The American Psychoanalytic Association Fellowship Program is designed to offer additional knowledge of psychoanalysis to outstanding early-career mental health professionals and academics, the future leaders and educators in their fields. The 15 individuals who are selected as fellows each year have their expenses paid to attend the national meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association during the fellowship year and to participate in other educational activities. The biographies below introduce this year's excellent group of fellows. We enthusiastically welcome them to APsaA.
Asli Baykal, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., is a first-year clinical fellow at Cambridge Health Alliance, Program for Psychotherapy. Previously she was an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Richmond, where she taught classes on Muslim societies in the Middle East and Central Asia. She received a B.A. in international relations and an M.A. in gender studies from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and she received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Boston University. Baykal conducted postdoctoral work at Emory University. She did extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where she explored Uzbek society in the wake of the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Current interests include the role of culture in psychodynamic psychotherapy, particularly the alternative paths taken in the repression, expression and interpretation of emotion.
Carolyn Broudy, M.D., has a private practice in Northampton, MA, is an instructor at Smith College School of Social Work, and is the Baystate Medical Center consulting psychiatrist for the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Project for Moms, the first statewide program providing training and consultations for clinicians working with pregnant and postpartum women. She received her M.D. and an M.S. in immunology from NYU Medical School and completed her residency and a fellowship in women's mental health at Columbia University School of Medicine. She is currently writing about the transition to parenthood.
Katie Lewis, Ph.D., recently completed a clinical faculty fellowship at Albany Medical College and currently serves as a research affiliate at the Austen Riggs Center. She received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus and completed her predoctoral internship at the Albany Psychology Internship Consortium. She maintains clinical interests in trauma and chronic character pathology, and she is involved in education and training on performance-based measures of personality functioning. Her research primarily centers on the role of personality organization in risk for suicidal behavior. As a graduate student, she served on multiple professional state and national committees, including a three-year term as the graduate student representative of the Ethics Committee of A.P.A.'s Division 39.
Lee Lovejoy, M.D., Ph.D., is a resident in the adult psychiatric program at Columbia University and also a Leon Levy Neuroscience Research Fellow. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in biomedical engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he developed computational methods for analyzing chaotic dynamics in dopaminergic neurons. He earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at U.C. San Diego where he studied the subcortical control of visual processing and attention in awake behaving primates. At Columbia he developed an interest in the mechanisms by which neural circuitry associated with affective processing influences cognitive processing and selects which information is incorporated into decisions. Lovejoy hopes to use psychoanalytic insights to relate neural mechanisms by which affect regulates cognitive processing to the generation of conscious awareness.
Christine Maksimowicz, Ph.D., received her doctoral degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she studied English with a specialization in 20th and 21st century
North American literature. Her work is situated at the intersection of gender studies, trauma theory, psychoanalysis and the critical analysis of social class. Her research seeks to widen conceptions of what constitutes trauma, identifying embedded trauma within ordinary classed realities and relations. Maksimowicz is presently working on a manuscript entitled “Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering the Self in the Working Class Escape Narrative,” a project that examines how fiction reveals unrecognized dimensions of classed injury and explores how trauma shapes narrative construction. She is a past recipient of the Joseph L. Boscov Fellowship and was recently awarded the Julius Silberger Essay Prize.
Karen J. Mu, M.D., Ph.D., recently completed her child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at U.C. San Francisco. She grew up in Japan, the U.S., Canada, Korea, Belgium and Cote d'Ivoire; this upbringing cultivated an early interest in culture and behavior, which set her on a roundabout path towards a career in psychiatry. Mu began playing piano at age three and continued her studies through graduate school. She completed her medical degree and Ph.D. in comparative pathology at U.C. Davis where she studied chloride channels in the inner ear. During her post-graduate training at U.C. San Francisco, she was the co-primary investigator on a study examining the relationship between psychiatric co-morbidities, shame and BMI in adolescents. Her current professional interests are in integrated care, parent and child therapy, and eating disorders.
Petra Pilgrim, M.D., is a PGY-4 and chief resident in psychiatry at the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine. She was raised in Saudi Arabia which provides her an additional cultural perspective when practicing psychiatry. She is a first-year fellow in the psychodynamic psychotherapy training program at the Houston Center for Psychoanalytic Studies. Pilgrim graduated from Rice University with a double major in English and women's and gender studies and completed her medical education at Texas Tech University School of Medicine. Her interests include psychoanalysis, long-term process groups and women's mental health. Pilgrim was recently distinguished with a Training Residents in Psychiatry Scholarship Program (TRIPS) Award for her commitment to research.
