THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL

INCOMING PSYCHIATRY RESIDENTS, 2020

CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY TRACK

Derrick Acheampong, MD

PRIOR RESIDENCY: Cardiothoracic Surgery, Mount Sinai
MD: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
BA: University of Rochester

Derrick was born and raised in Ghana, moving to the US after high school. As a
successful cardiothoracic surgery resident at Mount Sinai, Derrick was mentored by
Mount Sinai’s DIO and Director of Graduate Medical Education. He has published in
Aorta, Journal of the American College of Surgeons, Journal of Surgical Education,
Shoulder & Elbow, Annals of Medicine and Surgery, among others, and presented his
work at numerous national conferences. He has also harbored a longstanding penchant for psychiatry, so when an
unfortunately permanent wrist injury suddenly impeded his surgery career, he not surprisingly found a new second
home in our department. He had previously studied psychology in college, 1) exploring the emotional and
psychological effects associated with prejudice and stigmatization, 2) investigating the interplay between family
relationships and children’s social/emotional development, and 3) utilized an ethological/behavioral systems
approach to quantify relational dynamics within peer relationships. After graduation, he worked for two years as a
therapeutic mentor/behavioral health counselor for inner-city Boston children who had psychiatric disorders. As a
student at Mount Sinai, Derrick served as Head of the NY chapter and volunteers of African Research Academies for
Women (ARA-W), a nonprofit organization to encourage and inspire STEM education among African women. His
relentless dedication to community service and improving the lives of others was rewarded with the President's
Volunteer Service Award, awarded by Barack Obama in 2016. Derrick has chaired local divisions within SNMA,
mentored numerous low-income students throughout his career, helped connect local communities to medical care,
and represented his peers to the school administration.

Ariel Brown, MD

MD: Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University
BS: Tufts University

From a young age, Ariel has been interested in pursuing psychiatry and working with
vulnerable populations. Graduating college with a degree in psychology, throughout
her education, she has counseled peers, trained students how to be effective listeners,
and pursued research on PTSD and addiction. In college, she led the organization Kids
to College, creating curricula to increase the number of local first-generation college
students. She also worked to broaden scientific literacy and facilitate discussion of
controversial topics. In medical school she devoted her time to serving vulnerable populations through her induction
into the Urban Underserved Program. She attended the four-year weekly Population Health College within a College
program at Jefferson. After her first year of medical school, she began research studying barriers and facilitators to
integration of community health workers into safety-net health systems for diabetes prevention, which she continued
throughout medical school and ultimately published. Ariel has also conducted research at the Interdisciplinary Stem
Cell Institute in Miami, where she published on the regenerative capacity of cardiac progenitor cells under hypoxic
conditions. Perpetually active in her pursuit to alleviate suffering of the most vulnerable, Ariel plans to focus her
efforts on Addiction Psychiatry.

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THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL
INCOMING PSYCHIATRY RESIDENTS, 2020

Natalie Campen, MD

MD: Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California
BA: Swarthmore College

From California, Natalie attended college at Swarthmore, where she worked as a Resident
Advisor, tutor, and Teaching Assistant. She founded the Swarthmore Hapa Club, offering
an outlet for underrepresented groups to discuss issues regarding multiracialism.
Concentrating in biology, her work quantified the environmentally isolated soil bacteria
degradation of fungicide to determine its potential in bioremediation. After college, she
worked in research At at Stanford, where she helped develop a method to characterize the
human blood microbiome and transcriptome in the presence and absence of infectious fever. Matriculating at Keck
for medical school, Natalie evaluated a novel machine-learning software to localize areas of infarcts in the brains of
children with sickle-cell anemia, while also returning to her lifelong pursuit of the more humanistic sides of
experience, especially those focused on mental well-being, both with peers and patients. She led the Integrative
Health Group, organizing wellness events for the student body. She also completed a 200-hour yoga teacher training
course at the White Lotus Foundation, and applied her skills as a Wellness Liaison in medical school. A talented
singer, Natalie led Keck’s Chorda Tympani a cappella Group. In college, she rejuvenated and led the Swarthmore
Equestrian Association.

