APsaA FELLOWS
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.
Azeesat Babajide, M.D., M.B.A., is currently a second-year fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at UCLA. She attended Princeton University where she majored in molecular biology and African-American studies. After college she worked as a curriculum development associate at a charter school in NYC. She attended Tufts University School of Medicine where she obtained both her M.D. and M.B.A. Babajide then completed her adult psychiatry residency training at the New York State Psychiatric Institute–Columbia University. Her interests are in systems of care, psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, education, and child and adolescent psychiatry.
Catherine Boutwell, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist at the Women’s Program at Columbia University, Department of Psychiatry. Boutwell earned her Ph.D. from The New School for Social Research in 2015, and she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University Medical Center in 2016. During graduate school, Boutwell conducted psychotherapy research at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, where she studied shifts in therapists’ narratives about the therapeutic alliance before and after psychodynamic supervision. Her current interests include psychoanalysis, psychotherapy process research, women’s health and the intersection of development across the lifespan, identity and autobiographical narrative.
Keri O. Brenner, M.D., M.P.A., is a palliative care physician and a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. She completed psychiatry residency with MGH McLean in 2015 and then the Harvard Palliative Care Fellowship in 2016. Brenner received a dual degree from Yale School of Medicine and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her medical school thesis, “Suffering Transfigured: Phenomenological Personalism in the Doctor-Patient Relationship,” received honors recognition. She was a philosophy major at the University of Notre Dame, where she later served on the University’s Board of Trustees. Brenner was first inspired to care for patients with terminal illness through her work at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in Kolkata, India. Her interests include psychodynamic issues in patients with life-limiting illness, both as a palliative care clinician and as a psychotherapist.
Miguel Caballero is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. His areas of specialization are 20th century literature and culture, particularly architecture and urban planning. His dissertation is tentatively entitled “Negation and Preservation: Buried Monuments in Iberoamerica (1928-1964),” a critique of modern monumentality based on the archival reconstruction of three interventions where iconic monuments of Mexico, Spain and Brazil were buried for different reasons. In fall 2014, he founded the Princeton Psychoanalysis Reading Group and has since organized 14 sessions. In fall 2015, Caballero co-organized the “Freud Today” conference at the Freud Museum in Vienna. He also is an HIV activist and writer, publishing weekly articles on ASS (Amor, Sexo y Serología) and HIV Equal.
Kali Cyrus, M.D., is a PGY4 and chief resident in the adult program at the Yale School of Medicine. She graduated with her B.A. in psychology and human biology from Stanford University. She then completed a master’s in public health in health policy and management at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. Afterwards, she obtained her M.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. At Yale, she has completed research on doctor-patient communication, designed innovative standardized patient scenarios to test implicit bias, and lectured on privilege, bias and racism for medical students. She has been recognized for her advocacy efforts, clinical care and educational work. She is interested in countertransference and transference stemming from the growing intersectionality of both patients’ and doctors’ individual identities.
Ksera Dyette, Psy.D., B.C.B., is a first-year fellow at Cambridge Health Alliance, Child and Adolescent Acute Services. She recently received her doctorate from Widener University’s Graduate Institute for Clinical Psychology with a board certification in biofeedback. Specializing in work with forensic populations, she maintains clinical focus on issues of sexual trauma, attachment in institutionalized children and intergenerational transmission of trauma. She is also skilled in personality assessment, spending the last three years as a teaching assistant for her program’s Rorschach course as well as participating in lectures for advanced differential diagnosis. She presented and volunteered at APsaA’s 2014 National Meeting and won the Stuart T. Hauser Memorial Research Prize for her research presentation on her dissertation work with Monisha Nayar-Akhtar, her mentor.
Christopher Flinton, M.D., is a third year resident in the psychiatry residency program at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center He received his bachelor’s degree at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. After commissioning in the United States Army, he earned his M.D. degree at the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. He won the 2016 Anne Alonso Ph.D. Memorial Award, awarded by the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training, for his submission: “First Experiences with Psychodynamics.” Flinton hopes to use psychoanalytic approaches to treat trauma-related disorders in American service members and their families.
Jennifer Huang Harris, M.D., is a PGY3 psychiatry resident who received her medical school and first two years of residency training at the University of Texas Southwestern and is finishing her residency at Cambridge Health Alliance. Her particular passion is in making complex ideas accessible and relevant through teaching and writing. As an undergraduate at Stanford University studying biology and English, she created a course on the science of cooking. During medical school and residency, she was involved in creating and teaching courses on bioethics, literature and medicine, and a course seeking to synthesize the multiple perspectives in psychiatry. She has also published papers on predicting response to trauma and moral distress. Her clinical interests lie in philosophy of psychiatry, morality and theology, trauma, and conversion disorders. She hopes to make psychoanalytic ideas accessible and relevant in medical education.
