G Sean Escola, MD - CUIMC/Herbert Pardes Building of the New York State Psychiatric Institute

Dr. Leonardo graduated from Yale University and received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California at San Francisco.He completed residency training at NYSPI/Columbia University, College of Physicians & Surgeons. He completed a Research Fellowship in Anxiety, Mood and related disorders in 2006 and has been on the faculty since then. He is currently an Associate Residency training director and director of Neuroscience Education and Research training for the Department of Psychiatry residency program at Columbia.

Jeremy Veenstra-VanderWeele, MD, is the Suzanne Crosby Murphy Professor of Developmental Neuropsychiatry at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center; Director of the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at NewYork-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), and Columbia University; and Co-Director of both the NIMH T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship for Translational Research in Child Psychiatric Disorders and the Whitaker Scholar Program in Developmental Neuropsychiatry at NYSPI/Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Veenstra-VanderWeele is a child and adolescent psychiatrist who uses molecular and translational neuroscience research tools in the pursuit of new treatments for autism spectrum disorder and pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder. He trained in human molecular genetics in the laboratory of Edwin H. Cook at the University of Chicago. Following his child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship, he expanded his research experience with a postdoctoral research fellowship in molecular neuroscience with Randy Blakely and Jim Sutcliffe at Vanderbilt University. Prior to joining the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia in 2014, Dr. Veenstra-VanderWeele was director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, where he was also an associate professor and medical director for the Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorder. Dr. Veenstra-VanderWeele’s laboratory at Columbia University and NYSPI focuses on the serotonin and glutamate systems in genetic mouse models with abnormal social or repetitive/compulsive-like behavior. His clinical/translational research program at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Center for Autism and the Developing Brain studies potential treatments for autism spectrum disorder and related genetic syndromes. His long-term goal is to be able to develop novel approaches in the molecular laboratory that can then be tested in children. Dr. Veenstra-VanderWeele’s work has been recognized with multiple awards, including the 2017 Blanche Ittelson Award for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association. He is dedicated to helping train and develop the next generation of child psychiatrists and scientists who can generate an improved understanding of childhood neuropsychiatric disorders and deliver new treatments to the clinic.

Frances Rudnick Levin, MD is the Kennedy-Leavy Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University and the Chief of the Division on Substance Use Disorders at NYSPI/Columbia University. For over twenty years, she served as the Director of the Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship Program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and for the past sixteen years, she has been the PI of a T32 NIDA funded Substance Abuse Research Fellowship which has been continuously funded since 1994. Dr. Levin graduated from Cornell University Medical College and completed her psychiatric residency at the New York Hospital-Payne Whitney Clinic. Subsequently, she graduated from a 2-year combined clinical and research fellowship at the University of Maryland and the Addiction Research Center, the intramural branch of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Currently, she serves as the Medical Director of the Providers’ Clinical Support System (PCSS), a SAMHSA-supported national training and mentoring initiative focused on addressing the opioid use disorder crisis. Also, she is the Medical Director of a SAMHSA-supported State Targeted Response technical assistance grant (the Opioid Response Network) to address the national opioid epidemic. Dr. Levin, working with other senior faculty, inaugurated the university-wide Center for Healing of Opioid and Other Substance Use Disorders: Enhancing Intervention Development and Implementation (CHOSEN) in 2020 and serves as one of the senior Directors. Moreover, she is the principal investigator of several federal grants, including a K24 Mid-Career Investigator Award as well as a Co-Investigator on numerous other grants. Her current research interests include pharmacologic and psychotherapeutic treatment interventions for opioid, cocaine and marijuana use disorders, and treatment approaches for adults with substance use disorders and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder along with other psychiatric illnesses. Dr. Levin has over two-hundred and fifty articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics including treatments of substance use disorders, assessment, and treatment of co-occurring psychiatric illnesses and vulnerabilities associated with substance use disorders. She has served on several advisory panels and ad-hoc federal grant review groups and was a member of the NIDA – Initial Review Group: Training and Career Development Subcommittee for eight years and served as a member to the NIDA Interventions to Prevent and Treat Addiction (IPTA). She is currently on the Board of Directors for the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry (AAAP), the College on Drug Dependence (CPDD), and the American Society of ADHD and Related Disorders (APSARD). She is an editorial board member of three journals, past President of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry, and past Chair of the APA Council on Addiction Psychiatry.