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Will provide mentorship opportunities to advance my professional development
Will expand opportunities for investigation and dissemination of findings
Pivotal for my goal of improving patient care and becoming a leader in C-L Psychiatry
Will provide critical mentorship, advanced training, and networking opportunities
Will gain skills to advocate for healthcare’s sickest who do not have a voice to speak for themselves
Will help me challenge biases and promote more equitable care
A class of six has been selected for the Academy’s 2024-2025 William Webb Fellowship Program. They are:
Ryan Serdenes, DO
Dr. Serdenes is a first-year psychiatry attending at Temple University Hospital, Philadelphia. He completed his C-L Psychiatry fellowship at Johns Hopkins in the 2023-2024 academic year.
Dr. Serdenes cares for patients on the general hospital C-L Psychiatry service and also serves as the psychiatry residency’s associate program director.
He is passionate about C-L Psychiatry education: “I hope to contribute significantly to the C-L Psychiatry education programs at Temple and eventually navigate building a C-L Psychiatry fellowship for our department.”
The Webb Fellowship Program, he says, will provide mentorship opportunities to advance his professional development and establish a career as an academic C-L psychiatrist.
Dr. Serdenes has published in the Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry (JACLP) on the association of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) severity with both anxiety and depression. Currently, he is expanding on this work using a large national database.
“My goal is to grow the knowledge base regarding the psychiatric care of COPD patients by exploring the relationships between COPD severity, clinically significant anxiety and depression symptoms, psychotropic medications, and pulmonary outcome measures.”
Brittany Goldstein, MD
“The Webb Fellowship Program will propel me towards my goal of becoming an academic C-L psychiatrist with robust clinical, scholarly, and educational experiences,” says Dr. Goldstein.
“I have long been interested in using behavioral interventions to help patients with medical comorbidities. This interest has developed in clinical settings (e.g., chronic pain, chronic fatigue) and research settings (grants for studies in postural tachycardia syndrome and inpatient C-L service).
“The Webb Fellowship will expand future opportunities for investigation and dissemination of findings. As a C-L fellow, I will greatly benefit from the networking opportunities that will provide scaffolding for future leadership roles within the Academy and academia along with research mentorship.
“Building a broader network within C-L Psychiatry will bolster the regional and national recognition necessary to advance in an academic career. Within academia, I hope one day to serve as a medical school psychiatry clerkship director. I have greatly valued the role of mentors in my personal and professional development. This program will not only open multiple sources of mentorship, it will also provide me with unique experiences that afford me the ability to mentor younger trainees.”
Dr. Goldstein has developed a trial that will investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of an adjunctive mindfulness intervention for managing distress in patients seen by the C-L service at University of Washington Medical Center. She received the Clinician Scientist Training Program Trainee Research Award from the university providing financial support (more than $16,000) to implement the study.
Gregg Robbins-Welty, MD, MS, HEC-C
Dr. Robbins-Welty is committed to a career that integrates C-L Psychiatry, palliative medicine, and clinical ethics. “The patients and clinical cases that fall in the gray area between these specialties drive my passion for this field.”
As 2002 medicine-psychiatry chief resident and 2023 chief resident for C-L Psychiatry at Duke University, he helped design and implement a hospital-wide behavioral emergency response team and served as the sole psychiatrist on the hospital ethics committee.
Now at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Robbins-Welty says the Webb Fellowship will provide critical mentorship, advanced training, and networking opportunities.
“Engaging with thought leaders will help me refine my approach to integrated psychiatric care in medical settings and develop innovative educational programs. This fellowship is pivotal for my goal of improving patient care and becoming a leader in C-L Psychiatry, ultimately advancing my career by fostering the skills and connections necessary for impactful research and clinical practice.”
Dr. Robbins-Welty aims to present a retrospective clinical review at CLP 2025 which he has just completed. It examines the end-of-life experiences of insanity acquitees in state psychiatric hospitals. “Our findings indicate a significant unmet need for advanced palliative support of patients with severe mental illness who have also experienced prolonged psychiatric-legal hospitalizations,“ he says.
Elisabeth Dietrich, MD
At Virginia Commonwealth University Health System’s Department of Psychiatry, Dr. Dietrich conducted a cohort study during her residency to evaluate the clinical, safety, and financial outcomes of proactive psychiatric consultation in the Medical Respiratory Intensive Care Unit. It included a qualitative survey to assess reactions of ICU providers to proactive consultation, and an assessment of trainee experiences with proactive C-L on a critical care psychiatry rotation.
Now at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, C-L Psychiatry fellow Dr. Dietrich plans to combine her interests in critical care psychiatry and health care administration by exploring the financial impact of proactive psychiatric consultation for medical intensive care unit patients with delirium.
The research will cover total costs of care, estimated direct cost savings, professional revenue increase per patient, and return on investment for the program. Secondary variables explored will include hospital length of stay, ICU length of stay, ICU readmission rate, and 30-day readmission rate.
“I am passionate about the evolution of proactive consultation, which allows opportunities to optimize quality and equity of care by initiating psychiatric intervention sooner and decreasing the impact of bias in selecting patients who receive psychiatric consultation,” says Dr. Dietrich.
“I will utilize skills gained through the Webb Fellowship Program to best advocate for healthcare’s sickest patients, who often do not have a voice to speak for themselves.”
Julia Probert, MD
Dr. Probert is a C-L Psychiatry fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her interests include delirium and psychiatry in the intensive care unit.
“I believe that C-L psychiatrists are the physicians best equipped to study, understand, and treat delirium, which is a both highly morbid and relatively poorly understood syndrome,” says Dr. Probert.
“To reduce the morbidity and the suffering in our patients, we must better understand delirium. I hope to progress the field of C-L Psychiatry by developing new insights into the neurobiological etiology of delirium, as well as its association with post-discharge symptoms of trauma.
“Collaboration with experts throughout the C-L and medical community is essential to this endeavor. I have participated in research projects across multiple institutions and have learned a great deal from these collaborations, and I am seeking to continue to do so in a more structured way. I wish to participate in an even broader and deeper network of C-L psychiatrists interested in understanding the neurobiology of delirium, and the role of psychiatrists in the intensive care unit, and the emerging world of post-ICU care.
“The Webb Fellowship Program will help me further this goal by facilitating mentorships and connection with experts in delirium from different institutions across the country.”
Shivali Patel, MD
Dr. Patel completed her C-L Psychiatry fellowship at the University of Michigan and is currently a first-year attending at Henry Ford Health.
During residency and fellowship, she noticed the prevalence of disparities and stigma towards hospitalized patients with psychiatric disorders, including those with a history of substance use. She hopes to take advantage of the mentorship and knowledge gained through the Webb Fellowship Program to take a lead role in challenging biases and promoting more equitable care for patients with complex medical conditions throughout her career.
Her immediate plans are to work on a review highlighting clinical dilemmas and practical solutions for psychiatrists evaluating individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, eating disorders, or disordered eating for transplant candidacy.
“The transplant candidacy evaluation is very nuanced and can be complex as is,” says Dr. Patel, “but the presence of specific disorders including but not limited to autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, anorexia nervosa, or bulimia nervosa can make it even more challenging, especially for adult psychiatrists who do not commonly encounter and manage such conditions.”
Dr. Patel is a member of the Academy’s Residency Education and Guidelines & Evidence-Based Medicine Subcommittees. She also served as an abstract reviewer for the 2024 annual meeting.