetics of autism which she conducted in the laboratory of Dr. Joseph Buxbaum of the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai. One of her main research goals is to utilize a basic neurobiology approach in order to understand the mechanisms that may contribute to developmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders. She is working primarily in the laboratory of Dr. Matthew State studying the genetics of autism. She will join Yale's Investigative Medicine PhD program for physician-scientists in July 2009. Specifically, her project involves developing a zebrafish model system, in collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. Antonio Giraldez of the Yale Department of Genetics, for studying how rare variants may contribute to disease phenotype in autism spectrum disorders.

Rebecca Hommer, M.D. (entered 2006): As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, Rebecca studied history and wrote her honors thesis on the evolution of children’s literature during the depression and WWII. After college, Rebecca spent three years at the NIH studying infant macaque behavior and mother–infant attachment. Rebecca left the lab to attend medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, but returned to the NIH following her third year of medical school as a fellow in the Clinical Research Training Program. She joined Dr. Ellen Leibenluft’s group at the Pediatric and Developmental Neuropsychiatry branch of the NIMH where she spent a year working with children with bipolar disorder and mood dysregulation and undertook a research project using fMRI techniques to study the development of motor inhibition. Dr. Hommer is now a third–year resident in the Integrated Training Program. She is working on several projects under the mentorship of Dr. Linda Mayes, including studies of young children’s learning, adolescent stress reactivity, and maternal distress tolerance. Rebecca recently received a 2008–2009 American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Pilot Research Award supported by Eli Lilly and Company to study of the effects of acute and chronic stress on adolescent decision–making using a temporal discounting task. Dr. Hommer was also named a 2008–2009 APA/Shire Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellow and awarded travel grants to attend the 2008 and 2009 annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association.

Roger Jou, M.D., M.P.H. (entered 2008): Roger began his career in autism research as a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. His earliest work focused on psychopharmacology, treating secondary symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and other developmental disabilities. This interest soon shifted to neuroimaging in ASDs where he trained under the supervision of Antonio Hardan, MD and Matcheri Keshavan, MD. His initial work investigated differences in cerebral cortical folding using structural MRI techniques. As a second–year resident in general psychiatry at Yale, he began working with Robert Schultz, PhD in the Yale Developmental Neuroimaging Laboratory where he developed an interest in diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional MRI (fMRI). As a third–year resident, he matriculated into Yale’s Investigative Medicine PhD program for physician–scientists. Roger’s thesis title is, “Characterization of Abnormal Neural Connectivity in Autism Spectrum Disorders using Combinatory Magnetic Resonance Imaging Techniques.” He has preliminary data supporting his thesis and a manuscript ready for submission. His thesis work will continue in concert with “Project 4: Neuroimaging” of the Yale Autism Center of Excellence (ACE) project. Throughout his training, Roger has received recognition for his research efforts and has been the recipient of a number of awards and other honors. Most recently, he was awarded support from the American Psychiatric Institute for Research & Education (APIRE)/Eli Lilly Psychiatric Research Fellowship and APIRE’s Program for Minority Research Training in Psychiatry. Roger is also a recent recipient of American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry/Eli Lilly Pilot Research Award for Junior Faculty and Child Psychiatry Fellows. Roger’s research efforts will be conducted under the supervision of James Duncan, PhD (Diagnostic Radiology) and Ami Klin, PhD (Child Study Center).

Hanna Stevens, M.D., Ph.D.Hanna Stevens, M.D., Ph.D. (entered 2004): As a medical and graduate student at the University of Illinois, Hanna conducted research in auditory physiology, looking at the normal processing of speech sound in the auditory nerve of the chinchilla. She also worked on projects focusing on the presentation of restless legs syndrome in children and weight gain in children being treated with atypical antipsychotics. Since beginning in the Integrated Residency Program at Yale, she has worked with Flora Vaccarino, retraining with developmental neuroscience skills to understand the mechanisms by which early biological and environmental events affect brain development. She developed these interests in her clinical training experiences both with preschool children and with women experiencing perinatal psychiatric problems, both of which are her areas of clinical expertise. Her main interest is in early brain development, both in terms of clinical assessment/treatment and the anatomy and physiology of the brain. Hanna has completed a study of fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 (FGFR2) and the role it plays in the development of the central nervous system of the mouse, presenting these findings at multiple national meetings. Her work contributes to understanding how the FGF system plays a role in the mechanisms by which abnormalities arise in the brains of patients with schizophrenia, mental retardation and autism. She is also conducting a project examining how prenatal stress in model systems affects the development of inhibitory neurons known to be critical in establishing the functional systems of the early brain, funded by the AACAP, NARSAD, and APIRE. Hanna is active in clinical scholarship with publication of case reports/series, a review on translational primate models and an editorial on child psychiatry collaboration with pediatricians completed while a fellow with the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry. She has presented at the APA and AACAP annual meetings on clinical research on prenatal stress and early parenting interventions. She is also interested in the mentoring of women in child psychiatry and general psychiatric research. Outside of work, Hanna enjoys gardening, reading and spending time with her family.

Tamara Vanderwal, M.D. (entered 2006): Tammy grew up in a small town called Vernon in British Columbia, Canada. She received a BSc. in biology from Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C. She then studied ethics at Yale Divinity School for two years, where her concentration was in theological ethics. She attended Yale for medical school, during which time she worked on an fMRI research project about the self in autism spectrum disorders. Dr. Vanderwal is continuing to work in neuroimaging with Robert T. Schultz, Ph.D., examining the neurofunctional underpinnings for differentiating between self and other. She has developed a paradigm for testing encoding and retrieval of self–referential information in the MRI magnet. In healthy adults, she has demonstrated the social nature of self–referential processing, with a similar network of regions being recruited during tasks that involved self, mother and abstract others. Her study also found that unique deactivations in bilateral temporal poles occurred during self–referential processing when compared with mother–referential processing. The manuscript from this work was recently accepted by NeuroImage. She is working to extend this paradigm for use with individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders, as well as to look at the self–reference effect developmentally in typically developing children. Dr. Vanderwal is also beginning a project that will look at the effects of guanfacine on children physiologically, behaviorally and via dense–array EEG. She received a 2008–2009 American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Eli Lilly Pilot Research Award to pursue this research, which will be done with Drs. Linda Mayes and Lawrence Scahill. In addition, in between (and sometimes during) school, Tammy has spent time in Vietnam, Haiti, Eritrea and Germany. She enjoys running, reading, playing soccer and basketball, rowing and painting.

Alexander Westphal, M.D. (entered 2005): Alexander grew up in England and in the U.S. He studied writing and classics at Bennington College, pre-med sciences at Columbia University, and medicine at Brown University. At present, Alexander is a fourth-year trainee in the Albert J. Solnit Integrated Child and Adult Psychiatry Research Training Program and a PhD student in Yale's Investigative Medicine program for physician-scientists. His research interest is the autism spectrum disorders with particular interests in late onset autism and perception of biological motion.

Kyle Williams, M.D. (entered 2007): Kyle is originally from Minneapolis and grew up in Minnesota. He graduated from Carleton College and then spent two years at NIMH working with Drs. Daniel Weinberger and Dennis Murphy before entering the University of Minnesota Medical School. During medical school, Kyle received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Training Fellowship for Medical Students to study the pathogenesis of Sydenham’s chorea and Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections (PANDAS). This is an area of research he hopes to pursue while at Yale. He is currently working with Dr. Leckman on a paper describing the results of a two–year prospective longitudinal study. Early this year Kyle was accepted into Yale’s Investigative Medicine PhD program for physician–scientists designed specifically for residents and fellows in training at the Yale–New Haven Medical Center.