Brielle Cardieri, MD

MD: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
BA: Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Brielle was captain of her Brooklyn high school varsity softball and basketball teams
and was an elected official in student government. In college, she presented her study,
Health Disparities in Hypertensive Outcomes, at the National Conference for
Undergraduate Research, and was President of Global Medical Brigades, raising nearly
$50K and setting up medical clinics in underserved communities. Her drive to better
the lives of others continued through medical school, where she led the Human Rights
and Social Justice Fellowship, which is a year-long service-learning program for students. Her research and
advocacy project focused on segregation of healthcare at Mount Sinai by insurance status and driven by financial
pressures. She was co-leader of Sinai Students for Civic Engagement, focused on engaging students with the
political process and teaching them how to become effective advocates and agents of change, including lobbying at
both the State and Federal levels. She has helped develop curricula to teach medical students about LGBTQ+
healthcare, and she was named a Mahoney Fellow in Health Policy by the New York Academy of Medicine. As
Chair of the East Harlem Health Outreach Program, she helped spearhead a major expansion of the mental health
clinic and created the Advocacy/Community Engagement team overseeing the integration of medical care and legal
resources for uninsured patients. Also an amateur photographer, Brielle’s work has been featured in National
Geographic.

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THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL
INCOMING PSYCHIATRY RESIDENTS, 2020

Megan Crow, MD

MD: University of Minnesota Medical School
BA: Gustavus Adolphus College

In college, as a Howard Hughes Fellow, Megan studied the photodegradation of pesticides
in water and on commercial crops, presenting her work at the American Chemical Society.
After college, she worked as a community organizer for Health Care for All, a non-profit
advocacy organization in Boston, implementing campaigns, organizing lobbies at the State
House, maintaining the volunteer base, and organizing outreach events. Her activism
continued in medical school, where she was named a Dr. Pete Dehnel Public Health
Advocacy Fellow, focusing on advocacy and public health in psychiatry. Recognized as a leader, Megan was elected
to the University of Minnesota Student Council, representing her peers on the school’s Education Steering
Committee. She has been inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society, and was elected President, overseeing
education, mental health, and community service. She has also been Chair of Operations at the student-run free
clinic, providing care to uninsured patients. She has worked advocating for the inclusion of psychiatric advance
directives into advance care planning in Minnesota.

Sharely Fred Torres, MD

MD: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
BA: Harvard University

In college, Sharely’s research focused on the enjoyment of shared experiences. She served
as the Outreach Chair of Student Mental Health Liaisons (SMHL) and collaborated with
other student groups to organize mental health discussions on campus and achieve greater
access to mental health care. As a medical student at Mount Sinai, she received several
awards including a prestigious scholarship for one underrepresented female student in a
NYC Health Professional School, a five-year Leaders Merit Scholarship, and she was one
of six students initially accepted into the Primary Care Scholars Program. During her Scholarly Research Year, she
worked at the World Trade Center Mental Health Program, looking into online psychotherapy and biomarkers of
trauma and resilience. She presented this work at the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP) annual meeting and
published on the neurobiology of resilience in Biological Psychiatry. She also received the New York County
Psychiatric Society Medical Student Research Grant to design a study assessing the relationship of childhood trauma
to social functioning in adulthood, which she carried out with Mount Sinai’s Mood and Personality Disorders group
and presented at the APA and SOBP annual meetings. She currently has several papers in submission. Additionally,
Sharely collaborated on a project investigating medical students' attitudes on non-suicidal self-injury after
implementation of a didactic in the psychiatry clerkship which received the Association of Directors of Medical
Student Education in Psychiatry’s Distinguished Trainee Innovations Scholarship Poster Award. As a member of the
medical school’s Admissions Dean's Committee, Sharely worked to ensure the diversity of incoming students, and
has been recognized by Mount Sinai’s Center for Multicultural & Community Affairs for her work to increase
academic support for students who are underrepresented in medicine and/or disadvantaged.

