Division updates
Published on Tuesday, July 6, 2021
Medical Student Education Office
Dr. Osman Athar has done an outstanding job completing this clerkship year and is planning updates for AY2021-22 that include an on-call requirement, adding a formal evaluation of neurological exam skills, and changes in outpatient experience for students.
Ian Paul was named the Evers Society M2 All-Star Professor for the second year in a row. Dr. Paul was also selected by the School of Medicine to be a member of the inaugural cohort of six faculty in the Education Research Grant Academy for the coming year. He will be developing a grant proposal for curriculum development aimed at increasing medical student incorporation of mental health, substance use, and suicide risk screening in primary care practice.
Barbara Daniels continues to make the MSE Office hum!
Adult Division
The adult division is sad to say goodbye to Katherine Raines who will be retiring June 30, 2021. She has served UMMC and the Department of Psychiatry for seven productive years. She has shown great leadership to the nurse practitioner group and provided excellent clinical care to her patients. We wish her well in her retirement.
We are pleased to see faculty receive awards at our Graduation Ceremony. Dr. Sara Gleason won the collaboration award and Dr. Osman Athar won the clinical teaching award. Also Barbara Jones won the collaboration award.
In Riverchase news, we will be going to in person visits only starting September 1, 2021. Lindsay Jay and Leslie Hobbs have been leading that transition. Pharmacogenomics is now approved by UMMC for use at Riverchase. The company approved for our use is called Genesight. I am working with the company to get the supplies and logistics needed to roll this out soon. Also I have been working with Dr. Vallender on a project to develop a blood biobank for patient's with Bipolar disorder. This project is in collaboration with Mayo. We have the funding and will be hiring soon to get this project underway. Finally note that July 1 our didactics will move to Wednesday afternoon which means we will have full operations on Friday afternoons at Riverchase.
Division of Neurobiology and Behavior Research
After 27 years of service, Grazyna Rajkowska, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, will retire on July 31, 2021. In 1994, Dr. Rajkowska was appointed Assistant Professor at UMMC, rising through the ranks to Professor, with tenure, in 2002. A native of Warsaw, Poland, Dr. Rajkowska, earned her B.S. degree from the University of St. Petersburg, in the former Soviet Union. She graduated with distinction, being awarded the Red Diploma as the top student at the university. Dr. Rajkowska went on to earn her Ph.D. in Neuroscience and serve as a Postdoctoral Associate at the Polish Academy of Science. While in Warsaw, because of her masterful command of the Russian language, she was often requested to serve as a translator at high-level Warsaw Pact meetings of the Soviet Union with its satellite countries. Grazyna passed along vital information to the underground Solidarity Trade Union in its struggle to be officially recognized and to advocate for democracy rather than communism. In 1989, Dr. Rajkowska began a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Patricia Goldman-Rakic, a leading researcher in biological psychiatry at Yale University. While at Yale University, she authored the first studies to identify unique cell pathology in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and Huntington’s disease. Grazyna’s work revealed that these three diseases are characterized by unique morphological pathology despite having many similar cognitive symptoms. After coming to UMMC, her groundbreaking 1999 publication in Biological Psychiatry, using her own cytoarchitectonic map and the pioneering technique of 3-dimensional cell counting, was the first to establish glial cell pathology and decreased cortical thickness in postmortem brain tissue of subjects with major depressive disorder. More than 1700 citations of this paper attest to its lasting impact on the field. In 107 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 8 book chapters, Grazyna has identified unique pathology in neurons, glial cell types, and vasculature in the human brain in psychiatric disorders. She has given 59 invited presentations at national or international scientific meetings or universities. Grazyna was funded for 22 years serving as principal investigator on 13 grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health and two research foundations. She has taught medical students, psychiatry residents and graduate students in the Program in Neuroscience and mentored research projects for junior faculty, international masters students, and medical and undergraduate students.
This summer, DNBR also says goodbye to:
Dr. Jemma Cook – We wish Jemma the best of luck as she embarks on her new Assistant Professor position at West Virginia University Institute of Technology! (Celebrating Jemma in photo on right!)
Dr. Roya Moulana – We thank Roya for her efforts across all three missions of the University and support her in her new role as Scientist-Educator.
Dr. Austin Zamarripa – We wish him good luck as he starts his postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University!
