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.
Katie Aafjes-van Doorn, D.Clin.Psy., received her master’s degree in clinical psychology and psychological research and completed her doctoral training at the University of Oxford. She received clinical psychoanalytic training at Access Institute and currently works as postdoctoral research fellow at the Derner Institute for Psychological Services at Adelphi University. She will join the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology faculty at Yeshiva University this fall. Her interests are in evidence-based psychodynamic psychotherapy and its potential moderators and mediators of change. She has written several empirical papers on the process and outcome of experiential dynamic therapy and co-authored an introductory book on clinical psychology and chapters on process-outcome research. She hopes to contribute to the “evidence base” of psychodynamic therapy by operationalizing psychoanalytic concepts such as defenses, affect experiencing, countertransference and reflective functioning.
Aparna Atluru, M.D., is a chief fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University. She holds degrees in journalism and screenwriting/radio-TV-film and has written for popular publications including the Huffington Post and the Hindu, India’s largest English language newspaper. She has held fellowships with the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association and the American College of Psychiatrists. Previously, as a resident in the clinician-educator track at the University of Texas Southwestern, she conceptualized an organizational psychiatry curriculum to extend psychiatric knowledge and skills from the clinical setting to professional individuals, teams and organizations. She is particularly interested in the application of existential theory, adult attachment theory and philosophy of psychiatry to work with adolescents and young adults.
Harold Braswell, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of health care ethics at St. Louis University. His research addresses contemporary problems in U.S. bioethics, with a particular focus on end of life decision-making. His approach is interdisciplinary, integrating bioethics with the history of medicine, medical anthropology and disability studies. He is currently finishing a book entitled A Dying Family: U.S. Hospice Care and the Crisis of Freedom at the End of Life (under contract at Johns Hopkins University Press). A Dying Family argues for the need for civil rights for the dying in America. He completed two years of psychoanalytic training at Emory University and has written articles for publications such as Social Science and Medicine, The American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience and Hypatia.
Jorien Campbell, M.D., is a first-year fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University. She earned her B.A. from University of Wisconsin-Madison and served as a Peace Corps community health educator in Boca de Sábalos, Nicaragua. She obtained her M.D. at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. During medical school, she interned at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and completed a year as a Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellow in La Romana, Dominican Republic. Most recently, she finished her adult psychiatry residency training at University of California, San Francisco with an area of distinction in cultural psychiatry. Her areas of interest include forensic psychiatry, school-based mental health services and providing psychotherapy to underserved communities.
Bernadine Han, M.D., M.S., is a fellow in the addiction psychiatry program at NYU. She completed general psychiatry residency at the Payne Whitney Clinic at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medicine. She obtained her M.D. from the UC-Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, where her master’s thesis focused on visual public health media in India promoting family planning and women’s rights. She graduated from Harvard College and spent the years before medical school working in conservation and leading wilderness trips for teenagers. Her clinical and academic interests focus on substance use disorders and correctional psychiatry, the development of professional identity in medical students and residents, the tensions of stigma and ethics in countertransference, “difficult patients,” and transference-focused and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Marta Herschkopf, M.D., M.St., is a psychiatrist on the consultation service at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. She majored in religious studies at Yale University and subsequently earned a master’s degree in theology from the University of Oxford, with a dissertation exploring psychotherapeutic approaches to biblical interpretation. After attending Harvard Medical School, she completed psychiatry residency at New York University, and a psychosomatic medicine fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is also a graduate of the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics fellowship. Her interests include ethical and psychodynamic aspects of consultation psychiatry, the intersection of medicine and religion/spirituality, and medical education.
Patrick Hunnicutt, L.C.S.W., is a fellow at the Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) Program for Psychotherapy. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and completed his master’s at the Smith School for Social Work. After graduating with his B.A., Hunnicutt spent three years in San Francisco working at a community mental health agency serving foster and probation youth. Currently, he is participating in qualitative research studying patient narratives of the most salient treatment factors of psychodynamic psychotherapy. His interests include psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy and treatment of adults with trauma histories. He hopes to practice in a community health organization with a part-time private practice and to act as an advocate to increase availability of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy to marginalized populations.