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THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL
INCOMING PSYCHIATRY RESIDENTS, 2020

Yesul Tina Kim, MD

MD: McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science
Center at Houston
BS: University of Texas at Dallas

For much of her advanced academic career, Tina imagined going on to become an
orthopaedic surgeon. In college, while working part-time for three years as a pharmacy
technician, she investigated how adding epoxy into graphene and graphene oxide at
different concentrations affected depth and recovery of scratch tests, friction, and
measures of strength and stress. Her orthopaedic pursuits continued into medical school,
where she researched soft tissue management in open tibial shaft fractures, open fracture classification of
orthopaedic trauma, and outcomes of orthopaedic surgery consults on isolated simple transverse process fractures.
Additionally, Tina was been highly active in her community, directing or on the board for multiple Texas and
Houston-based initiatives to advocate for policy change, improve public health, and provide care to the
disadvantaged and uninsured. As President of Women in Surgery, she sought to advance gender equity in the field.
Coming later to psychiatry, she dove into multiple projects, evaluating white matter lesions in Gulf War Illness,
characterizing corpus callosal lesion morphology and its association with chemical exposures, writing a case series
on the co-incidence of bipolar disorder and gender dysphoria in adolescents and considering the effect of hormone
therapy on the treatment of depression in this population, and concluding a review of biomarkers, treatment, and
mortality of depression in pregnancy. Tina was a mezzo-soprano in the Skeletones acapella group and founded the
first charity talent show at McGovern Medical School, reuniting the campus after hurricane Harvey.

Rose Kleiman-Weiner, MD

MD: George Washington University College of Medicine

BA: University of Pennsylvania

Rose has long been interested in the intersection of policy and medicine. At UPenn,
she was the Lead EMT and member of the executive board of the medical
emergency response team. From this, while working at Mount Sinai during college,
she researched financial incentives in ambulance care and developed a proposal for a
Center for Medicare/Medicaid Innovation Award on EMS transport to destinations
other than to the Emergency Department. After college she was employed at The
Commonwealth Fund, national healthcare policy foundation, where she developed programmatic strategies to
improve health care quality and cost, organizing Congressional briefings and national webinars to advance the team's
national policy agenda. Her work focused on the impact that social, political, and cultural factors have on health
outcomes, seeking ways to integrate behavioral economics into healthcare, creating a strategy for healthcare
population segmentation that was presented to the National Academy of Medicine, analyzing the effectiveness of a
medical home model, and participating on a panel at a national conference. In medical school, she participated in the
Community-Urban Health Scholarly Concentration, exploring health equity, social determinants of health, food
security, housing, community violence, and advocacy. Rose was selected by the Dean to lead Clinical Public Health
Summits, brainstorming and developing innovative policy proposals that were presented to experts in the field,
including the former White House AIDS czar. She has investigated state laws regarding nurse practitioner
prescribing and the effects on Medicare billing patterns, the effectiveness of group therapy for adolescents with
social anxiety, and experiential learning and reflection as a means to engage medical students in interprofessional
collaborative practice. She was President of GW’s chapter of the American Medical Women’s Association.

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THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL
INCOMING PSYCHIATRY RESIDENTS, 2020

Gregory Morgan, MD, MS

MD: Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at
Buffalo
MS: Tufts University
BS: University of Toronto

