About Me

I am a psychiatrist and a psychological anthropologist and a Health Sciences Clinical Instructor in behavioral medicine, in the Department of Family Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. I work primarily with the Center for Behavioral & Addiction Medicine and the Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, & Treatment Services (CHIPTS).

PLEASE NOTE: My new office number is 310-794-8296 and my HIPAA-compliant e-fax is 424-652-2213. Please use these in preference to any other numbers for me. For scheduling, please contact the clinic where you see me. I supervise and teach FM residents and see both general psychiatry and dual-diagnosis patients at the UCLA Family Health Center (formerly Les Kelley Clinic) and the UCLA CARE Center.

I do NOT see patients in private practice. Ordinarily I am only able to see patients who already have a primary care provider/primary physician at UCLA. For more details, please see my clinical information.

My current research interests include social and psychological processes of sexual identity development, particularly as they relate to addiction and HIV prevention, mostly though not only among men who have sex with men (MSM). Geographically, I conduct research in Los Angeles, California, and Prague, Czech Republic, and in both Czech and Anglophone portions of the internet.

Training & Education

My undergraduate work at Harvard in History and Literature focused on the social history of medieval Europe (particularly Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia). I also developed an interest in eating disorders, culminating in a thesis on the representation and regulation of the body in the writings of the Venerable Bede.

I participated in the joint MD-PhD program (MSTP) at University of California, San Diego, with a PhD in psychological anthropology. My MA thesis reviewed psychosocial factors in eating disorders cross-culturally and historically. My dissertation then examined alcoholism, depression, and processes of sexual identity development in the post-communist Czech Republic.
During the first two years of fieldwork, I attended the Czech Studies Program at Univerzita Karlova. I have lived, studied, and done fieldwork in Prague for some four years since 1999.

From 2005-2007, I was a post-doctoral fellow in the Center on Aging at NORC and in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, working through data from my dissertation and learning new research and analytical methods. In 2011, I completed my residency in psychiatry at UCLA - Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior (UCLA-NPI) and the Greater Los Angeles VA. In 2013 I completed a research fellowship in addiction medicine in primary care and obtained board certification in addiction medicine from ABAM. My clinical work focuses on addiction medicine, HIV psychiatry, affective disorders, and personality disorders.

Further information on my research interests is available at academia.edu.