Summer Research Institutional Membership Program

A generous philanthropic gift from Culture to Culture to the Stanford Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences is supporting one faculty member each year to attend the Summer Research Institute at Oxford University, situated at the Harris Manchester College.

2019 Recipient - Manpreet K. Singh, MD MS

2019 recipient - Manpreet K. Singh, MD MS
Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Director, Stanford Pediatric Mood Disorders Program
Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine,

Stanford Maternal Child Health Research Institute, Stanford University

The following is an email excerpt from Dr. Singh:

Thank you for your support of my participation in the Harris Manchester College (HMC) Summer Research Institute at Oxford two weeks ago. The week brought inspiration and enrichment that has sparked many new directions for research and for collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford and with scholars from around the world.

At HMC, I met a global community of scholars from diverse fields bringing with them rich experiences and perspectives about humanity. The College arranged for us to have a historical tour of the campus, provided us with valuable access to the libraries, gave us an opportunity to view rare manuscripts, and arranged a very interesting high level discussion about world politics with Lord John Alderdice.

During my time, I was also able to meet with eight incredible faculty from the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford (including Drs John Geddes, Catherine Harmer, Philip Cowen, Michael Browning, Paul Harrison, Andrea Cipriani, Kia Nobre, and John Stein). I made several visits to the Department; the faculty and I had rich scientific discussions, commiserated about the challenges and opportunities associated with treating serious mood disorders, brainstormed opportunities for collaboration, and discussed strategies for leadership development. Dr. Cipriani and I started the process of drafting a manuscript together on furthering the topic of dosing psychotropic medications. We will attempt to take an ambitious data driven approach using advanced metaanalytic techniques to providing clinical guidance on pace of dosing where there is a significant gap in our field. I hope we can continue to build on this most valuable friendship between our departments.

I'm grateful to Drs Alan Louie and Laura Roberts for their ever-thoughtful support of my work, and for recommending me for this incredible opportunity. The trip was so rejuvenating that I may take HMC up on their offer to return for another week on the chance that another window in my schedule opens up. Indeed, this experience would not have been possible without your generous gift and the inspiring mission of the Culture to Culture Foundation.

With tremendous gratitude,

Manpreet

2018 Recipient - Alan Louie, MD

2018 recipient - Alan K. Louie, MD
Professor, Associate Chair -- Director of Education
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Stanford University School of Medicine

The inaugural recipient in July, 2018 was Alan Louie, MD, who is Professor and Associate Chair-Education in the department at Stanford. He spent one week at Oxford and writes, “I had a marvelous and productive time at Oxford along with 30 other Visiting Scholars. I was also able to meet with some 20 faculty members of the Oxford Psychiatry Department to plan out various Stanford-Oxford collaborations. We will be pursuing these over the course of this year. In the evening, I had a wonderful chance to wander around the historical streets and buildings of the town and University.”

Update: The following is an excerpt of an email Dr. Louie wrote in July 2019

One year ago, I landed in Oxford in the wonderfully appointed surroundings of the College, for an event-filled stay (as described in my August 2018 email, below) that kicked-off a number of fruitful events over the past year.

My focus has been on developing research and educational exchanges between the Oxford and Stanford psychiatry departments, using the HMC Summer Research Institute as a foundation and jumping off point for collaborations. My stay in July 2018 included meeting with some 20 members of the Oxford psychiatry department, representing a wide array of areas in the field, which gave me a sense of the marvelous range and depth of possible synergies between the departments. Of particular note, is the great strength of Oxford in informatics (e.g., Math Institute housing 70 mathematicians, Alan Turing Institute, new Informatics building for 500 informaticists) that complements the mental health technology and neuroimaging prowess of our department.

In the past year, we hosted Dr. John Geddes, Head of Oxford’s psychiatry department and expert in bipolar disorder, at Stanford as a visiting professor to give a psychiatry grand rounds presentation and to meet with some 20 members of our department. More recently, we also hosted Dr. Mina Fazel from Oxford, who gave a psychiatry grand rounds at Stanford and met with members of our Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division. She is an expert in the mental health of immigrant (e.g., from Syria) children in the UK and is engaging in collaborative work with faculty in our department.

As the Director of Education for our department, I have been most interested in educational exchanges involving medical students, psychiatry residents, and junior faculty and have worked with the directors of medical student and of resident education at Oxford. Many of our department members would benefit from educational exchanges to learn about mental healthcare under the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, the large medical databases maintained by the NHS, global mental health, and/or clinical approaches more common in England. They would then come back and teach all of us about what they observed and discovered. We have not yet been able to send a trainee over to Oxford for a rotation, but are still working on the logistical barriers. My visit to Oxford gave me time to further explore the teaching of artificial intelligence (specifically machine learning) and computational neuroscience to psychiatrists. My study of this over the past year became part of a speech I gave at the American Psychiatric Association (May 2019) on “Why Artificial Intelligence and Computation Neuroscience Should be Taught to Psychiatry Residents,” for which I received the Vestermark Psychiatry Educator Award.

I was involved, with Dr. Laura Roberts, in the search for the second visiting professor for the HMC Summer Research Institute in 2019. The second, Dr. Manpreet Singh, is an outstanding member of our faculty who is an international expert in mood disorders (e.g., depression, bipolar disorder) in child and adolescents.