Studying pathobiology in college, Greg researched the function of type VIII collagen on
the progression of atherosclerosis. After graduation, he worked full-time as a data entry
clerk before enrolling in a Masters program in biology from which he graduated with
the highest GPA. He conducted research with the Pain and Imaging Neuroscience
Group and the Department of Anesthesiology at Harvard, analyzing gray matter volume changes in pediatric
migraine patients. Simultaneously, he worked as an anesthesia intern at Boston Children’s Hospital. As a beginning
student, Greg founded the Peer Support Group, providing space for a focus on mental health maintenance among
medical students. He also trained as a Mercy Doula, providing companionship and comfort to patients at the end of
their lives. As a 2nd year medical student, he helped establish a health clinic in a small town in Haiti, providing the
sole source of healthcare for the area. The medical school has continued to send students to provide continued care.
He has also worked at clinics in rural Jamaica and Ghana. As President of the Human Rights Initiative, affiliated
with Physicians for Human Rights, he conducted forensic evaluations of asylum seekers and conducted and oversaw
research illustrating the type and frequency of medical and psychiatric sequelae experienced by the clients, resulting
in a presentation at the World Congress of Psychiatry in Lisbon. He has also investigated LGBTQ asylum seekers,
presenting his work at the New York State Association for Rural Health. A tutor and a teaching assistant for multiple
courses, Greg has been inducted into AOA.

Lauren Nagy, MD

MD: Rutgers, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
BA: University of Pennsylvania

Studying the Biological Basis of Behavior at UPenn, Lauren published first and second
author papers in Translational Psychiatry, Pharmacology & Pharmacy, and Drug and
Alcohol Dependence. She conducted an independent research project on the
developmental effects of chronic ketamine abuse and while working with a German
doctoral student through an exchange program, designed and organized an fMRI study
examining how the brain processes music. After college, she was employed at the
Advisory Board Company, a consulting firm that works with hospitals, physician groups, CEOs, and COOs navigate
changes in healthcare. Her work focused on nursing management, fundraising, data collection, and technology
development. At Rutgers for medical school, she has been helping develop and validate the use of the
Communication Perception Estimate Scale (CoPES), a low-cost screening tool to identify communication disorders
in children and teens presenting for psychiatric complaints. She has also created and delivered workshops to teach
students working in the free clinic about mental health topics. She is Chair of the Robert Wood Johnson Voter
Registration Drive, which she founded four years ago. President of the Ultrasounds a cappella Group, Lauren is also
an actor and vocalist, with over 10 years of classical vocal training and performance in operas, musicals, and plays.
She was President of the Penn Singers Light Opera Company in college, producing major productions, serving as
Chair of the Executive Board, and implementing a new leadership system with community service initiatives.

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INCOMING PSYCHIATRY RESIDENTS, 2020

Storm Portner, MD

MD: Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University
BA: Princeton University

Studying Anthropology and Global Health & Health Policy in college, Storm
conducted ethnographic research on an international WHO program to treat
tuberculosis through community outreach. Following graduation, he received
fellowship funding to launch and operate a Maternal and Birth Center at a clinic in rural
Sierra Leone. Due to the Ebola epidemic, he pivoted into a U.S.-based role as
Operations Director working with Partners in Health to scale the response in West
Africa. He managed fundraising and grant writing, tripling the operating budget in six months and raising over
$1,000,000 for the organization's Ebola response. He then transitioned into a managerial role in Sierra Leone, leading
a team of 350 Community Health Workers responding to Ebola, HIV and TB in their communities. At Jefferson,
Storm participated in the Translational Research College within the College, continuing his overseas work
investigating the effect of accompaniment by a community health worker on the CD4 count and rate of retention-in-
care for HIV-infected patients in Sierra Leone, while also analyzing risk factors for hepatitis C amongst
Philadelphia’s homeless population. In medical school he was selected to be the director of a weekly outreach
nonprofit clinic providing harm reduction services, where he facilitated the transition to a more dignified and
accessible location, expanded clinical capacity, and drove initiatives to address mental health needs. He
simultaneously served as research director, collecting and analyzing data to describe the patient population and local
impact, and developing a database to measure services delivered to 5,000 patients per year. He has been inducted
into the Gold Humanism Honor Society.