Sheril Kalarithara, M.D., is a psychiatrist at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. She completed her residency training at Emory University, where she was chief resident of psychiatry at Emory University Hospital. She received her M.D. from the University at Buffalo. Prior to medical school, she graduated from Stony Brook University with a B.S. in biology and B.A. in psychology with a minor in English. She has completed the four-year core curriculum at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute and has remained involved with teaching and community events. She is a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and practices in the outpatient clinic at Grady Memorial, a large community hospital, and practices women’s mental health at the VA Medical Center. She is very involved in residency and medical student education, in particular around psychotherapy education and training.
Kristopher A. Kast, M.D., is a third-year psychiatry resident at the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude with majors in biological sciences and philosophy from Notre Dame, then graduated from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. At Weill Cornell, Kast received the Benjamin Rush Fellowship in the History of Psychiatry and is pursuing his interest in the history of the clinical interview. He has also published and submitted manuscripts and presentations in reproductive, consultation and addiction psychiatry. Further interests include integrating psychodynamic and other psychotherapeutic approaches to co-morbid addiction and personality disorders.
Peter Loper, Jr., M.D, F.A.A.P., is a first-year child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at the University of South Carolina/Palmetto Health. He attended Kenyon College prior to transferring to the University of South Carolina where he completed his B.A. in English and earned his M.D. In medical school he recognized his passion for caring for children while serving on the Executive Committee for Medical Students for Burn Care International, a medical student run nonprofit organization supporting pediatric burn care in developing countries. Prior to fellowship, he completed residencies in general pediatrics and general psychiatry. He has continued to work part time as a pediatrician during the course of his psychiatry training. He hopes to explore the utility of fundamental psychoanalytic principles in the primary care setting.
Tua-Elisabeth Mulligan, M.D., is a clinical fellow in the psychosomatic medicine program at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She attended medical school at Emory University School of Medicine. She trained in adult psychiatry at UCSF and received additional training in the UCSF Health Systems & Leadership Pathway program. She was a class representative to the Resident’s Association as a PGY-2 and PGY-3 and the chief resident of outpatient psychiatry as a PGY-4. She served on numerous committees for program development and education from the residency training program level to the university level. She was an American Psychiatric Association Leadership Fellow from 2015-2017. She received several awards throughout her residency for her contributions in medical education and leadership.
Nicole Nehrig, Ph.D., is a staff psychologist at the VA New York Harbor Healthcare System, Manhattan Campus and a clinical instructor at New York University’s medical school. She provides psychotherapy to veterans in person and via telemental health to underserved areas using short- and long-term psychodynamic models. Her research interests include multi-method approaches to personality assessment and psychotherapy outcomes for evidence-based psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral therapies. The long-term goal of her psychotherapy research is to determine the optimal treatment for each patient and expand the range of therapies provided in the VA system to include more psychodynamic models. She teaches and supervises predoctoral trainees in psychodynamic models and psychological assessment at the VA as well as Long Island University, Brooklyn, where she obtained her doctorate.
Elizabeth Rawson, M.D., M.H.S., is a PGY-4 and chief resident in the UCSF Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program. She earned her B.A. in cognitive science from Yale University, where her honors included induction into Phi Beta Kappa. She then completed the Johns Hopkins Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program prior to returning to Yale to earn her M.D. and Master of Health Science. Her master’s research examined psychological factors that impede early identification in pediatric primary care of children experiencing traumatic stress. She is in her second year of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program at the SF Center for Psychoanalysis and is also receiving training on infant-parent psychotherapy in the UCSF Infant-Parent Program. Her professional interests include psychoanalytic approaches to childhood trauma, incorporation of psychoanalytic thought into medical education, and resident psychotherapy curriculum development.
Hammam Yahya, M.D., received his M.D. from the University of Jordan in 2010. He is currently a psychiatry chief resident at the University of New Mexico. Prior to beginning his residency, he served Doctors Without Borders in Amman, Jordan. He is interested in exploring how the abuse of psychiatry, which is well-recognized in authoritarian and fascist regimes, can happen in liberal societies. Additionally, he has recently published a book of poetry, Hawaff (Edges).
A. Ning Zhou, M.D., is a PGY-4 and chief resident of education at the University of California, San Francisco Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program. He received his B.S. in neuroscience from the University of Southern California and completed medical school at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He traveled to Hyderabad, India, to study social networks and HIV prevention in men who have sex with men (MSM). In addition, he studied depression in medical students in China and helped culturally adapt an internet-based depression prevention intervention for adolescents in Hong Kong. In residency, he is pursuing Areas of Distinction in LGBT mental health and cultural psychiatry. He is currently enrolled in the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.