Director of Psychology in Transplant Psychiatry
Montefiore Medical Center
I am the Director of Psychology in Transplant Psychiatry at the Montefiore Einstein Center for Transplantation and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I previously served as a Member at Large of the Psychosocial and Ethics Community of Practice (PSECOP) of the American Society of Transplantation (AST) from 2021-2023. During my tenure on the PSECOP executive committee, my primary responsibility was to organize and draft public policy responses related to psychosocial and ethics, particularly equity issues. My research is focused on evaluation and treatment of substance use disorders within liver, kidney, and pancreas transplantation and the intersection of these disorders and equity issues. In December 2023, I co-chaired the American Society of Transplantation Controversies in Transplantation Conference on Adjusting the Paradigm on Cannabis use in Solid Organ Transplantation on behalf of the Psychosocial and Ethics Community of Practice and presented on the equity considerations involved in policies related to transplant. Locally, I am the chair of a multidisciplinary taskforce at my center for optimally assessing and treating alcohol use disorders, which my team and I built as a foundation for future research projects investigating and creating best-practice guidelines to manage alcohol use disorder in liver transplantation. The proposed research study is to evaluate the effectiveness of this comprehensive, multidisciplinary program. At the June 2023 American Transplantation Congress, I presented an IMACT talk on engaging patients in alcohol treatment, in which I presented the preliminary outcomes from our program.
