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 12 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.
Emily Asher, M.D., M.S., M.P.H., M.P.A., is a third-year psychiatry resident at Yale. She received her M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and has master’s degrees in health care administration, public health and public administration. Before medical school, she worked as a clinical program analyst at UCSF Children’s Hospital focusing on quality improvement initiatives and supporting the associate chief medical officer. She also worked for 10 years at an inner-city emergency department to improve clinical operations and support an underserved population. She has experience as a play therapist for a child with autism and counseling homeless clients at a community clinic. Her professional interests include psychodynamic psychopharmacology, organizational dynamics, psychoanalytic frames and intersubjectivity, and working with infants and children.
Jasra Ali Bhat, M.B.B.S., is a PGY4 and chief resident at Westchester Medical Center’s adult psychiatry training program. She is a graduate of University of Jammu, India. She grew up in the conflict zone of Kashmir, India, and worked with various nonprofit organizations to raise awareness about mental health in the underprivileged community. Jasra organized multiple medical camps in these areas to address addiction and women’s health issues. She also worked as a visiting research scholar at Yale’s Schizophrenia Neuropsychopharmacology Research Center and has published her work in prestigious journals. Her professional interests include cultural psychiatry, personality disorders, addiction psychiatry and teaching.
Jonah Cohen, Ph.D., is a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. He received his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University with majors in philosophy and psychology. Jonah went on to earn his doctorate at Temple University, completing his clinical internship at Columbia University Medical Center and fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. His clinical interests reside in the treatment of anxiety disorders, the integration of therapeutic modalities and the creation of novel psychotherapeutic approaches in consultation psychiatry. His research interests focus on treatment personalization and outcome within these clinical contexts and the empirical examination of psychanalytic theory. Jonah is also interested in clinician education and the intersections of philosophy and clinical science.
Angela Coombs, M.D., is a chief resident at Columbia University’s adult psychiatry residency program. She received her M.D. with research honors at Tufts University in Boston and her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Amherst College. Her interests include addressing mental health disparities facing black American populations as well as using psychodynamic concepts and therapeutic approaches to understand intergenerational trauma and how individuals navigate structural inequalities. She has helped to develop curriculum within her residency that examines various processes that lead to disparate mental health outcomes among a variety of patient populations.
Jenny Dwyer, M.D., Ph.D., is in her final fellowship year at Yale in the six-year Solnit Child, Adolescent, and Adult Integrated Residency and Research Track. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and a Ph.D. in pharmacology, where her dissertation focused on the development of neurochemical systems in adolescence and their disruption following gestational drug exposures. At Yale Jenny works clinically with children and adults, with a broad interest in how the brain and mind develop over time. She is interested in the neurobiology of experience and how early events shape developing brain circuitry and color future interactions with the world. Her current research is with adolescents with severe depressive symptoms, and she is interested in psychodynamic formulations of these cases and intensive psychotherapeutic treatment strategies.
Ahmed Fayed, M.D., is a fourth-year psychiatry resident at the Cleveland Clinic and a clinical instructor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine (CCLCM). He obtained his medical degree at the University of Alexandria, Egypt. He received a master’s degree in neuropsychiatry at the University of Ain Shams in Cairo, where his thesis focused on the mental health of refugee children. During his psychiatric residency in Cairo, Ahmed volunteered with refugees and asylum seekers in Cairo as well as in refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan. He received an excellence in teaching award from the Cleveland Clinic for exceptional achievement in teaching. He recently completed the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program at Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center. His areas of interest include psychosomatics, neuropsychoanalysis, and teaching psychoanalytic ideas to mental health trainees and medical students.
Laura Beth Kaplan, M.D., is a first-year child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Weill Cornell Medical College. She earned her A.B. in history from Harvard College and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. While completing her adult psychiatry residency at University of California, San Francisco, she served as president of the UCSF Psychiatry Resident Association and as chief resident of clinical programs, and she won numerous awards for teaching and leadership. In addition, she completed the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and a year-long program in infant-parent psychotherapy at the UCSF Infant Parent Program. Her professional interests include infant mental health, psychoanalytically informed care for resource-limited populations, and psychiatric education.
Michael Katz, M.S.W., is a graduate of the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, class of 2018. While at Silberman he participated in the National Child Trauma Stress Network’s trauma specialization program. He will receive an Honorable Mention award for the Diana Siskind Excellence in Writing Award for M.S.W. student papers at AAPCSW’s 2019 conference for a paper on the commonality between psychoanalytic theory and social work ideas. He is currently training at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. He helped found and works at Shlavim, an organization seeking to bridge the gap between Orthodox Jewish educational institutions and the world of mental health. His interests include the effects of historical trauma on communal attitudes towards abuse, cyclical psychodynamics and Karen Horney’s theory of neurosis.
Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, Psy.D., M.C.P., received her Psy.D. from George Washington University, master’s in city planning from MIT, and B.A. from Oberlin College. She completed her internship at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Boston College’s University Counseling Service. She also serves within APA’s Division for Psychoanalysis (39) as a Section IX board member (Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility) and as secretary of the Multicultural Concerns Committee. Prior to clinical training, Marianna worked as a community organizer and served as an Obama administration appointee in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Marianna’s clinical and research interests include psychodynamic treatment of childhood trauma in community mental health settings and intersections in identity among race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality.
Tuua Ruutiainen, M.D., M.B.E., is a third-year psychiatry resident at the Hospital of University of Pennsylvania. She received a B.A., master’s in bioethics, and Certificate in Clinical Ethics Mediation at the University of Pennsylvania. She completed internships with the Presidential Commission for Bioethical Issues and the World Health Organization Ethics and Health Team. Tuua attended medical school at Tulane where she developed a passion for social justice and ethical issues related to access to care. She is currently writing a bioethics paper arguing for changes in commitment laws, which would lead to greater treatment of those with severe mental illness. Tuua is interested in the intersection between psychoanalytic therapy and bioethics, including the ethical issues surrounding countertransference reactions and the role of insight-oriented therapy in increasing patient autonomy.
S. Dina Wang-Kraus, M.D., is a third-year resident in adult psychiatry at Stanford University. She earned her B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, studying cellular/molecular neuroscience and publishing in the field of neuro-oncology. She obtained her M.D. at Stanford University, School of Medicine, during which time she was awarded a year-long grant to study acculturative family distancing and help-seeking behaviors in youth suicidology in partnership with the CDC. In residency she has numerous scholarly concentrations in cultural psychiatry and resiliency and perfectionism in college-aged mental health. She leads several group therapies for medical students and women in sciences to address stigma. Her areas of interest include narrative-based therapy in end-of-life care and providing psychotherapy to underserved and immigrant communities.
Hannah Zeavin, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and received her doctorate in media, culture and communication from New York University. She is a media theorist and historian with particular expertise in the intertwined histories of communication, technology and the mind sciences, the history of psychoanalysis, and the broader medical and health humanities. Hannah is the managing editor for The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and has published articles and reviews in American Imago, Logic and The Candidate among others.