Anik Saha, MD

MD: Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
BA: Cornell University

As Cornell Bhangra’s President and Captain, Anik led his team to audition at Madison
Square Garden for NBC’s America’s Got Talent, which culminated in an award-winning
performance in the quarterfinals at Radio City Music Hall, with over 12 million viewers.
Following college, he was employed as a Senior Associate for Product Innovation at
athenahealth, where his passion for addressing health care delivery became a driving
force of his professional life. As a medical student, he was a delegate to the Committee
on Health IT for the AMA Medical Student Section and drafted AMA policy on electronic medical records, medical
data standards, and telemedicine. He worked as a teaching assistant for Wharton’s MBA course on medical devices,
and he was Vice President of Innovation for Penn HealthX, helping to lead a conference on "Paradigm Shifts" with
200 attendees from health care, venture capital, and consulting. He founded and led an innovation team comprised of
former engineers, chemists, and software developers who were first year medical students to address wearable
devices and smartphone applications. As an intern at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, he
conducted research with the Mental Health Engagement, Navigation, and Delivery team, supporting the development
a novel machine-learning algorithm that autonomously reviewed inpatient notes to predict which patients would
benefit from psychiatric consultation. He has published in Plasmid, Gastroenterology, Annals of the American
Thoracic Society, and The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. He has been a co-chair of Penn's
South Asian Medical Student Association, a delegate to Meeting of Students Addressing Intercultural Concerns
(MoSAIC), and a member of the Diversity & Inclusion Student Advisory Committee.

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THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL
INCOMING PSYCHIATRY RESIDENTS, 2020

Vlad Velicu, MD, MS

MD/MS: Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
BA: Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College

Vlad grew up in Romania and moved the United States when he was a senior in high
school. He was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to college, graduating with dual
degrees in English Literature, Language, and Criticism as well as in Biochemistry. He
served as Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry Editor of The Olivetree Review at Hunter
College, while working in biomedical research throughout college at multiple medical
centers. At Mount Sinai he worked to develop an analog of the effects of spaceflight on
neurologic sensorimotor function to be used in the pre-flight training process of astronauts to allow for a quicker re-
accommodation to the effects of gravity. In the endocrinology lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he
conducted clinical research in the multi-center Glycemia Reduction Approaches in Diabetes: A Comparative
Effectiveness (GRADE) Study, to determine which glucose-lowering medication works best in combination with
metformin. While at Columbia for medical school, he worked in genetics with Wendy Chung studying the value of
whole-genome and whole-exome sequencing in newborns. Initially considering internal medicine given his broad set
of medical experiences, he was soon drawn to psychiatry as the synthesis of his prior studies as applied to medical
care. Receiving a Dean's Research Fellowship to support a year of neuroscience research and Masters degree, he
focused on glutamatergic markers in dopamine neurons and how this expression is affected by amphetamine
exposure. Fresh from this experience, and most recently, he has led a weekly poetry reading and analysis group for
psychiatric patients at New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Jasper Werby, MD

MD: Northwestern University The Feinberg School of Medicine
BS: Pomona College

Jasper was heavily involved in global health prior to medical school, graduating Pomona
College with a degree in Global Health and Science. He taught about HIV/AIDS in rural
Tanzania, working to reduce stigma and initiate community dialogue, and he completed
an ethnography in Salvador, Brazil. While at an NGO in rural India, he spearheaded a
project to help the Public Health Research Institute of India contextualize the lives of
tribal community women in 30 villages to improve targeted health interventions,
including focusing on alcoholism, domestic violence, and maternal mortality. His work included creating teaching
materials for local providers. Additionally, during college, he worked within medicinal chemistry and pharmacology
to design an antimalarial molecule, a synthetic pathway to create it, and a novel mode of delivery of drugs to the
blood involving an approach using an amide and ester prodrug linkage. Jasper entered medical school already very
drawn to psychiatry, and for the past 3 years, he worked in the Positive Sobriety Institute, assessing personality
factors, ACT implementation, and the importance of continuing care in substance abuse. He took the primary lead on
several research projects involving over 600 patients, found novel data in terms of predictors for relapse, and
presented at multiple national conferences. He helped to facilitate Northwestern’s Sustained Dialogue program and
was one of the founding members of the chapter at Northwestern, leading groups of peers in conversations focusing
on privilege, diversity, and the pressure inherent to medical school, and helped to initiate changes to the structure of
big sib-little sib interactions. He competed on a national level in ballroom dance, played chess competitively as a
child and continues to love board games. He is also an advanced SCUBA diver with a wreck specialty certification,
giving him the opportunity to dive in reefs in Malaysia and Thailand, shipwrecks in the Philippines, and caves in
Mexico.