Cassie Kaufmann, Ph.D., is a staff psychologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where she works with individual patients and groups on a psychiatric inpatient unit. She is also an instructor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and maintains a private practice in Manhattan. Her multidisciplinary research incorporates psychoanalytic theory, art and literature, and gender and women’s studies. She received her doctorate from the Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University. Kaufmann’s dissertation was a study of visual creative thought that posed a critique of the devaluation of visual thinking within psychoanalytic theory. Prior to studying psychology, she received her B.A. in comparative literature from Yale University and M.S.Ed. in special education from City College.
Daniel Kimmel, M.D., Ph.D., is a fourth-year resident in psychiatry and Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellow at Columbia University. He completed his undergraduate training at Oberlin College, where he double-majored in biology and neurobiology, while studying jazz guitar and flute. After two years as a computer developer in San Francisco, he continued his training in the M.D./Ph.D. program at Stanford University, where he recorded from single neurons in awake behaving monkeys to understand how prefrontal cortex represents and routes information about economic value to make decisions. At Columbia, he developed new statistical tools for examining high-dimensional neural data, while pivoting from animal work to study in humans the relationship between affect and value in decision making. Kimmel hopes to further explore the link between psychoanalytic theory and the physical mechanisms underlying human behavior and emotion.
Emily Markley, Psy.D., is a psychologist at Craig Hospital in Colorado where she sees individuals and families as part of a spinal cord injury rehabilitation team. She recently completed her predoctoral internship and postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University where she worked with a range of patients, including those with life-limiting illnesses and college students. She earned her B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, following which she engaged in research on gender violence in Cyprus on a Fulbright grant, and on the biopsychosocial experience of neurodegenerative disease at the Cleveland Clinic. Markley earned her Psy.D. from the University of Denver with her dissertation focusing on implementing the dignity therapy intervention within a hematological oncology population. Markley’s interests include the integration of psychodynamic conceptualization and practice in behavioral medicine and end-of-life concerns.
Mayumi Pierce, M.D., is a PGY4 resident in the adult psychiatric program at the University of California, San Francisco. She is a San Francisco Bay Area native. After graduating with honors in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley, Pierce worked at a biotechnology startup in San Francisco. She then attended the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where she was co-president of their Alpha Omega Alpha chapter and involved in various programs, including the American Medical Women’s Association and the Mobile Clinic, a volunteer clinic for homeless individuals in Los Angeles. Pierce was thrilled to return home to UCSF for psychiatric residency, and her professional interests include psychodynamic psychotherapy, community mental health systems, cultural psychiatry and medical education.
Chrysa Prestia, D.M.A., L.C.S.W., is a fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy, Cambridge Health Alliance. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the Peabody Conservatory and doctorate from Stanford University, where she studied music composition, computer music and psychoacoustics. This experience at the intersection of artistic expression and neuroscience led to her study of molecular biology and research on biochemical markers of learning, memory and emotion. Seeking a more direct connection to the passions that drew her to research, she then completed a master’s degree in clinical social work and a postgraduate fellowship in psychoanalysis. Her interests concern the neurobiology of emotion and the role of creativity in the process of psychological change. In her practice, she is compelled by the construction or productive disruption of patient narratives in the service of therapeutic action.
Rachel Ross M.D., Ph.D., is an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She received her bachelor’s degree in biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University, and participated in nanobiotech research. She earned her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she studied the effects of fatty acid signaling in the hypothalamus on whole body energy metabolism. While in residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Hospital Adult Psychiatry Training Program, she began work in the lab of Bradford Lowell, M.D., Ph.D., at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, studying neurocircuitry of the hypothalamus related to metabolism. She has since expanded this study to multiple survival related drives spanning feeding to fertility to stress response pathways. She maintains a small clinical practice at MGH treating patients with anxiety and eating disorders. She hopes to use psychoanalytic insights to relate neural mechanisms of motivational drives and unconscious impulses in the setting of stress.
Lara Sheehi, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and a policy analyst with the Department of Health and Human Services in SC. She maintains a private practice and teaches at the George Washington University Professional Psychology Program and Forensic Psychology Program. She received APsaA’s Teacher’s Academy fellowship as well as the APA, Division 39 Minority Scholars Program award in 2014. Sheehi mentors in the Division 39 Minority Scholars Program, is the secretary of the Multicultural Concerns Committee and is a board member of Section IX (Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility). Her research addresses cross sections of psychoanalysis and sociopolitics, social justice, race, and her own lived experience as an Arab clinician. Sheehi’s publications include a chapter in Identities in Transition: The Growth and Development of a Multicultural Therapist (2015) as well as “Enactments of Otherness and Searching for a Third Space in the Palestine-Israel Matrix” in the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2016).