Psychology Residency
The Psychology Residency Program has had another productive 2020-2021 training year in both clinical and research areas. Over the course of the training year, our psychology residents have provided over 3,100 hours of clinical service to hundreds of Mississippians. In addition, faculty in our program have provided over 1,200 hours of supervision to psychology residents throughout the training year. In terms of research, our psychology residents have worked on over 16 research manuscripts with program faculty members during the year, 9 of which the psychology resident is serving as the first-author.
Thank you to our entire program faculty for their tireless efforts providing clinical and research mentoring to our trainees. Congratulations to Dr. Dustin Sarver for winning the program’s Faculty Research Mentor Award and to Dr. Julie Schumacher for winning the Faculty Clinical Mentor Award.
Faculty and staff in the program would like to congratulate our recent graduating psychology residents. We wish them the best of luck in their post-doctoral fellowship positions and in their future careers and welcome them into our illustrious group of program alumni (AKA the Mississippi Mafia).
The program will be providing CE credits for our Research Rounds and Evidence Based Psychotherapy workshop series. More details will be announced in the coming weeks about these events hosted by the program. We are also excited to provide CME/CE credits during the Psychiatry and Psychology Joint Case Conference series as part of the departments Curriculum 2025. The schedule for the case conference will also be distributed in the coming weeks.
Graduating Class of Psychology Residents (2020-2021)
Adult Track
Kerry Kinney, PhD - Psychology Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, MS
Kevin McKenna, PhD - Postdoctoral Fellow, Continuum of Care for Addictive Behaviors, Trauma, and Co-occurring Disorders, Palo Alto VA
Aishwarya Rajesh, PhD - Postdoctoral Research Associate, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington State University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO
Child Track
Kimberly Barajas, PhD - Child Psychology Postdoctoral Fellow, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Seattle, WA
Kara Nayfa, PhD - Postdoctoral Fellow in Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health, BeHIP Grant, Department of Pediatrics, University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, MS
Francesca Penner, PhD - T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Research Training Program in Childhood Neuropsychiatric Disorders, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT
Thank you to Drs. Kinney and Penner for serving as our co-Chief Residents during the past training year, as well as for their valuable service and contribution to the training program. Congratulations to Francesca Penner for winning the program’s Excellence in Research Award and Kerry Kinney for receiving the program’s Excellence in Clinical Award. Kerry Kinney was also selected by program faculty and residents to receive the Resident Outstanding Contribution to the Training Program Award. Also thank you to Kristy Herbison, program administrator, for all of her wonderful support and assistance throughout the training year.
Psychology Division
A Season of Coming and Going
Coming - In the culmination of several months of effort that included the indispensable work of Barbara Jones and Mandi Ford, the Division of Psychology welcomed its newest faculty member on July 1. Andrew Voluse, Ph.D. is an associate professor in our Division with a secondary appointment in the Department of Medicine, where he will become Principal Investigator for the SAMHSA grant that funds the Helping HAND program. Dr. Voluse’s clinical expertise lies in the areas of addictive disorders and trauma. He will have clinics focused on these issues on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at River Chase and he will provide brief inpatient evaluative and therapy services as an extension of our Consultation/Liaison Team two half days a week.
Dr. Voluse hails from Ohio and earned his undergraduate degree in Psychology from Northeastern University. He obtained his Masters from Nova Southeastern and returned to Boston for internship prior to earning his Ph.D. from Nova Southeastern. He remained in Boston following internship to complete a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Boston VA Healthcare System.
Dr. Voluse comes to us from the G. V. (Sonny) Montgomery VAMC where he managed their residential substance abuse treatment program, provided clinical care, trained psychology interns and fellows, and conducted research. Dr. Ladner, Dr. Gleason, and I all worked with Dr. Voluse when we were at the VA and are thrilled that he has joined our Department. If you would like information about philately or tutoring in juggling, you might want to contact Dr. Voluse!
Going – On the other hand, we feel the loss of Christi Cook, who retired after 27 years of service to the Department of Psychiatry and Division of Psychology. Christi’s job title was “Psychometrist,” a role at which she excelled, but she did so much more! For example, Christi was actively involved in maintaining a variety of important spreadsheets related to our predoctoral internship program and she managed the complicated and mostly thankless task of keeping up with the unique requirements of all our psychometric testing vendors. In recent months she played a crucial role in evaluating candidates to fill her position. Christi was our go-to source of institutional knowledge. We will find a competent Psychometrist to meet our needs, but we will never find someone who can fill Christi Cook’s shoes!