Resident Physician
Stanford Health Care
Avital Fischer, MD, PHD is a resident psychiatrist at Stanford Health Care. She completed her undergraduate education at MIT where she studied biology and brain and cognitive sciences. She was elected to become a Phi Beta Kappa member for her outstanding academic achievement. While at MIT, she worked in the lab of Dr. Robert Langer on siRNA targeted nanoparticles for chemotherapeutic delivery to cancer cells. She was admitted to the Medical Scientist Training Program at UC-Irvine where she completed her MD-PhD. She completed her PhD in the department of epidemiology under the supervision of Dr. Anton-Culver. Her thesis focused on life events and breast cancer in the Orange County cancer registry. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Technion -Israel Institute of Technology where she evaluated long term mortality among women with breast cancer who were also treated with SSRI medication. Dr. Fischer is currently in her 3rd year of the research track residency at Stanford University in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department. She is working with Dr. Alan Schatzberg and Dr. Mickey Trockel on predictors of loneliness and isolation in older women in the Women's Health Initiative as well as evaluating factors contributing to suicidal ideation in physicians. She plans to continue her work on physicians health toward understanding factors contributing to workplace wellness in residency while specifically evaluating differences in women vs. men physicians and their experience of loneliness. She hopes to use her findings to develop an intervention to enhance wellbeing during residency training.