Sana Sheikh, Ph.D., completed her doctoral studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in social psychology before taking an assistant professor of psychology position at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She left St. Andrews to pursue respecialization in clinical psychology at Suffolk University. She is currently a clinical fellow at the Bipolar Clinic and Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research focus concerns the nature of emotions as they arise in social and cultural contexts, particularly self-conscious emotions such as shame and guilt. Her past research also includes issues around gendered morality, as well as identity formation and conflicts, among Muslim British and American youth. Sheikh was awarded Best Student Publication Award in 2010 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Nathaniel Sowa, M.D., Ph.D., is a PGY-4 resident in general adult psychiatry at U.N.C. Chapel Hill. After graduating summa cum laude in biology from Albion College, he spent a year at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD, completing a research fellowship. He then completed his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at U.N.C. Chapel Hill, receiving his Ph.D. in neurobiology. His Ph.D. dissertation on the neurobiology of pain received the national ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. As a resident at U.N.C. Chapel Hill, he has received the Outstanding Resident Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. He conducts research in delivery of mental health care to resource-poor populations, as well as integrated care approaches to the treatment of mental health in primary care settings.
Amy Vyas, M.D., is a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine. She also attended the general psychiatry residency at Baylor, where she joined the clinician educator track and received the Stacia Micheletto Scholarship and the House Officer Teaching Excellence Award. She completed her M.D. at Tufts University School of Medicine. Prior to medical school she earned a B.A. in English at Duke University, where she focused on creative
writing and literary theory. In addition to psychodynamic psychotherapy, her clinical and academic interests include humanism in medical education, somatoform disorders, supporting effective interdepartmental discourse in medicine, intergenerational effects of post-traumatic stress, and practical applications of fairy tales and literature in therapy.
Rachel Weitzenkorn, Ph.D., is a candidate in the women's, gender and sexuality studies department at Emory University. She is currently working on a dissertation titled “Looking at Infants: Expression and the Boundaries of Empirical Evidence.” Her dissertation explores the ways researchers conceive of evidence in theories of psychological pathology through the case of infant research, combining her background in neuroscience and ongoing training in psychoanalytic theory and method. She is particularly interested in the history of psychoanalysis within American psychiatry. She hopes to one day complete analytic training. Her interests include the history of medicine, affect theory, object relations and child psychoanalysis.
Laura Werner Larsen, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., is a clinical fellow at the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance where she sees individual patients and participates in research on the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Before becoming a clinician, she earned a master's in social sciences and a Ph.D. in social and moral philosophy from the University of Helsinki and also taught and did research on philosophy and gender studies in Finland, Germany, Italy and the U.S. at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. Werner Larsen's academic interests concentrate on the politics of gender, love and desire. Her master's thesis for Smith College School for Social Work aimed to provide a radical rereading of psychoanalytic theory on transsexual identities. Her current interests include gender and sexual identity, transcultural experiences and anxiety disorders.
Rachel Winer, M.D., is a fourth year psychiatry resident at Stanford University. She graduated from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai with distinction after completing a yearlong C.D.C. fellowship in epidemiology and public health. Prior to medical school, she graduated from Yale University with double majors in molecular biophysics and biochemistry and history of science and medicine. Working with a Native American population in Arizona sparked her interest in understanding how the mind affects health and well-being. She has since worked in New Zealand, rural India, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand. She is drawn to the intimacy of psychotherapy and patients' narratives, and she is participating in the Palo Alto Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program Fellowship Year.
Yi Yang, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge Health Alliance where she provides individual, couples and group psychotherapies. She studied psychology and law in China and received a master's in experimental psychology at Oxford, a Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Cornell and a postdoctoral respecialization in clinical psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During her internship at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, she was trained in D.B.T. for personality disorders and C.B.T. for psychosis in addition to psychodynamic psychotherapy. She also provides international community outreach and has been invited to speak about psychotherapy, mindfulness and original Buddhism. Yang has publications in psychology, literature and law. She received the A.P.A. Division 39 multicultural fellowship and the Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad by the Ministry of Education of China.
David Yuppa, M.D., is an attending psychiatrist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He serves as liaison to the Division of Adult Palliative Care at DFCI and associate of the Department of Medical Psychiatry at BWH. He completed an accelerated seven-year B.S./M.D. program, earning a B.S. in chemical biology from Stevens Institute of Technology, where he was valedictorian of the class of 2004. Yuppa's medical training and psychiatry residency were both completed through the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey Medical School with a fellowship in psychooncology and psychosomatic medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. His entire clinical practice comprises patients with advanced cancer. His interests include the application and practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in patients with life-limiting illness.