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THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL
INCOMING PSYCHIATRY RESIDENTS, 2020

PHYSICIAN-SCIENTIST RESEARCH TRACK

Lu Jin, MD, PhD

MD: Weill Cornell Medical School

PhD: Yale University
BS: Zhejiang University
Lu was born and raised in Xi’an, China, graduating college with a degree in
Biotechnology and receiving the FERROTEC CHINA Scholarship, the First Class
Scholarship for Top Students in Academic Performance, and the Award for Outstanding
Volunteer, as well as the award for best senior thesis. She moved to the US to pursue a
PhD in Neurobiology at Yale, where she was mentored by Amy Arnsten. Her doctoral
research focused on the molecular mechanisms of cognitive circuits in the prefrontal
cortex, aiming to develop better treatments for cognitive deficits in aging and mental illness. She trained monkeys in
a working memory task, recorded single neurons in their prefrontal cortex, and applied drugs to the recording site to
test influences on neural activity. Her dissertation focused on the roles of mGluR2/3 receptors in regulating
prefrontal circuitry and cognitive functions. The results ultimately challenged the prevailing understanding of these
receptors and contributed to the development of compounds to treat schizophrenia. In medical school she conducted
research at Weill Cornell with Faith Gunning and at Mount Sinai with Helen Mayberg and Allison Waters, focusing
on optimizing subthalamic deep brain stimulation for motivational symptoms in Parkinson’s Disease. This
experience motivated her to pursue a career combining clinical and research work, with the goal of incorporating
scientific discoveries into clinical practice. Lu has already authored 10 publications, including two as first author in
Cerebral Cortex and Molecular Psychiatry, and several others as co-author in Nature, PNAS, and Neuron. Lu has a
long history of mentoring younger students throughout her PhD and MD degrees. In her spare time, Lu loves rock
climbing, reading history and sociology books, and attending Broadway and Off-Broadway plays.

Brian Sweis, MD, PhD

MD/PHD: University of Minnesota Medical School

BA: Loyola University
Brian graduated college with a dual major in Psychology and Biology, and a dual
minor in Neuroscience and Philosophy. His PhD work was co-mentored by Mark J.
Thomas and David Redish, and focused on understanding mechanisms underlying
complex choices using a cross-species approach to study decision making. He applied
neuroeconomic theories in combination with neuromodulation technologies to identify
neural computations underlying distinct aspects of information processing as choices
are being made. He discovered that there is a conserved evolutionary history to
cognitive biases previously thought to be unique to humans, and that these biases arose from similar neural systems
in mice, rats, and humans. Applying this framework to the study of addiction, he found that mice exposed to
different drugs of abuse suffered lasting impairments in fundamentally distinct types of choices. He then linked
circuit-specific memories to dysfunctions in certain neuroeconomic computations. These findings suggest that
neuroeconomic approaches can be used to behaviorally resolve computation-specific dysfunctions and help identify
circuits to target for therapeutic intervention. Brian’s research was recognized with best PhD awards from the
University of Minnesota and from the Society for Neuroscience. Brian has published 11 peer-reviewed articles,
including five as first-author in Science, Nature Communications, PNAS, PLoS Biology, and Learning & Memory. In
medical school Brian was inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society in recognition of his ability to
demonstrate compassion, humanity, dignity, community service, and respect towards patients and his colleagues.
Outside of medicine and science, Brian stays active with art, cooking, and running, and he was awarded the Fisch
Art in Science & Medicine grant to communicate neuroscience to the public through painting and filmmaking.

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